Sadly, I gather that the stem cell gathering process that starts tomorrow does not lead to the potential for a new me – wrong sort of cells. I quite like the idea of popping back in 1000 years time to see how things are going, although what I have at the moment seems unimprovable (strange word) so coming back in 1000 years only to be disappointed that things aren’t as good as they were (arghh what is the future pluperfect historic conditional) is not so desirable. The future will have to make do with my telephonic vocal mausoleum complete with a computer voiced version of me produced by my incredibly kind and staggeringly clever friends at Cereproc https://www.cereproc.com/ . I have yet to realise its full potential, but by way of a demo here is a recording of my voice (recorded) and my voice (computer generated) dipping in and out of a poem written specially for the box (see if you can tell who is who) – just to be clear this is an in progress rough demo (with a number of tech issues) and does not show off the potential of my new toy – but to be doubly clear and for those ignorant of computer generated voices, most of the sentences spoken have never, ever, been spoken by me, they are spoken entirely by the computer reading the text from the screen – impersonating me. Many pauses and quiet bits please listen on hifi or headphones.

As a special bonus you can now see live video from the inside and from the outside of “Marge” here – https://gravityisahat.co.uk/index.php/marge/ if you are very lucky you may see a visiting punter, although spiders are still the most enthusiastic subscribers.

…and as a final offering I have installed an Asterisk telecoms server at home with which I hope to produce some more interactive versions of the ‘me’ voice but for now it just has a test message with a Becketian/Hawkings piece I wrote for two characters with the same voice – Dial 01904 215445 (normal geographic charges) or VOIP 0904 87 290 (no charge) At the moment it will only accept one caller at a time – very early days, very big how-to book.

Please note – all the above systems are subject to complete melt down – the most common reasons being; me messing stuff up or our frequent power cuts.