The Drive to Live
Okay, yeah, so it all started with my left lung, right? I was maybe 54 at the time, and the thing went and developed a tumor on me. I reacted poorly to the news, of course, spent most of a week taking long walks and screaming at the river. I almost gave up, you know? Yeah, I was just about to lie down and let it happen. I didn't have much in particular I wanted to live for, and it just... sounded like the path of least resistance.
It was the birds that did it for me. I woke up one morning and there was a finch outside my window. I sat there, and it hopped around, chirped at me for a bit, and flew away, and I realized that I wanted it to come back.
I wanted to be there, to see it come back.
So I got to work.
It took up about two months, getting the necessary supplies, and throwing everything together. Getting the blood cells to oxidize properly took some finagling, and I ended up having to shunt the process to a rather bulky external unit, which I had to carry around with me. I would later refine the design, of course, you have to understand I was under some intense time pressure to get the first prototype functional at all.
But function it did, and I cut the tumor out, along with both of my lungs for good measure, just three weeks before I was expected to kick it. By that point I had firmly made up my mind that if I was forced into being a thinking, feeling being, then I was going to at least eke as much joy out of the experience as I could.
The rest was honestly a bit of rinse and repeat. My heart, kidneys, my full muscular system, they all eventually gave out, and I gave them each a personal overhaul in turn.
The trickiest one was the nose, I think. Replicating taste was a simple matter of chemical analysis to determine flavor, and then an obscene density of replicated nerves to apprehend texture and shape. Smell, however, was much more complex. I ended up having to program each odor individually, and I've come across smells that I hadn't encountered before and needed to add within the last decade, even.
The nose also led to a bigger problem; that of the brain. Brain cells, as it turns out, do last quite a while when it comes to aging, but it did start to become a problem in due time. Full Upload wasn't a thing back then, mind you. It took massive computers, the size of a large room, just to store a mind. But at that point, see, I was entrenched. I had fallen in love once or twice, grieved a few losses, and watched a lot of finches gather nesting materials. It had taken a while, and no small amount of spite, but I had earnestly started to love being alive.
And so I decided to continue doing just that.
My first design used a processor in my skull, with a signal transmitted through gravitational waves, streaming information from a database under my home to a unit in my chest, wherever I was. It was terribly inefficient, and I couldn't move more than a few miles from my brain before I started to encounter lag (sidenote, if you haven't experienced your own mind skipping like a holorec with a scratch in the drive, I would emphatically recommend you avoid it.), but I was, what, maybe 200 by that point? 225? Anyway, I had been around the block, and had plenty of experience designing workarounds.
Oh, I hope you'll understand, but I can't really tell you what my current system is, as that would be a sliiight security risk. If you'd like, I do have the blueprints for my previous design on a drive somewhere, I'd be happy to send you a copy. And in return, could you send me a bit of the tea leaves you use? This blend is quite spectacular.
Yes, well, I suppose it's getting late. If you'd like to meet again sometime, I know I didn't exactly leave any time for questions.