the singularity

His liver was in need of replacing.
This would be his seventh.
He received the message into his cerebral cortex from the failing liver itself. The printout was visible to him when he awoke, behind the lids of his eyes, like a screen in the most advanced theaters. He heard the blood values announced, funneled through his cochlear nerve, and he acted with little anxiety or alarm.
He concentrated on the thing that needed to be done, the generation of the new liver, one that would be elegantly compatible, a carbon copy of the one with which he was born 287 years ago. Just the act of concentration, the very willing of the command would be enough. Within the hundreds of miles of his veins and arteries circulated the very engine, the very preprogrammed nanobotic factory that would engineer and construct the bright fleshy organ. It would be built cell by cell, as the aged liver was simultaneously deconstructed by nano-phages engineered to efficiently remove and dispose of the well-worn cells. It would be a beautifully compressed dance of decay and creation. And it took take less than a day.
He spent that day skiing at Whistler, feeling every twist and turn in the double black diamond trail, experiencing every inch of the freshly fallen powder, hearing every crackle in the roaring fire at the base lodge.
All while never leaving his apartment in Flatbush.


ray kurzweil