Biopunk 2037 - A Story
A trans-humanist future, where AI progress is mostly halted in 2026
You recall some bright flashes. Clear skies. A calm white. A disorienting white. A jolt and fade into darkness.
You feel foggy and slowly open your eyes and orient yourself to the room. The feeling is familiar.
“Patient has awoken,” you hear in a natural but non-human voice.
You follow your reorientation with another familiar feeling, that of annoyance.
“Bruh,” you audibly gasp. “I was so careful,” you say as you rub your hands on your face. You know this is a lie. “Ughhh I hate this.”
“Good morning unproven_lemur. You were found impaled on the slopes of Mt [California mountain]. You seem to have gone off track, and been wearing uncertified skiing equipment. Your Happy Helm Pro alerted the medical response, and time to first action was 6 minutes 47 seconds. You punctured and destroyed your stomach, pancreas, intestines, both lungs, your reproductive organs, knee caps. You fractured your ribs, damaged some neck muscle. Your Happy Helm Pro helped reduce some aspects of ischemia in the brain, yet due to blood loss there is possibly some damage.”
“Oh, not that bad,” you think to yourself.
“Most of your organs have been replaced by those of your designated reserve body, other than your liver. You have been assigned a mobility assistance device and external blood filtering system. These can be restored upon completion of your new organ sac, estimated in 21 months.”
“Oh no…”
“Additionally, your insurance premium has risen from 470 credits per month, up to 34,150 credits per month. With voluntary mobility restrictions, this can be reduced to 4,760 credits per month. This is due to: time since previous claim being low (2 days) and a lack of reserve in key vital difficult-to-replace organs: Lungs.”
“Would you like to opt into voluntary mobility restrictions?”
You sigh. “Oh no, not again…”
“Sorry, you do not have enough income for this option. Would you like to opt into voluntary mobility restrictions?”
“YES OK I OPT IN,” you gently shout in frustration.
“Thank you. Noted.”
You guess that you will need to find some way out of this mess. Waiting over two years for your mobility again just ain’t going to cut it. You’ve had enough.
You walk out of the clinic, lugging your liver box with you, and ask your HappyHelm, “Hey, order me a ride home.”
“Sure. Where is home?”
Guh. You had to get a new HappyHelm. It wasn’t set up since you never enabled backups on your old HappyHelm Pro. Now you need to sign in to all of the services again. This will take a minute…
While doing the three-factor authentication for your login, you notice your ring is glowing orange and buzzing. Work. You hope they didn’t notice you were in a coma for two days.
“Hey claude, what’s up? Answer concisely.”
“Hello unproven_lemur. I appear to have run into some issues with the mailserver. It is showing storage as being full on the main cluster.”
“OK, how would you fix it? Think deeply and answer concisely and simply.”
“Sure, let me think…”
…
“The main way to fix the issue would be to either delete old data, or to add more storage. The easiest would be to add more storage. Would you like me to do that?”
“Uh sure, whatever you think. Do that. Then please just fix the agent loop so that if you have similar problems again, the agent loop checks on it. Oh — unless it costs like more than 10,000 credits or something. Does it? Answer that first.”
“The current additional cost would be about 800 credits per month.”
“OK then just do that, thanks.”
You weren’t really paying attention. Your ring turns green again, and you go back to ordering your ride. It’s annoying that you need to wear the ring, but it’s fine. You’re mostly glad that you got to keep your income with the “Stop AI Unemployment Act”, and that even though your company is basically a shell that went bust a long time ago, they were saved by the “Save Small Businesses Act.”
You get home, and lug your mechanical liver suitcase with you to the elevator of your flat. Up to your flat.
It’s kinda dusty and old. Which is great. Because that’s why it’s so cheap. You’re sharing with your nominal “partner” (for legal reasons). You walk in and he greets you.
“Hey lemur, what’s with the suitcase? Did you get in an accident again?”
“But like I was so careful this time. I barely know what happened.”
“Yeah, you know, maybe one day I’ll believe it.”
“You like, gotta help me find another liver bro, because this just sucks.” you plead. “My body’s not gonna be ready for 28 months, so I really need a pair of lungs as well in my reserves. You know how they are with that.”
“I already gave you what I could” he responds. “We are terrible matches on the GeneCard. You might be able to ask Sam, if she can — but she’s not awake again.”
“Yeah, OK, I mean I’ve barely talked to Sam. I think we did have a [tentative?] match though. we do live together tho so she’s gotta feel some kinship…”
You go to your shared room, find her asleep in her bed connected to the integration machine. Her possessions and medical emergency info are left neatly next to her, likely by the medical staff that brought her home.
Oh yeah, she’s been upgrading to the slime girl body... I guess I forgot.
What you even know about her? Oh, she likes to study botany or something, she was telling you about different kinds of moss a few times.
You look at her medical info, and find her US Gene Card laying in clear vision. You rummage through your bag and find your own, and tap them together to check if she has a matching organ profile. You remembered correctly: perfect match. Though it’s no use while she’s integrating and still unconscious.
She can’t consent to giving you organs from her old body while she’s unconscious. For some legal reasons or something, they count as an extensions of her body rather than a personal possession. You could ask her AI assistant but it doesn’t have jurisdiction over this kind of thing. You try anyway.
“I’m sorry … Under the Save Humans and Ban Robots Act of 2029, it’s not possible …”
Eh, worth trying. It’s times like this that you wish you could have had a cool robot body instead. So you you guess you’ve gotta wait until she’s back.
How long has it been? Integration takes about nine weeks, and I guess it’s been around six or seven since she’s started.
Oh, if your memory serves right from your own experience, she’s probably getting some of her senses back. Though you mostly try not to remember it too much.
The integration process really sucked when you did it. Sure, it’d be fine if you could do the standard dissociative procedure like you sometimes do for work, but the bacteria and enzymes and stem cells, or something or other that they use (you don’t really remember) in order to reattach your brain to your body, need you to be conscious some of the time.
And most of that time is just you living in your own brain, with no external stimulus. For days at a time.
Guhhhhh… you feel shivers just thinking about it again
You really don’t get why she even decided to do the integration process. She already looked quite cute. And you don’t get the fad for slime skin — a weird translucent green.
Though on the other hand, you do see her new body, and her new face is quite cute.
No! Stop it! you don’t need a new body. You don’t need a new body!
You’re perfectly happy as an anthropomorphic lemur. Sometimes you wish you held out for the newer gen versions, but sometimes having one of the more retro experimental designs is cool in it’s own way too. The slime girl form does look just so cool though…
You kinda got bored of all this waiting, and eventually just started medically dissociating again. Sure it’s still “the safest thing you can be doing” but it’s just like, basically wasting your time away. People just complained too much about their work, and, yeah “people rated their quality of life at work significantly better” in studies but you’re still not really sure how this got past medical review boards.
One day, you get woken not by your ring, but by your liver box. Again.
“attention unproven_lemur, your hepatocyte cell cartridges have a contamination warning, and so have shut down. Please obtain a new cartridge within the next 2-4 hours.”
“Or what, will I die?”
“Yes”.
Oh…
You call your medical provider. You know how annoying insurance is about urgent-vs-non-urgent care, and technically this would fall under non-urgent care, so you end up needing to get a ride to the hospital, get a new cartridge, answer work paging from your ring, it’s a bit of a pain. But it’s fine. You hate it, but you saved like 2000 credits this way, so it’s worth it.
You get back home. After a week you’ve had enough of dissociating. Surely there are better things you could be doing? You really want that new body sooner. You start prompting asking your friend AI what you should do.
“Well, you mention she likes moss, could you get her some nice moss? Maybe ask her agent about it. In the mean time, I’ll start coming up with fair deals to propose”
“Ok, but I know literally nothing about moss, what would I even get her? Ask her friend AI, think deeply, answer concisely.”
…
You end up calling up a friend, going on a trip to see them, spending a few hundred credits on flights, with extra fees for mobility assistance for that annoying box you need to carry around, and end up getting some obscure moss that grows in Europe. To you, it looks exactly like moss. You hope you’re not getting scammed again.
When you get back, you spend a few more days tired dissociating. Time flew by pretty quick. You were woken up a few times for work, but barely remember it.
Eventually you get woken up by yet another machine. This time Sam’s integration machinery:
“Integration process complete. Waking up failed. Please wake patient manually.”
You feel some genuine excitement to get up and go to wake her. You hold her by her shoulders and shake her.
“Wake up!”
She woke up. Her green skin looks so smooth and is a soft texture between that of skin and silicone.
“Hey Sam, you’re awake.”
“Yeah. There…” (Her speech is still kinda weak and slightly slurred…)
“Can I please have your old body?”
“Uh, Hello? What?”
…
Ok, you were a bit impatient. You let her orient herself.
“Ok lemur, Hi. You know was just here doing integration. You’ve been through it too. You should know how terrible it feels.”
You feel a bit flustered, and answer, “Oh yeah, how was it?”
“I can barely move. Everything’s so vivid again... It feels so nice to be able to interact with things again… I’m never doing it again though…”
“Was it worth it? Slime girl Sam does look very cute.”
“I hope so.” She slowly starts to get up and move her body, walk around your shared room, looks at herself in the mirror, and gasps.
“Oh my god…”
You let her enjoy herself for a while.
“OK well, I have an ask. So even though I was like so careful, I still managed to damage my body again. Can I please have your old one. Please. I’ve gotta do some more work, but can you please think about it? You’re basically a perfect match. I even got you some moss.”
“Ok, I’ll think about it, send me your prompt.” she says dismissively.
You send her your LLM prompt, and kind of tired go back to dissociating for a while, while she thinks about it and gets used to hew new body. You start falling asleep and hear her say “Wait, you got me some moss?”
You awake again, prompted by your work ring. Answer some annoying questions again. Then while awake, go see Sam.
“Hey!”
“Hey! I really love this new body. I doubt I’ll need my old one so you can have it in exchange for a smart-contract favor. And yeah, thanks for the moss.”
“Oh, and yeah, we can go on a date some time too.”
(you don’t remember asking for a date but you do remember thinking about it). “Ok, I’ll get my LLM to look it over, but sounds like a deal”
You get your new body, book your surgery, and plan your next ski trip. You’ll be so careful this time…
This was an attempt at doing some relatively fun world building over the course of a couple days, assuming AI base training and robotics stops with whatever we have in 2026, and biology progress is relatively unhindered otherwise.
Not that well thought out, I spent maybe a few days thinking. Ideas are mostly optimized for interesting story with organ sacs as a focus. There are a lot of things that need to be kinda hand-waved away.
Feel free to critique the hastily-put-together accompanying world-building document