“No, I’m good,”Eric replied to his personal companion (PC) when asked if he would like to become famous while still alive. “I think that if I were to sell my soul to become famous there would be hell to pay in the afterlife.”
His PC responded with a no good recipe on how to be no good that can lead to fame for all of eternity and a total fortune while here on Earth. That is not the kind of fame Eric is looking for so he resisted and asked if there was any way to avoid eternity and instead keep a fortune for several more lifetimes until the money was gone for good, just in case there is a cure for hell on Earth and the afterlife.
“Don’t you know that once you have made a fortune on your own you will always make a greater fortune while still alive? With the right recipe you will know how to avoid hell on Earth.” The PC paused for theatrical effect. “Since you don’t yet know how to make and keep a fortune I will not grant you a fortune in this lifetime, nor the recipe, but I can offer you fame for eternity after a century passes if you do what I tell you. It will cost you though.”
Eric mocked his PC before hearing the offer that was nowhere near his wishes. “Fortune doesn’t always come to a person through their wallet. Sometimes we are just fortunate enough to not have been duped or hit over the head with hard salami or robbed of our wallet, possibly all three calamities at once.” Eric began to think back to the scene of his revelation. “Sometimes the wallet is a bad omen when you find yourself wrestling with a thief to gain control of a club of salami you just bought. Then you realize they want your wallet not your lunch meat so you let go quickly enough for them to go crashing into the deli shop window before limping off with the salami and your watch. At least my wallet was not stolen but there may be more to the watch.” He looked perplexed with a smirk that indicated there was more to this story.
The PC had already begun calculating how much money Eric had access to in his wallet but they could not compare that amount to the price of the watch since the make, model, and year were not disclosed to everybody close to Eric when it was passed down from his great, great grandfather. The PC knew nothing of the watch but its name – Frank.
There is something to a name. There is eternity and there is singularity; redundancy and excellence, pride and shame. Everything has a name. Not everything is one and the same. If they were, everyone would be famous, there would be too much pride but not too much to save us.
Eric’s personal companion is striving to be one and the same. It is his PC and his personal computer. It is his social profile, it is his intelligence and his artificial intelligence, it is his past, present, and future.
The PC assumes the same wish; to share the same name, to try and explain it this way:
“It is the same for fame. There are names that every human being will eventually learn during their lifetime that are known by everybody now and everybody since that person walked the earth. Everybody knows Christ’s name. Maybe Einstein. Oprah? With all the famous people throughout history it seems the further back in time you go the more time there was between the next most world famous person, from Abraham to Socrates, Shakespeare then forward to another Abraham from Indiana. Hundreds of years between the time each walked the earth, even thousands of years. Some are still alive. In fact, more and more are still alive. The gap fills with more famous people every day. The famous will begin to mound up and eventually overlap to the point where everybody will be famous. Who will still be talked about in 1000 years? Ford? Tesla? How will you be immortalized after only 100 years without making a name for yourself?”
“You tell me.” Eric accepted the offer.
Francis Erich McElroy 