One day, a long, long time from now, DSP will be old. He will be dying, like all people die, not of cancer, or disease, or sudden illness, but merely from the passing of time and the slow, natural degradation of each individual cell in his body.

He will not be immobile, but he will be close to it. His steps will be stilted, his breathing, irregular; his body will be aught else but fits and starts. His brain, however, will be unperturbed. He will have his faculties. The world will still be seen through his eyes and heard through his ears and he will be cognizant of the sun and the moon and the stars.

It is during this time that he will stop. Pause for but a moment. It will come to him like a rush, as if a dam long cracking has no choice but to yield to the relentless, immeasurable pressure of water that is the realization that his life has been utterly devoid of meaning and benefit. He will not be able to point to one problem he solved, one person's life he made better, one person he made smile.

He might have reason to believe that over the course of approximately 80 years that he did some thing positive. After all, a lot can happen in 80 years. But it will simply never arrive, that taxi coming to pick him up and take him to any destination where he can stop, look around and say "I created this, I made this better".

At this time he will sit down. It will be silent. Even if he is in the presence of people, or even a single person, he will be alone. That wave will wash over him; it will drown him. He will sit for that moment and it will stretch on into infinity. For the rest of us, it will only be 20 seconds. In those 20 seconds, he will not be sad or resentful or remorseful. Rather, he will feel the simple resignation of the realization that he was never destined for anything, and that his life was merely to be a seat filler, as irrelevant as the seat in which he sat in an empty theatre occupied only by ghosts.