Agrippa - One Shot to Download Bill's Dad

What are old comic books going for? Kachillions. Some people really want to hold an original copy of "Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olson" in their hands, smelling the old dry paper as it sucks all the moisture from their fingertips. They want to see the word "invulnerable" right there in the context where we all first saw it. They'll pay for it because all our mothers threw them away. "Why did my Mom throw all those comics away? If she had only known what they were going to be worth . . . ." If our Moms knew what they were going to be worth than everyone else's Mom would have known what they were going to be worth and they'd be worth jack. But the important parts are now part of us. Ephemera may not last (wow, great sentence). Soon you'll be reading mags like this on some screen and everything will be in electronic memory somewhere and perfect copies will be trivial. Perfect and worthless like those National Geographics that your Mom did save. Except "Agrippa," which is a high tech ephemeron. I assume you know of Bill "Cyberspace-is-my-middle-name" Gibson. You may not know Dennis Ashbaugh but he's a real, stuff-in-the-Whitney artist who does big paintings of computer viruses and DNA "portraits," way too cool for school. These two guys have teamed up and done the hippest non-Lou Reed thing this year. For a lump of change, (limited editions ranging from a few hundred to several thousand clams) you get a big old dirty metal box. In it is rusted, dirty honeycomb cardboard, a mounted dirty old digital clock just counting down from 1 minute over and over and a book, a really fancy-schmancy book, with rag-paper and everything, of print and etchings. The text is a letterpress printed series of DNA codes, a personal scrapbook of genetic snapshots. The etchings are DNA too, austere, unintelligible - pure information. Among all this genetic information are reprints of old ads. They look random at first, but there's clearly something binding them together; ads for '50's TVs, "HOW TO's" from Kodak to make your pictures look good (i.e. like everyone else's). Dennis figures that over 2,500,000,000,000 snapshots have been taken since he was born. The fact he wondered how many is interesting, the fact that he snagged himself a plausible number is the personality that makes "Agrippa" so cool. It has some real science. They worked with gene jockeys, hackers, even chemists, and physicists. It's the real deal. The "ads" are printed with a special ink, that, after you look at it for a while, goes away - science, art, little kid spy stuff. The book is about the size of the Gutenberg bible (I had to take their word on this - my Mom chucked out my Gutenberg and now, I hear, they're more dear than Batman #1) but this has something the Gutenberg never did, a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk. When you put it in a computer, the text of Mr. Gibson's story scrolls gently down the screen (merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream). Then a self-contained virus (more accurately an irreversible encryption) destroys it. And it's gone forever. The guys told me the story is about Bill's father, who died when Bill was six. These are his memories. Moved into your computer's memory. Moved into your brain's memory. Then gone from the disk - forever. Danny Hillis' Thinking Machine posse have promised that they will crack it. I'm sure they will, but that won't hurt it. They get it and there's plenty of room for fun. "Agrippa" says that people, ideas and things go away and all that's left is human memory. And even with a big hard disk, what matters is what's in your head.