Comment:

I admit, Forward is an escapist utopian wish-fulfillment fantasy for me.

Specifically, this is precisely the type of conversation I'd like to have with a college professor (or, if I were a teacher, to have with my student).

Although, in my ideal fantasy, the conversation would delve into these ideas a little more rigorously. Lee Caldavera does not appear to share in my dialectical predilections.

Transcript:

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0109 - 2167/07/06/12:46 - Lee Caldavera's apartment, living room
OT [data connection]: So, Lee, let me turn this around on you. Let's say you leave a major philosophical movement behind after you're dead, but you get to choose. What is Caldaverism? What would you want people to remember? How do you want the world to be changed, after you're gone?
LC: I don't see why I have to be dead for this. I don't want to think about being dead. I don't make plans that involve me being dead ever.
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[Rosenthal College, Orb Twofeather's office]
Zoa [data connection]: Modern med tech allows for growing new body parts and hot-swapping them, even taking cellular senescence into account. Given the pace of technological progress and the fact that Lee's only 29, it's entirely likely that they'll never die, or at least, not within a foreseeable future.
OT [data connection]: Surgically replacing organs and limbs can only do so much. Lee could still die in an space travel accident, or in some new plague we haven't seen before. If anyone's immortal in this conversation, it's you, Zoa.
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[Lee Caldavera's apartment, living room]
Zoa [data connection]: You're kidding, right? The oldest continually running computer program has 37 years 2 months 8 days of uptime, and that's just a network traffic control algorithm. General purpose automatons like me have a median lifespan of about a decade.
Zoa [data connection]: ...depending, I guess, on what aspect of my existence you consider to be my "life". Like I said, it's all about what's analogous to the human experience, and some analogies are more analogous than others.
LC: Can we please stop talking about any one of us being dead?
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Zoa [data connection]: Uh, hey, so changing the subject entirely, assuming that Socrates existed and Plato's story of their death was accurate, do you consider it to be a suicide or an execution?
LC: Zoa!
Zoa: What? Socrates isn't one of us!
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