One and done

I don’t know of any upgrades to our system.  Our casing has never been improved upon, our intel remains as it always has been.  There aren’t any Humans 2.0 

As complex as we are, you’d think there would have been constant updates.

 

***

 

This feels like the sort of observation that sneaks up on you when you stop to think about it.

As complex as we are,
you'd think there would have been constant updates.

No replacement model arrived,
no patch notes were issued,
no redesigned knees,
no memory expansion,
no battery indicator tucked discreetly behind an ear.

We still misplace our glasses,
still walk into rooms and forget why,
still learn difficult lessons one painful mistake at a time.

The blueprint appears unchanged.

A dragonfly gets refinements.
Viruses reinvent themselves every season.
Even a common phone receives upgrades before breakfast.

Yet here we stand,
running the same ancient equipment,
wrapped in skin little different
from that worn by distant ancestors staring into fires.

Perhaps evolution decided we were good enough,
or perhaps it simply wandered off
and forgot to return.

Either way, there seems to be no newer release coming.

This is the version we got:

fragile and durable,
brilliant and bewildered,
capable of splitting atoms
yet unable to remember where we left the remote.

One and done.

And somehow, despite all apparent design flaws,
the old model keeps going.

 

 

 

 ZC