Back from the first round of scans.

[elfs]

So I went today to get myself scanned, first a thorasic for my heart, and then another one for my throat. The message from both technicians was simple: they weren't doctors and couldn't say "anything," but neither saw anything alarming or noteworthy in my scans. It seems my carcass is good for another 40 years or 400,000 miles, whichever comes first.

The woman who did my heart took a long time, because hearts are complicated. As I watched the throbbing hunk of meat on the monitor I marvelled that anyone thinks that messy, cobbled-together organ is somehow the work of divine providence. It's a hack, valves and hoses and energy supply all co-opted from previously existing structures, which is why the vagus nerve in giraffes is five meters long when it connects two body parts only a few centimeters apart.

When we were done, she asked me what I did, because I seemed to know a lot about the procedure and asked a lot of questions. The questions were in two parts: one was about the biology, and the other was about the hardware, because as a professional industrial web designer I wanted to know how the UI worked on her machine (amazingly well, I might add). And as a science fiction writer, I wanted to know more about how the biology actually looked so I could write authoritatively about it.

Her knowledge of science fiction extended to "What was his name? Oh, yeah, Mr. Spock."

Comments

[areitu.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize the heart was that haphazardly assembled. Maybe the hobbled together nature of the heart is why nobody can figure out how to make a machine pump do the simple job of pumping fluid.