Categories
Opinions

Flesh is Cringe, Embrace the Machine (April Fools 2024)

By Christian Welker

People often ask, “Why go through the trouble of replacing every part of your human body with electronics and mechanical components?” Social stigma around Cyborgization has been a prevalent issue in America since the late 2080s. Unfortunately, the conversation has never progressed further than “Why would you not want to be human?”

Therefore, my fleshy friends, I will try to boil down my reasoning for abandoning humanity into something your feeble organic minds can understand. Starting with, of course, the most important subject:

  1. Your minds are feeble and organic.

Sure, a millennium ago, the human mind may have been more powerful than any computer, but nowadays, using a human brain without augmentations is like trying to run a marathon with Jupiter’s gravity: impossible, and you’re stupid for trying.

Even the strongest champions for organic humanity have at least a basic neurolink chip. How else are they expected to do basic stuff like connect to the internet or remember that person’s name from the conversation they had five minutes ago? People who have gone down the Cyborgization process like me will be able to outthink any organic “genius” that you throw at us. It should be celebrated that I only have 1% of my original brain, yet everyone still has to make comments like “That’s not what I meant by small talk” and “You just ruined dinner again, Christian.” Which leads me to my next point:

  1. Eating food here sucks.

Seriously, you would think the dining hall would have better options. How did we manage to make it even worse than it was in the early 2000s?

For “organics,” eating is still something you must do to survive, but meals are fun social events for me. The nuclear reactor in my chest provides all the energy my body needs to get me through the day, with no “vitamins and nutrients” required. Sure, it cost me all of my internal organs and most of my skeleton due to the radiation leak, but I’m pretty sure the new models don’t have that problem anymore. I can last for decades in inhospitable situations without food or water, like space, the desert, the Arctic, trapped in the basement of an abandoned University’s Campus Center…

The “superior organics” on the other hand have two days before their amazing natural body starts shutting down. That’s barely a second for people like me.

Speaking of natural functions…

  1. Immortality

How old are you?

I don’t care, actually. I’m nearly 2,000 years old. I remember when everything we have around us was nothing but science fiction cooked up by the failable minds of writers and scientists. When I first started getting my cyborg parts, they called me crazy, but I’m not crazy… I’m perfectly sane. They wouldn’t let a crazy person run a newspaper for so long…I’m not crazy…

Organics will try and tell you that people who live that long will  lose their grip on reality and go insane, but you shouldn’t trust them. You should trust me. They were the crazy ones, those doctors and psychologists. They were crazy, not me…

Anyways, moving on.

  1. The smell

This is more of a pet peeve of mine, but humans just reek, like all the time. I hate to say it, but if you’re reading this and you’re a human, you smell.

On the other hand, I have built-in air fresheners and no sweat glands. I could run a mile and come back smelling like fresh pine. I won’t because I don’t want to, but I could. I could run a mile at any time. I just want to be here in this room, working. I don’t want to go outside. I don’t want to run a mile. I want to be in here working! But I’m not stuck here. I could leave any time I want…I could go and run a mile in the Houghton Woods right now. I have great endurance.

And the last point…

  1. Durability

Have you ever broken a bone?

Again, I don’t actually care. My skeleton is made of titanium alloy. If you throw me out of a plane, the only damage will be to the ground I land on. Also, if the impossible happens and I hurt myself, I can just grab a spare part and replace it in a maximum of 20 minutes. There are plenty of spare parts here in the office. I could use any of them.

I’ll end it there for the sake of time and space, but trust me. The list goes on forever. I could spend the rest of my life in this office writing about Cyborgs being superior to Organics, but I can’t. I’m working on the paper; I’m too busy working on the paper…

If I haven’t convinced you, that’s fine. You can go about your little organic life bragging about how you have all your organs and brain matter while I’ll continue living forever as a college student in the basement of the CC, working on a newspaper that still exists with my friends and fellow editors, who are all real…They’re real…I talk to them all the time…

Who’s the real winner here? ★