Illustration Corinna Heumann / Text by Ulrike Parthen

“Hello Mrs. Uli, this is all getting a bit too much for me here”, my right kidney sighs exhausted and simply stops working. Hold on, girlfriend, we’ll get to that. Zack, I press a few buttons and thus activate the self-repair mechanism of my cells. And there it is again, the kidney – as lively as ever. Doctors? So unnecessary!

A hundred years from now, people will laugh at us. You’re not serious, are you? You were hooked on doctors back then? Yes, ‘sorry, I’m really trying really hard to practice in the present for 2119 and yay, first feeling of success. I had a nasty earache the other day. I thought, uh, maybe to the doctor, cause it hurt really bad.

Since visits to the doctor usually end frustratingly for me, I have just tried it myself. Zack, I took a quick look at the cause behind it and what my body wants to tell me with the pain. Trigger recognized and lo and behold, in no time the pain was gone again.

Fully automatic self-healing? Totally normal in 2119

Heartburn, a weak heart valve, double tibia fracture – all no problem for us in 100 years. Stage one of automatic self-healing: Instead of seeing a doctor, we simply go to our personal treatment room. The walls are studded with monitors of various sizes. Each of them shows several data of our inner being. Or in other words: Our body is depicted on it with all its cells in long rows of numbers. The operating terminal is located in the middle of the room. With it we heal ourselves at the push of a button, just like Susi Carefree:

Diagnosis in twenty seconds

Susi Carefree does not feel well at all and has no idea what is going on. But this does not upset her, because she only has to walk down the corridor once for diagnosis and healing. On the right hand side you will find your own treatment room. She stands barefoot and dressed only in underwear on the fixed point in front of the operating terminal. “I feel faint, diagnosis please,” is what she entered on the control panel. They immediately scan dozens of cameras from all sides – every single millimeter on and in it. Ah, there’s the problem. 20 seconds later she gets the diagnosis “heart valve defective”.

Healing easy

“To heal, press OK” is the further instruction. With defective heart valves, this takes a good hour. In contrast, headaches are beamed away in a ridiculous 30 seconds. Well, in a hundred years, thanks to spacy digital advances, we’ll be traveling at breakneck speed – even in curing diseases. Maybe it’ll even make us immortal.

Racy pace

Time is racing in the here and now. Just got up and it’s evening again. The hours in between go by in no time – except when I have another headache. Then an hour feels like infinity. Short extrapolation: At 50 years, much more time is currently behind me than ahead of me. I am therefore one of the so-called Bestagers. If the perceived pace of life continues in this way, the bestager will become Omi Uli in no time at all.

Age is relative

Such extrapolations are completely unnecessary in 2119. With digital automatic self-healing, age is a purely theoretical number that has practically no meaning any more. Hach, now being able to stay 50 for another hundred years – fit as a fiddle, rich in experience, without age-related aches and wrinkles – sounds tempting somehow.