by F. John Sharp

I have downloaded every song created by mankind, including tribal chants, medieval hymns, and the Hanson brothers, onto my iPhone482, where it uses up only a third of the available memory. iTunes tells me it would take 1,021 years to listen to it all, which is a problem considering we’ve only managed to extend the average lifespan to 91. But our hard drives are amazing.

Some time ago, number-crunchers predicted we would run out of original tunes by 2447, but then two prolific songwriters died too-young in separate lightning strikes and here we are.

In an underground bunker beneath the Smithsonian, the world’s most powerful super computer, which fits in a business envelope, labors day and night to discover just one last original tune. Meanwhile, a guy with a guitar sits under a tree on the Mall, strumming.

---

F. John Sharp lives and works in Kent, Ohio, and thereabouts. He is the fiction editor for Right Hand Pointing, and his work may be found at FJohnSharp.com.