Uprising of the Elderly

Research is currently being performed with artificial limbs that would allow individuals not only to control those limbs but also to receive accurate feedback, sensations, from the prosthetic limb by utilizing lasers as a transmitter to individual nerves.

It is the year 2023. Hundreds of elderly people have undergone elective surgery in order to replace non functional or weak limbs with superior mechanical ones. However these same individuals are facing hard times as society begins to exponentially increase health and life expectancy. The elderly are perceived as unneeded group, leftovers from centuries past. The majority is simply waiting for the last of them to pass so that the age of endless youth can begin.

Tensions build as two retirement homes are attacked by young white males eager to find some remaining group against which to commit hate crimes and prove whatever if it is they hope to prove to one another. The government does little to compensate or protect those retired communities which are at greatest risk. In fact retirement as we know it is expected to be legislated out over the next two years.

The elderly are forced to take up action on their own. They alter their artificial limbs into powerful weapons. The old people cyborg uprising is begun.

Omnidexterity

As a child they called him a mutant. In school they called him a monkey boy. In college they called him a prodigy. I know him as Lile.

Lile can use all four of his limbs to perform four different tasks simultaneously. I don’t know how he does it, but it never ceases to amaze me. I have seen Lile write a paper, while painting a picture, while playing a boardgame, while singing, while standing. If he had had more limbs, I am quite convinced that he would have been able to use them for even more tasks at the same time.

I remember watching the BBC this one time. The show was about sea creatures. I remember seeing how different creatures were wired to interact with their environments through different sense receptors and with different appendages. I remember thinking to myself, Lile is like an octopus. I think I must have told him as much. In any case, he surely has thought something similar. I know because he has recently made a minor alteration to his body. Lile had some extra arms attached.

As it turns out, he isn’t able to use his new limbs. He says it’s probably just because people get wired to use different limbs when they are kids and now he’s too old. I’m not sure. Part of me thinks that people just can’t learn how to use more limbs than they aught to have. I mean if anybody should be able to learn how to use an extra arm or two, it’s Lile.

He did it. It took a year or so, but he did it. Lile is now the proud operator of six arms. He officially the worlds first functional human octopus. His parents who were once mildly ashamed of their freakishly talented little tyke are now very proud. I wonder what Lile will do with all those limbs.