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PART 1
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And then there was that morning that John woke up as someone else.
Sixty five years old, and a body that was failing here and there, and – let’s face it – everywhere. His hearing, his eyes, the left shoulder, the knees. He could hardly pee anymore, for chrissakes, except in sorry dribs and drabs, an old man. And even though he still had sexual thoughts of women every day, multiple times a day, he could not remember the last time his penis actually got hard. Only in his dreams.
He would often think that if life was truly a virtual reality, then he should be able to will himself a new body, just by focusing on it long and hard enough. How cool it would be to just morph into a new young body. He also would sometimes imagine that the fundamental cognitive difference between a mouse and a human was just that humans had more control over their environment, maybe if even just by degree. But if that were so, he then reasoned, then maybe the difference between being human and the next cognitive leap was another degree of difference, which would be controlling one’s aging process. Maybe that’s the next step.