Fiction Fix Seventeen

17
Fiction Fix
arm’s only so long. So I gotta have a technician,
a handy-grip, otherwise eternity won’t
see me, my face, my expressions, my mannerisms…
my soul. Got it, princess?”
She got it, but her mind was spinning forward.
Sasha didn’t want to share him. She
had developed a mild jealousy on their second
night together, when she’d named him Justin-Time
Justin because of the synchrony of
their lovemaking. “So, maybe you want me
to be your handy-grip.”
“Whoa. What about when we’re locked in
mouth-to-mouth and going for it? There’s
gotta be a third party, otherwise we lose that
vignette privée—that tender piece of my
propagated soul.” Justin grinned.
“You mean you want someone else to tape
us in the sack?” The thought intrigued her.
“Yep, gotta get it all, minute by minute.
That’s the point. For eternity’s sake. But
you and me in bed is such a small part of it.
There’s my thoughts, too. I’ll talk about them
into the mike as I navigate,” said Justin.
Sasha raised her brown caterpillar eyebrows.
“Navigate what?”
“Navigate life—my life. And then outload
it all. It’s gotta be formatted in every digital
standard out there. We might even backtrack
to analog, in case extraterrestrials are still
fudging with that. It’s gotta be fully dispersible,
and the archival’s gotta be durable as
gold. Do you know if there’s anything other
than analog and digital? I’ve gotta cover all
the bases. It’s immortality we’re talking about.
You don’t want to mess it up.”
“But you can’t capture all of it,” said Sasha.
“Come on. The technology’s here! I’ll get
every second. I’m even going to record my
dreams when I wake up in the morning.”
“And who’s going to bother to look at the
minutiae of your life? I mean, it could be
worse than reading an encyclopedia… or a
dictionary… or the yellow pages… or Proust.”
Justin liked Sasha’s piercing comments, but
he generally tried to ignore them.
“I’ve gotta find someone to help with the
editing, too,” he continued. “Then I’ll send
it all out—I mean various edited versions of
it—on commercial multi-spectrum transmitters
to the far reaches of the universe,
maybe beyond. And once those deep-space
radio signals go out, it’s forever, baby; it just