This is an illustration I did for the August 2014 issue of Popular Science Magazine. The assignment was to show a scifi take on human aging in the future. I wanted to do something relatively positive, so I drew a lady whose life has been been prolonged through cybernetic enhancements and augmentation, so she gets to spend time with her great-great-great-great grandchildren.
Thanks to AD Michelle Mruk!
this is beautiful
So I keep wanting to reblog Cyborg Matriarch here, but I keep losing track of her.
She’s not getting away this time.
I really want a sci-fi story to go with this.
The woman smiles.
The children were starting to tire - they’d deny it if she mentioned it, but she was their grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother and she was well beyond the point where a child could hide things from her. So as soon as Jean-Louis began to take his second swipe at Zaahirah’s holo she bundled Nat into her arms and began to look for the nearest zinho stand.
Grandmother cubed - she chuckles inwardly - it sounded so old. Then again, she was old, one of only a handful of people still breathing who was born before the third millennium. She’d insisted on the breathing; the cybersurgeon who’d done her last update had tried to persuade her to go for an oxy-recycling system but she’d held firm, just as she’d done on the face. She enjoyed breathing, especially now they’d repurified the air, in the pre-fusion years Juba had been so smoggy the locals used to wear rebreathers indoors - but even then she used to relish the feel of the air hitting the back of her lungs. Now the air was fresh and clean and full of spring flowers and childrens’ laughter.
For a moment, she stares off into the distance; a thousand faces float through her mind, friends, family, chance acquaintances - so many memories: 258 years of laughter; of pain and sorrow and joy, of travel and invention, of lovers and children and grandchildren, of life. It was a reverie tinged with sadness, so many lived now only within her: those whom she had known before cybernetics were so widely available, who had lived only the 90-odd years a natural had, those who had succumbed to illness, or violence, or misfortune.
Even post the Nwabuikwu-project, when everyone had upgrades there were many who had moved on. Some had tired of what they had, booked themselves into cryo-ships or uploaded themselves to groupthinks or Funspace or something. Still others had merely grown tired. She kept on. She was old, she felt old, but it was a good feeling - her metallic limbs were no less supple or strong than they had been last century and her mind only improved with each year - you never stop learning after all. Her years did not weigh on her as they had on her parents or grandparents, they strengthened her, supported her. She was an ancient and she would keep going, for everyone that lived in her, and, in the end, for herself, because she loved life, and living, and the smell of spring.
Then Nat pulled at the beads round her neck and she returned to the present day with a jerk. She pulled them closer, enjoying the warmth of the child on her chest. Time for remembering could wait until the children had something sticky and sweet to occupy them - some things never change after all. She was old, and getting older, and she planned to enjoy every second of it.
(Well I tried - hope someone likes it.)
That story is so lovely! :) Thank you!