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A touching story of eternal love, growing younger, and shiny metallic spare parts
I wish we could be together forever.
Imagine what it would be like if we could swap out parts of our bodies like a machine. We move robot and computer brains around like rearranging furniture, but try that with mine and all you’ll get is gray jello on the carpet.
But if someone could figure out how to do that, we could be together forever.
If we were broken or dented like the frame of a computer, we could just get a new toenail, tonsil, or tailbone. In fact, we could get all of our parts replaced, and then we’d be brand new. We could be as young as we want. Forever. We could change our age and appearance like buying a new car. Sleek and sexy.
Would I be the same person you fell in love with?
Am I the same person I was when I was five years old? How about 32 years ago when we married? I have the same name but everything else about me has changed so much that my younger self would be lucky to pick me out of a lineup. I don’t remember much when I was five, but I know that in my 60s my brain has receded as far as my hairline. Robots don’t worry about stuff like that.
What happens when every part is new, and all the old parts have been donated to Toys for Tots? I’m a completely different physical object but I still have the same name on my driver’s license. The IRS will follow me to the ends of the earth. Will you?
If I made myself young again, would I look like I did when I was in my prime, or should I design myself to be something even better? I could tighten my skin and get some tattoos. My jaw could be square and cleft like Dudley Do-Right and my muscles engorged like Arnold’s.
I could work hard for a hundred and fifty years and save up enough so we could retire on a yacht for the rest of eternity. The magic of compound investment growth is even more magical when you can invest for millennia.
We could be shockingly good-looking, experienced, worldly, and rich. A spectacular combination to carry us through the future while we watched societies rise and fall and puzzle at the new generations with their customs and quirks.
But I probably wouldn’t like their music. Rock and roll forever, man.
What if everybody else lived forever too?
If technology existed to component-ize and youth-anize us, then why wouldn’t everyone else do it too? It might be expensive, but like all technologies, it would drop in cost, and sooner or later everyone who hadn’t already died could join us in our parade down the streets of perpetual life.
Would we all have children? Of course we would! With all our newly-young supercharged libidos spurting pheromones all over the place, we’d be squeezing out babies like rabbits. And then they’d live forever and stay young and start squeezing out kids of their own. Pretty soon there would be so many people we’d be living in tiny houses with low ceilings and ovens too small for a frozen pepperoni pizza.
Robots would serve us cheeseburgers and fries and they’d build gigantic spaceships that could take us away to the stars. We could swap out a few parts so our bodies would enjoy the warm, fresh scent of sulfuric acid in the morning and Venus would be the new Palm Springs.
We’d be deliriously happy and intensely smart. Like computers, we’d get regular upgrades and enhancements so we could keep up with the neighbors. In time we’d have artificial silicon brains that are more reliable and efficient than those rusted old first-gen carbon-based neurons.
Our consciousness would be backed up to the nebula so if we got skewered by a speck of space dust when flitting about the rings of Saturn we could just pop in a new diode and have Microsoft download us once again.
We could clone ourselves and be partners in two places at once. If two is good, twenty is better. We could marry each other a hundred times over and live happily ever after scattered across the solar system.
Speech, hearing, and email would be obsolete because we would just connect our brains to each other through the nebula and transmit our political outrage instantaneously to everyone who isn’t on the do-not-transmit list. Your results may vary.
All we’ll have left is our consciousness
With silicon brains and electronic storage systems for our memories, we’ll be shiny metal caricatures of our past. We won’t be human as we think of it today, but we won’t have to worry about high cholesterol either.
The only thing you’ll have left from your old fleshy days will be a curious concept: Consciousness.
Is consciousness all we need to be alive? You can replace all of our flesh and blood with aluminum, hydraulic fluid, and fiberglass, but our memories and thoughts remain. We’ll still believe with all our rubber hearts that we exist as a person, a human, a living soul.
And we’ll still be in love.
Okay, maybe forever is a bit too long
If I lived forever, I’d feel as out of place as a caveman on a couch.
The speed of change is faster than an electron, and living forever would be an endless struggle to keep up. We might be young and handsome but those newer next-gen minds would think circles around us and our sculpted bodies.
We’d splat like a fly on the windshield of the future
I don’t need forever, I just need a few simple things:
- To remember what it was like to be as curious as a five-year-old.
- To share a memory like I can show you a picture.
- To catch another glimpse of that flirtatious twinkle in your eye.
- To run naked in the surf giggling like little kids.
- To lie in the grass together and dream of our future.