by Mike Bozart
~(~: “Yeah, at least it didn’t say, ‘You wasted five minutes of your feckless life extricating this meaningless note from a bottle that last contained horse piss.’ Or, something nasty like that.”
33: “How ironically lovely and disgusting. But, I don’t think many 10-year-olds do the message-in-a-bottle thing anymore. They are all on their tablet computers all day.”
^|^: “Yeah, these days it would be a virtual message in a bottle tossed into cyberspace.”
~(~: “I wonder if she thought that it would ever be found. And, I wonder if she ever thought about it while in Switzerland.” Or about a psecret psociety pshort pstory [sic] being written around it.
33: “What are you getting at?”
^|^: “You think that she quickly forgot about it?”
~(~: “Probably after a few years, I would imagine. I know that when I was eighteen, I didn’t think about things that I did when I was ten. A girl’s life is in such a different phase then.”
33: “I wonder if she told anyone about her message in a bottle. Was it a secret?”
^|^: “If it was, it surely isn’t now. They even have a bronze plaque in her name in that town.”
~(~: “Now, I certainly doubt that she foresaw that – all the notoriety. Her story spread all over the world.”
33: “I know some friends and acquaintances who have died and, well, their internet presence lives on, in a ghostly kind of way.”
^|^: “What if, at some point in the future, our online presences – after we have physically died – automatically update based on a hyper-learning, ultra-intuitive algorithm?”
~(~: “Like a program that is so smart, it would write something just like we would write given a certain stimulus, such as a post or comment on a social network?”
^|^: “Yeah, something like that.”
33: “Or, what you guys just said.”
[laughter]
^|^: “And we would appear to be ‘living’ forever in the electronic binary realm.”
33: “Wait, do you really have a pulse?”
~(~: “You know, guys, at some point in the future, the message in the bottle will be someone’s whole existence in ones and zeros.”
^|^: “And, it may not be static.”
33: “Hey, we could put our conversation today on a thumb drive, and then drop it in a small bottle.”
~(~: “Glass or plastic?”
^|^: “Glass could break.”
33: “You would want to add a desiccant packet to keep the water vapor down.”