Age of Prosthetics

Programmer Zhou Mingyuan sees his name highlighted in red on the performance system. At thirty-seven, after eleven years as technical director at a big company, he is finally 'structurally optimized.' Meanwhile, his wife Lin Wanqing—a high school Chinese teacher with a PhD in literature—is asked by a student in class: since neural interfaces can share sensory experiences, is 'Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself' outdated? Their daughter Zhou Yu draws a picture: two hands. The left one is warm-colored and round—'Dad's old hand.' The right one is silver and glowing—'Dad's future hand.' She writes crookedly: Dad's hands used to be warm, now they are bright. 'Age of Prosthetics' tells not how technology 'invades' humans, but how humans, under competitive pressure, step by step send their own bodies to the operating table. No one forces them. No one deceives them. They just calculate—not implanting means losing jobs, losing school districts, losing their children's future. Implantation is the optimal solution. Everyone makes the most rational choice. When 'survival of the fittest' becomes the sole mechanism for allocating scarce resources, how elimination of the bottom becomes a mathematical necessity, and how everyone, at the end of their rational choices, collectively arrives at a future no one wants.