What I Want To Be When I Grow Up (50 Years From Now)

I am an old woman with white hair. My home is a ridiculous shape. It is a dome with strange plants in the garden. I don’t do much these days except for look at magic, play with satellites, and paint wildly. I have disabled children in the back, and a couple of doctors. I have set up a museum next door for kids to learn science and do art. It is a magical, magical place. It’s a bit like an amusement park. There is a rollercoaster (children can even dissect the physics of the rollercoaster if they so desire.) Everything is within a gigantic glass greenhouse. The population is 1,000 and adults can come and go as they please. In the middle of the colony is a beautiful garden called Sanctuary.

Besides the disabled children, my social life will be the teachers I have employed. Highly distinguished scholars will want to come teach here because they’ll have the power and equipment to conduct their own research. The professors will have a lot of character and more importantly, interesting ideas.

“Oh, hello little one.”

The child is sitting in the chair, connected to the imaging machine.

“Is the flesh still being eaten away?”

“No, it’s working!”

These solar-powered spheres buzz around the brain map, regenerating circuitries involved with ailments. We have to keep track of the spheres because the program we’ve written for them might change as the brain grows. We have a tracking system that will alert us if the sphere reaches its threshold. There is a randomized element to the circuitry that is more or less quantifiable. It is quantifiable enough for us to replicate it safely anyway. We’ve even calculated the damaging consequences and are able to contain them, possibly even counteract them.

Outside, the children love running up to the walls of the aquarium that we are enclosed within, trying to lure aquatic animals into participating in sensory duets with them. They can also draw on the glass if they want to. Their fingers have sort of a toy implanted in them. They can draw on the glass with ephemeral incandescence, such as painting on an iPad, or agitating a fogged windshield. They also have the ability to sit on the vertical plane, up to a certain controlled area, kind of like an invisible dog-fence, except its mechanisms inflict no pain.

The children don’t have mothers or fathers. It’s basically an orphanage, except it is extremely fun and they’re all nurtured with love. What will these children aspire to do when they get older? Who knows? If they are old enough to leave they are welcome to leave. If they want to continue living on the property then they can choose any of the job positions available, and of course they can upgrade their lodging arrangement.

We send all of our information to a company that manufactures medical technology. That’s how we stay funded. All of the readings are available at anytime. We have a team of statistical analysts who graph the information and provide researchers with new parameters for their experiments.

Who is using the readings? What are they funding? Why are we trying to cure diseases? To create immortals, obviously. When I die my ego might involuntarily be replaced by logarithms because I can’t afford to physically propel myself through time, but honestly I could care less: hence why I look the way I do.

The immortals will go on to live just like these children in my opinion; drawing upon the vertical glass screens, blinded by immediacy.