The voice of the narrator serves as the source material for a word-painting of the following poem by Alice Thorner:
If it is true that in our universe, nothing ever disappears
But is transmuted into new arrangements of neutrons, electrons, genes
That a scientifically explicable process intervenes between the loss and some new incarnationEven though we ourselves can only slowly, and then not in all cases
Recall the names to go with the faces of old friends, detested colleagues, of times and places where things happenedCan the hoard we have painstakingly amassed be stocked somehow as bytes on floppy disks?
If not to last forever, at least to disintegrate by successive halflives over several millennia?How nice it would be to believe in a collective unconscious
A kind of electronic attic where entropy holds no key and our chosen heirs have accessRather it seems more likely that our missing synapses will resurface as dust on a windowsill, spirals in a DNA chain, or interplanetary static