Psecret Psociety Pshort Pstories, vol. 1 Page 12

  ~(~: “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.”