Today, I realized that I’m going to die.

I was sitting on the couch and listening to some music when some strange thoughts entered my mind:

“What if I die tonight?”
“What happens when you die?”
“Will anyone notice?”

I felt cold.  I wanted someone around me, some other person to remind me that I was still alive.  Maybe another beating heart could lend me some of its vitality.  But it was four-thirty in the morning.  No one wants to talk at four-thirty in the morning unless they’re drunk or they think they’re going to die.

I tried talking to God.  He didn’t say much.

I decided that staying awake was the only option.  Unfortunately, staying awake meant staying aware, thinking.  Which was how I got into this mess.  So I thought.  With death on the mind, I tried to think of ways to live.

Maybe I have ADD.

How can you live forever?  Extensive vitamin supplements?  Working out religiously?  Regular sacrifices?  Drinking the special Kool-Aid when the celestial bodies are in optimal alignment?

What about if you change who you are.  Not like a new haircut or job or religion, or any of the other mutable descriptors that people normally associate with a person.  What if you fundamentally change what makes you part of Homo Sapiens?

Can you become a machine and retain your humanity?  Or do you lose the ability to think and reason once you’re digitzed…

This concept was immediately more interesting than dying.  So I still couldn’t sleep, but for a completely different reason.  And utterly more frustrating.

Would being a routine in a machine be so different than being a routine in a bag of meat?  Is it wrong to change your existence from one body to an artificial vessel?  Are people vain to believe that they could create their own life form?  Is it still evolution if we change ourselves, or is it just self-mutilation?  Would we be the first species to commit voluntary suicide by migrating to electronic consciousness, or just the first to transcend the limitations of corporeal life?

Time will tell.  But first I sleep.