Author: Warren Woodrich Pettine
Mother,
We replaced our eyes with machines. The impact of perceiving the full spectrum – from viciously fast gamma rays to the yawning gaps of AM radio – was profound. Our ears were next. Augmenting the perception of substance compression, we learned to hear gravity. We listened to the moon as it pulled the tides, heard Venus cross between the Earth and the Sun. Then smell. The range of detected chemicals was expanded two thousand-fold. We could sense the slightest variation in the Earth’s oxygen composition. (The rise in carbon on a heating planet smelled like fire.) Taste was discarded. By that point, we had no digestive tracts, just batteries and nutrient infusions. Areas of the brain specialized for useless things like arm movement were bathed in drugs and reprogramed to control synthetic limbs, or to interface with external silicon-based processing. But our memories remained intact. When I was a child, before the transformation, I had you,