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Good News, Everyone!
A brain will no longer be required to survive the apocalypse
04/23/2067
Celebrate good times, come on! Kool & The Gang played in the recesses of my mind somewhere when I read the news I would no longer need it. My brain, that is.
I can’t believe how wrong we all were. Silly me, what did I know? I had thought the goal was longevity. Cracking the human code. Unlocking forever. Nope. Sci-fi lied.
There was this show, Altered Carbon, do you remember it? I completely fell for the fictional future world where humans had learned to free themselves from their bodies. I found the potential terror of it alluring. At dinner parties, over wine and sprawling wood boards smeared with cheese, I’d ask something like, “If you could transfer your brain to a new body, would you?”
That’s what happened in the show. Your entire essence could be plucked from your sleeve — the distressing term used to describe a body — and either put inside someone else, or to my personal horror, put on a shelf in an indefinite purgatory. They called the thing they plucked from the back of your neck a stack, and it housed a backup of your entire personality.
If you can, picture the male protagonist of Altered Carbon, tall and square-jawed with a body built for combat, viewing a…
