Ki Ni Naru

I want to live forever. As information. Not male. Or female. But better. Where I’m going, there’s no life or death, there’s only data. I will be data.

I love a tale of a dystopian future, me. What sets Year & Years apart is that it’s not cyberpunks in flying cars and humans used as food, but rather a few years from now. I would naturally expect Emma Thompson as Prime Minister to be a good thing. Definitely not. She’s basically Britain’s answer to Marine Le Pen. But one that wins.

Prior to watching the show, I had very little knowledge of a what a transhuman was. Tragically, my initial reaction was exactly the same as Bethany’s parents’ one – the ‘trans’ prefix pointing me in the wrong direction. I guess this means I’m just an old git now. I knew this anyway, shut up.

Ki Ni Naru is a Japanese phrase and can mean a number of things: to be on someone’s mind, to worry, to care about, to be bothered by, to be anxious, all of which I would say are relevant to replacing your blood and veins with circuit boards and electricity (side note, I still have nightmares about the sister getting sucked into the computer in Superman III). In the programme, it’s the name of a tech company that manufactures human implants – it’s mentioned and we get a few glimpses of the inside one of their clinics, but the logo remains absent. So here it is.

The design shows an amalgamation of the biological and digital. The microchip element is fairly obvious, but hexagons are everywhere in nature, aren’t they? Beehives, snowflakes, eyes, mineral structures. The undisputed king of the organic polygons.