The Perfection Pill

Blood was 5.8 this morning, after three attempts at getting blood out of my thumbs. It's kinda like my thumbs now sense the pricker coming, and do the Das Boot thing, hiding all their precious resources in the deepest recesses the minute they hear my unzip the case...It's amazing to watch, actualy - my whole hands go lily white the moment I have the thought "Hmm...time to test my blood..."
Bastards...

Anyway, there's an idea that's been niggling at me for days now, since I delivered another instalment of my ongoing Devil's Guide To The 21st Century to my pals at werenotfunny.com ahead of their website relaunch.
One of the entries I wrote was about Photoshop, which I defined as "The Fountain of Digital Youth". Just to give the thing a bit of weight, I pondered that by the end of the 21st century, it could confidently be predicted that Photoshop would be available in a handy pharmaceutical form, to match unforgiving 'reality' to an image that was much more socially palatable...

I know, I know, sci-fi pisstakes are kind of a niche market, but it's an idea that won't let me go. If there was a pill you could take that could re-write practically everything about you - your height, weight, body-mass index, ability to learn, capacity for memory, even your gender, your hormone levels, your ethical convictions...which pill would you take?

I imagine it wouldn't actually be a chemical thing of course...more like a capsule of programmable nanobots. So the question isn't really which pill would you take, it's more...if there were no limits to your capacity to re-write the human genome...what would you choose to be?

I started thinking about this in terms of our obsession with 'beauty' of course, and how we insist at the moment on already-beautiful people (by our common aesthetic standards) being digitally enhanced by a programme that can make them taller, or slimmer, or more toned or whatever. If we kept the standards of 'acceptable' physicality static, and merely changed our bodies to comply with them, what would that do to our individual and collective psyches?

Then of course, the potential of the idea expands in the mind - if we can re-write the DNA, that means we never have to have diseases or disabilities - fuck you, Cancer! Up Yours, Cerebral Palsy - all it would take would be the right programme, fed into nanobots and then fed into mothers, and you could determine exactly what your child's future looked like on a fundamental level. One or two more tweaks on the DNA, and why should we decay at all? Bollocks to blindness, and deafness, and memory degradation. Hell, come to that, bollocks to death itself - we die because our cells are ultimately exhausted. Well, if we had the power to re-write our DNA, we could eventually block the impulse that makes the cells yawn, and give up, and decide to go and be cells of something else instead...

And of course, every geek in the world would have a field day - you wanna be Spiderman - there's an App for that. Wanna grow fangs and have a blood dependency? Go nuts, Twilight-fans! Wanna be an angel? Functional wings, amazing singing voices, enormous faith and no genitals...sure, step right this way, we have a finance package that can cover that...

What, in this kind of world, remains fundamental to human beings? What, in this kind of world, remains fundamental to you?

I guess this is the crux of the matter, because there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Disappearing People out there. All of them changing something that has been a fundamental part of their lives - because in case you've missed this, being a Fat Fuck does define you. It defines what you're physically capable of, and what society allows you to be emotionally capable of, what you have to fight against, and what you have no option but to accept. If you change that, you choose to take at least one version of the Perfection Pill. You alter how people see you, you alter what you can do, you alter your lifespan...so what remains fundamental at that point?

You've seen some of the mental and emotional changes this physical change has made to me already. When I get to the "Perfection Point" - my so-called "Ideal Weight"...I'll let you know what still remains of the Fat Fuck that started all this...and what's been subsumed by the new opportunities and new challenges of achieving the completion of my 'nanobots'' programme...