Lost Bits
A man walks out of his house one day, as he does every weekday, fumbling for the keys to his car. An older man, but not an old man. He makes it as far as the driveway, and collapses there. The heart stops pumping, the neurons stop firing... an animated sum of matter returns to an inanimate state, never to move under its own power again.
From a purely physical point of view, nothing has been lost. All the same matter is still there, if somewhat less animated than before. All the energy that was there can be accounted for, the cooling body imperceptibly warming a cold Minnesota morning, melting the snow in the driveway. Conservation holds, all that was there still is.
But one of the liveliest, funniest, most unique people I've ever known is no longer anywhere to be found. A bottomless well of stories and mirth, of interesting facts and intriguing philosophy... the knowledge, the memories, where are they now? Where did all those bits go?
Matter is preserved, energy is preserved, but none of that matters. The information is gone, lost to us, everything important is gone, only the trivial is preserved. We've lost all that really mattered, and are left with the meaningless bits.
It shouldn't be like that.
The world is half-baked. A poor design, a prototype at best, more likely a random accident, since the alternative of a creator this incompetent scarcely bares thinking about.
We've all seen the prototype, we need to build the real thing. We need to build one that actually works.
Too bad we've just lost one of our best thinkers and engineers. We could have used his help...
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
galatea_gynoid) wrote,
sad
