"Do we wake or do we dream?" asked Heisenberg. "I'm not quite certain."
"This dialectical conundrum is as old as the Sphere," said Karl Marx as the usual indeterminant number of entities sat under the Bo Tree in Red Square.
"Older," said the Buddha, waving his right hand to summon up a vast Himalayan range. "Older than the hills."
"Paradox," said Zeno.
"Is the equation of chaos," said Gregor Markowitz.
"And we are in it," said Ilya Prigogine.
"Nevertheless, God does not play dice with the universe," Einstein insisted indignantly
"Says who, bright boy?" said Jehovah, rolling a seven.
The Buddha puffed on his hookah and morphed into a large caterpillar with the grinning head of a cat. "Who are you?" he inquired, blowing a smoke ring at Jehovah, who morphed into William Shakespeare.
"To be or not to be," said the Bard, "that is the question."
"Bollocks," said the Cheshire Caterpillar, morphing into Rene Descartes and blowing off an enormous fart. "I stink, therefore I am."
"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," rejoined Shakespeare, wrinkling his nose. "Or haven't you noticed?"
"Time for a paradigm shift, Arjuna," said Vishnu, revealing the awfulness of his true visage.
The Flying Dutchman sailed the sea of stars. The Worm Ouroboros spat out its tail, morphed into a dragon, and devoured the sun. Hokusai' frozen wave broke up into quantum foam.
"This is the end, my friend," sang Jim Morrison as Leviathan rose from the sea of bits and bytes.
"What have we summoned from the vasty deeps?" moaned the Bard.
"What do you mean we, white man?" said Tonto.
"Not a meaningful question," Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out. "The question is, will we come when it calls?"
"Time for Mohammed to descend from the Magic Mountain?" suggested Thomas Mann.
"Don't look at me," said the Prophet, morphing into Marshall McLuhan, "I'm the Messenger, not the medium."
"Not my job," said Sherlock Holmes with a shudder, jabbing the needle into a virgin vein.
"But somebody has to do it," said Immanual Kant. "It's imperative!"
"Categorically?" asked Spinoza.
"Generically," replied Kant with a wink and a nod.
)
Commissioned for an anthology where the format was simply to write anything set in the Year 3000 (to be published for the end of the millenium, but it came out late.) A meditation on electronic afterlife something like my short novel DEUS X, but told from a very different angle. The narrator is "dead." Or is he/she/it? The question being "Do I Wake, or do I dream?" And what sort of entities might be designed to live on after the death of the "meatware?" And why?
