"It is all possible because of Quantum Computers, which have the capacity to store the colossal amount of information obtained from a whole body during the scanning process. When that detail is used to create the first stem cells, we have the template from which to grow the rest of your body cells in our culture media. We can speed things up by 3D printing large bones and organs so that you don't have to go through infancy and adolescence again. In fact, you could come out of the process with the body you had at twenty-five. That upgrading costs extra."
It was Friday morning, and the Four Horsemen were gathering for coffee. They liked the name though nobody owned a horse. It just seemed like a good, funny name. They joked that they were looking for an apocalypse to steer the world from, if it would only listen to the wisdom they had to offer. There was no shortage of candidate issues for the coming Judgment, they thought.
He hadn't counted on going in. He'd just been too darned lonely house-sitting the place while its owner studied overseas. He really resented the inane or gratuitously violent TV offerings. So, after his TV dinner, he'd just gone out, walking, till he got tired enough to sleep - just like every other night for the past six months. But who counted? He had seen the bustle from a block away. Cars had been trying to get into the plugged parking lot. Lines of bundled-up families chatted excitedly and called to each other as they converged. Bright light bathed the spire and filled the windows. He found himself trapped between clumps of people ahead and behind and fenced in by the solid row of parked cars to his left. The human tide simply herded him off the sidewalk with them and up the broader approach to the double doors. Rather than step out of the line into the knee-deep snowbanks he decided he'd just go with the flow. It wasn't that he didn't know the drill. It was Christmas Eve. How many similar services had he conducted through his lifetime? It's just he couldn't do it anymore. And he had nobody to not do it with either since Margaret had died back in the Spring.
Is it because we don't have stuff anymore that we feel so lost in a place like this? I ask myself this all the time. When we give up those memory chains Hiram spoke of, do we lose the anchor they connected us to? I don't think I feel it as keenly as some others here. I have my organ and wall of memories for refuge when I feel unable to bear the loneliness of others about me as well as my own. It is the time between concerts, like now, when I find myself most strongly in retreat. Life Supports by K.G. Watson is a wonderful reminder of what matters most and his work asks us to think about what our legacy will be.
