Last week, I had a very interesting, humorous, and very futuristic conversation with my father. Not your typical father/son conversation. At a moment in time when we both were suffering from bodily ailments; both of us had lower back pain although of different types, dad and I pondered what kind of improvement on the human body we would like to see.

Between grinding my teeth from the pain and adjusting my posture to a position of least pain, I fantasized about the day where replacing human parts was as easy and efficient as exchanging car parts. I would replace my left knee, my left foot, my left bicep, and three vertebrae (namely L4, L5, and my S1 for those of you who are neurologically versed). I reveled in the image of being able to play basketball again, lifting weights, and maybe even running a marathon. Lying on his stomach and stretching his back in a sphinx pose, dad listened to me with obvious wincing. I looked back at my dad and hoped that his pain was from his back rather than from my ten minute day dream diatribe.

My hopes were dashed aptly as dad revealed a human enhancement that I am proud to explain in this piece. He called it the Human Word-Meter, HWM in short.  The premise of this feature is that every new child would be born with an HWM on their forehead with a preset number of words. A child born with 1,873,321 on her HWM would exactly have that number of words to speak throughout their lifetime. Once the counter reached to zero, she would lose her ability to speak and there was no way to reset or refill the HWM. HWM initial reading were also assigned at random at time of birth, thus a person's character would be determined by their HWM. So if one had an HWM of 2,399 they would need to be the quiet type as opposed to the people with a seven digit HWM.

I listened with fascination as my dad explained the HWM, something that he had obviously thought about for a long time before this conversation. I wondered what had given him the idea. I have a slight suspicion that it's a person; but I love my mom too much to reveal what I think.