Wispometer™

Ashes to ashes...as they say. From ashes we arise, and to ashes we'll end up. That's not religion; that is physics.

Don't be fooled by entropy. There's more at work even at the granular levels of dissolution—smaller than the scintillas; tinier than the remnant specks; less noticeable than the crumbs that end up in food chains.

For there's data in those ashes. Carbonaceous trails. Life stories. Love stories. Entire histories. Whether buried by burning or fragmented and atomized via deterioration, we all settle onto our world as wisps. Wisps that carry the data. Data that can be read.

Perhaps one day we'll build machines that can read that data.

That's when we'll know who our deathbed-fellows are. Those progenitor ashes, from which the lives that live, laugh, love, suffer, and relate to all the other ash-bound beings on the world, come from...on the front end...

...themselves carry the data of all those before and provide the new ashes to be forged into the stuff of new lives. And their data is added to the data our own ashes will carry after our lives burn out in conflagration.

And that machine that will read the data, contained therein, will columnate, sort, and collate our otherwise tangled web whose lifelines cross not only time zones, borders, and cultures, but epochs, too. Clio's substrate of the history of all that was and all who were.

Ashes accrue. Ashes bequeath. Ashes define all that was before, all who were before, and portend who will be and who will add yet another layer of data to the planet's motes, stored deceptively under footfalls to come or along the winds.

For those who care to look beyond the false simplicity of detritus.