Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

“You realize they’re exactly right,” Sita said. She smiled, stopped. “You know, when the first walkaway prostheses projects started, most of the people contributing had lost an arm or a leg in Belarus or Oman, and were tired of paying a loan-shark for something that hurt and barely worked and could be remotely repossessed by an over-the-air kill-switch if they missed a payment. But once they got here and started living, realized how much had been left on the table by conservative companies that didn’t want to get into a patent fight and didn’t see any reason to add advanced functionality to something that you didn’t have any choice about, they got radicalized. “They stopped saying ‘I just want to make an arm that’ll get through the day,’ and started saying, ‘I want an arm that does everything my old arm did.’ From there, it was a short step to ‘I want an arm that’s better than my old arm.’ And from there, it was an even shorter step to ‘I want an arm that’s so outrageously awesome that you’ll cut off your own to get one.’ That’s what’s coming to immortality. Not just the ability to come back from the dead, but the ability to rethink what it means to be alive. There’s going to be people who decide to deadhead for a year or a decade, to see what’s coming. There’ll be people with broken hearts who deadhead for twenty years to get some distance from their ex-. I’ll bet you that someday we’ll look around and discover that all the kids are short for their age, and it’ll turn out...