Fantaisie Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66

Loved these quotes which are spoilers:

“People have been leaving behind huge chucks of themselves after death for eons, Consuela – in their diaries and paintings and the notes in their cookbooks and the stories they tell their children. The eneural is the latest in a long line of media that help us capture some bit who we were when we were alive, and give it to the future. It's the birth of a new artform. One I already love.”She frowns skeptically. “That's it? My husband is art to you?”I don't back down. “Art makes life make sense.”“Art is a dead thing trying to tell the living how to live.”

And the absolute validity of her logic is sending waves of delight through my body. A soul can't be mechanically reproduced, goes Consuela's thinking. By definition, a soul is singular. So when they made the backup copy of the eneural, they didn't copy Václav's soul: merely everything else. In her eyes, she sent her husband to heaven by destroying the original eneural. In the meantime, she's donated the soulless backup to the Smithsonian, thus preserving his art on Earth forever.


Listened to LeVar Burton read this, can also be read at: https://crossedgenres.com/magazine/024-fantaisie-impromptu/