Aren't we already plugged in?
Or that is to say we are the contraption itself,
contingent on the selves that lived before.

Savanah-driven adaptations overlaid on ancient biology, nothing more.
Spilling out to trace the distant shores.
The briefest knee-jerk twitch,

the anatomy of grief that fills your skin -
perfected rules-of-thumb programmed in.
In patterns and cascades, digitally-made.

Our bodies, shutting down as we speak,
sculpted by the culling of the weak.
Aren't we behaving plastically,

but in just the way spec'ed by our R&D?
Bilateral symmetry
tugs our limbs to march to universal beats.

And if we were brains in vats,
I fail to see us being any more empty
or constrained by contingencies.

The heat of jealousy,
soldered in by reproductive economy;
a sense of beauty,

selected for by ancestral attentional needs;
the briefest knee-jerk twitch,
the anatomy of grief that fills your skin -

ad hoc jury-rigs hard-wired in.