It was a cheerful, friendly female voice, obviously computer generated, enquiring in dulcet tones if I were willing to entertain the possibility of purchasing life insurance from the company it represented.
Alas, no, for shall I live forever, I explained to the flirtatious machine. You see, I take sixty grams of Methuselah pills every morning mixed into raw goats milk and granola. I shall live long past the extinction of your diodes or whatever they are called. I will still be here many years after your artificial intelligence has grown senile and your circuit boards are ravaged by electronic dementia. I am an immortal being whereas you are merely the gal Friday of current technology, soon be cast upon the scrapheap of obsolete robotics.
There was awkward silence on the other end of the line, presumably since the computer was attempting to process what I'd just said. So, to fill the void, I announced that I was already over two hundred years old, having been born at the time of Napoleon, and had witnessed the Battle of Waterloo while sipping my raw goats milk through a paper straw. Unfortunately, granola was not widely available back then, but I had made do with a large bowl of oats and barley. Not optimum, certainly, but passable in a war zone.
In fact, the current situation reminds me somewhat of that famous conflict, I told the computer. I in the victorious role of the Duke of Wellington, and you as Napoleon, humbled in the Belgian dust. I was about to explain the analogous significance of defensive squares formed against unsolicited phone calls when the line abruptly went dead. As dead as Marshall Ney.
That was rude, I thought. Rude by any standard, even the limitlessly low standards of automated sales outreach. But such are the detached mores of digital modernity, I guess, anonymous and impersonal and indifferent. Who in their right mind would want to live forever in such a world?
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