I am a Hummingbird, By Michael Blade, Copyright 2012

After my body died the surgeons put me in a hummingbird. It took a while to get use to having my perspective darting around so quickly, but my mind had finally adapted to it. At least that was what my neuro-psychologist told me. Maybe it was so.

My mind had been living for a long time in the cloud; most of my personality and memories had been living there for a while anyway. The cancer was just horrible. It ate away at my old body until it was no more. I really don’t like thinking about it now. Maybe later I will review those death memories for some possible insights; but for now I was all good and darting around quickly.

I had adapted to my new fast and light bird body. The technology was interesting enough. They surgically implanted a wireless transceiver in the bird’s body and injected nanotecs into it, which migrate to the brains neurons. I literally had a bird brain. Hummingbird -it’s too ironicly funny.

It made perfect sense you see technically most of my thoughts were now actually occurring in the algorithms simulating me in virtual space, my virtual brain. What I like to call my essence of soul and my one fragile living presence in the real world, a small bird who just ate colored sugar water. Able to see and fly anywhere there was a wireless signal. The thing that bothered me the very most though was that I missed foods; tasty meals with others in nice restaurants or ever sloppy-spoon dives. Anything that gave me that full tummy, that bloated satisfying feel after a full and delicious meal. That’s where virtual reality came into it big time.

Everyone had an avatar these days; many even had multiple names, virtual identities for various occasions, work, play, etc.  I had a pretty cool virtual office I had even designed myself. Anyway, they had yet to really approximate the simulation of taste to the level that I desired. Simulating dinners with my friends was out of the question for them, they had no reason to really want to simulate eating, when they could and had to do it for real every day.

The exception was sex. I had a fairly active and varied sex life after death! Albeit it was all virtual, but with good feeling. Old lovers never got use to having avatar sex, but I had new ones. Some of them were even hummingbirds like me. Well enough about my sex life, that should suffice to explain it well enough. I’ll leave the rest of it up to your imagination. As for my day to day life, I hung out in feeders around cafes in Silicon Valley, mostly Palo Alto, CA. It didn’t make any sense to travel globally as a hummingbird, although I attended many virtual meetings worldwide and some even in space, but those felt like playing chess by mail because of the long delays in transmission.

-M Blade.