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Broadcast from Outer Reaches Greater Zogra Network, 2397.

Tonight on "Fin de Siecle," a special look at the changes that Zogratech have wrought on our lives. Special Zogra-only correspondent Lara Exquisite? reports on how those little boxes have changed our lives.

Without Zograscope, I couldn't be speaking to you right now. Sure, I disappeared many years ago, but luckily, I was a Plantium Zograrecording Club member. My zeta-waves were recorded a few months before I disappeared and now I live on, in the aether, as a bunch of Freedom and Strangeness particles. For those of you who've forgotten your high school aetherics courses, two Fr's and an St make a telempathon, the elementary particle of Feeling.

When Einstein made all these advances in particle aetherics, it was Tommy "T&A" Edison, a failed bank speculator and pornographer, who had the bright idea of trying to bilk little old ladies out of their life savings by promising to reunite them with their dead husbands. He cobbled together a little audio recorder with some superfluous antenna bits and called it a Zograscope, after Edith Zogra, first of the little old ladies to fund the project.

Trouble is, it worked. Things like that tend to happen when you inadvertently create a Strangeness Attractor. Of course, how else could you create a Strangeness Attractor but inadvertently?

Edison became rich beyond his wildest dreams, and soon other applications were found for the Zogra technology. Video came, as broadcasting by Feeling became the preferred way to make a point and have other people hear it. Zograscopes, receivers attuned to certain emotion-aetheric frequencies, sold like hotcakes, after being perfected as receivers during the Turing Challenge?.

It was after the Thirty Seconds of Silence that some people (namely, the heirs to the Illinois Nineball Champs) got the idea to use the emotional residue left after using a Zograscope (Adlai had used one exclusively during his career to perform music and release "calling all Champs" announcements) to preserve the essence of someone after they'd died (or, in Adlai's case, had given up the fight). It wasn't exactly like being a ghost, or even a meme. It was more like the aetheric particles... congealed in the rough shape of a personality.

So not only were Zograscopes great for communication, data storage and retrieval, and detecting infinitesmal emotional variations on the part of one's spouse or spouses, they also allowed famous and rich people to live forever inside a little box on the mantelpiece. The faces in there grow old, though. I have no nanocosmetics to make me Exquisite any longer, but really, that's not a dignified way for a journalist like me to go out. smiles, blinks out

See also: Adlai, Turing Challenge?, Einstein

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This is a Z entry in the Lexicon of the Lost 500 years

last recorded author: Jere Genest