The Words - An Autobiography

One Thousand Years

 One-Thousand years before my birth:

The climate warmed in Europe.

Erik the Red founded a settlement in Greenland.

Erik's son, Leif Ericson, reached the shores of North America.

The introduction of Hops to brewing beer.

The invention of Algebra.

The Golden Age of Islam.

The Byzantine Empire was in decline.

The Holy Roman Empire arose.

Beowulf was penned.

Duncan, King of Scotland, was murdered by Macbeth.

England was invaded by William the Conqueror.

The first Crusade was successful

The first universities in Europe were founded.

One-Thousand years since my birth:

We'd made great strides in nanotechnology, which drove further advancements in many other fields. In medicine, Mary was at the innovative forefront of the employment of nanotechnology. She'd developed procedures where very precise inner-vascular and deep tissue surgeries were possible on areas of the body previously unreachable. Spinal surgeries returned the use of their legs to patients after catastrophic injuries. Since the nanobots themselves were smaller than cells, as were assemblages the size of my angelic stickmen, surgeries could be performed cell by cell for the precise removal of tumors deep in the brain, repair aneurysms, and the damage caused by strokes.

While a tremendous amount of technology was hidden beneath all this, performing any of these procedures was merely matter of surgeons visualizing whatever they wanted to be done, as simple as thinking "close the wound" or as complex as "eradicate every abnormal cell appearing in this scan." All this happened as if it were Magick. Surgeries required no incisions and were painless, with the patients awake and engaged with the surgical teams during the procedures. Anesthesia became an archaic concept.

For centuries, by then, I'd watched my grass being cut by wishing it. Of course, the maintenance of the house and the rest of the grounds had long been automated and required no further thought. The grass never grew, except when I periodically wished until I could watch it Magickally cut again. Mary would laugh, finding me watch an invisible wave pass through the yard, leaving a perfectly manicured lawn in its wake.

"Don't you have something better to do?" she'd ask, only teasing me because she was aware that multiple instances of my AI Avatar were perpetually busy doing those better things.

Our furniture consisted of nanobots that shaped themselves into whatever we wanted at that moment, then reshaped themselves into something else when we wanted something different or left rooms appearing empty awaiting our wishes.

A chair formed from nanobots but as solid as any physical object had been part of our daily existence long enough that we no longer gave this any more thought than objects. Both ultimately consisted of nothing but minute particles, whether molecules or nanobots. But the advantage of one was an entire room reorganizing itself by simply imagining how we wanted it to appear, but this generally required no conscious thought. Virtuality was aware of our preferences and produced them as we arrived. But there were occasional humorous results when Mary and my preferences differed – a piece of furniture shuttering visibly, trying to decide what it wanted to be.

We sat, knowing that a chair would form beneath us. Objects appeared out of thin air as billions of invisible, microscopic nanobots climbed, crawled, or flew into place faster than the human eye could see. Without a powerful microscope, it was impossible to observe the difference between these objects and the "genuine" item, neither by texture, weight, or construction. Without thinking, we subconsciously redefined the meaning of 'real,' 'physical,' and 'genuine.'