Smrt Lernins

When Captain Science was little, maybe around four, he once declared, “I have a robot body and a Triforce soul.”

Science, it seems, is on the way to making that a possibility.

Because I am what I am, which is to say, I’m not the most normal rutabaga in the carrot patch, I have not been able to stop obsessing over this video, with its tiny rat cyborg, which still believes it’s a real real rat, even though it’s just a jarred rat brain in a little rat robot. It creeps me out. It beyond creeps me out; it terrifies me!

Officer Daddyman, also being what he is, which is to say, he likes to say weird things to creep me out, has been on a little kick lately of saying that by the time we’re old, they’ll be able to transplant our brains into new bodies (robot or flesh copies) and so I should anticipate both of us living a very long time. He says that the video above proves him right, and that he can have a nice new cyborg body before he dies of old age. I told him I only agree to “’til death do us part,” and that I’m not contractually obligated to remain in a marriage to a cyborg once Officer Daddyman’s actual body has died.

This raised some Very Important Theological Questions, of course, such as:

How will the various church(es)/religious organizations weigh in on the cyborg issue as a whole?

Does the soul transfer along with the brain, does it go Onward when the body dies, and where does either option leave the cyborg in the eyes of the church(es)?

If the particular organization doesn’t allow divorce, will they require adherents to their religion remain married to their cyborg partners? Would they grant a divorce on the grounds of en-cyborgation, would it be an annulment, or would the non-cyborg living spouse of the newly en-cyborged be considered a widow(er) in the eyes of the church(es)?

If the legal status of cyborgs remained consistent with that of regular living human being of the non-cyborg persuasion (thus meaning the living non-cyborg spouse was NOT a widow[er]), would the church(es) grant divorces/annulments under those circumstances, or would the widow(er) still be a widow(er) in the eyes of the church(es), but forced to remain legally entangled w/ their cyborg spouse?

If the legal status of cyborgs is different from that of the living human, in that the living human is first declared dead before their brain is put into the cyborg, who then gains its own “life” and own legal status, how would that affect divorce/annulment/widow(er)hood? Would the living spouse be widow(er)ed from the physically deceased when his/her body died and would have to remarry the cyborg if s/he wished to continue the marriage?

I’ve already made it clear to Officer Daddyman that I’m not staying married to him if he’s a cyborg, because it’s just too creepy, but I do wonder at the wider-reaching legal and theological (not to mention moral/ethical) issues of a human cyborg. The mind reels, I tell you.

Captain Science’s chapter from Vocabulary from Classical Roots included the root “serv-,” so we were talking about various words with that root: service, servant, deserve. I mentioned “disservice.”

Captain Science asked me to give an example, so I said, “When you leave your dirty dishes all over the table, you do me a disservice.”

Captain Science then gave his own example: “A boy’s family is cleaning the house, when his friend comes over to play. The friend goes home and leaves a mess of toys everywhere, while the family is cleaning.”

The Tank exclaimed, “Oh! I have one, too!” He then gave his example, which I can only partially transcribe, because it was very Boomhauer-esque: “A boy go to his friend’s house and then goes home and they say, ‘Oh no! The toys turned into a robot master!’ and [mumble mumble] fightin’ TWO robots and [mumble mumble] it turn into this thing and [mumble mumble] and that’s what I doin’.”

Um…ok, then.

Addendum: Apparently, radioactive ants were involved in the Tank’s story.

Captain Science, while looking up a word in the dictionary*, said with frustration, “Why do teachers make students memorize things? In the future, we’ll all have personal robots who tell us anything we need to know.”

I said, “Well, then in the future, we’ll all be pretty dumb, won’t we?”

Later he said he wanted a personal robot servant to flap his shirt for him, so that he could cool down. He also said his personal robot servant would fix him a snack. “I have lots of servant robot cooks.” When I told my mother, she said I should tell him he needs to learn a lot about mathematics and get a degree in robotics, so he could build his servant robots.

“I’ll just have my servants build them for me,” was The Captain’s response.

“Your servants?” I asked.

“Yes, when I’m rich and famous, I’ll have lots of servants.”

My mother pointed out that you have to do the work up front if you want all of that, because no one will give it to you (“unless you’re Paris Hilton,” she added). Captain Sciences says that he will invent new words and get rich off of them.

Sounds like a plan. Hope he remembers the little people.

*Please note that he wasn’t being asked to memorize anything here. He was just feeling pissy and this was the topic that popped into his mind, I guess.