It started with a video someone sent me—a clip claiming that high-tech machines are now using living human brain cells, merging stem-cell neurons directly with silicon computer chips. It sounded completely unbelievable, the stuff of science fiction or internet fakery. But when I looked into it, I discovered it is absolutely true. Scientists are building "biocomputers," blending biological life with mechanical hardware to create a new kind of intelligence.
As the reality of it washed over me, my mind immediately flashed back decades. I couldn't help but think of my beautiful, brilliant Dada.
My father passed away at the young age of 58 while I was still just a girl in high school. Losing him so early was incredibly hard, but the memories he left behind have become an anchor for our entire family. In fact, my family always calls on me whenever they need to remember something from our past. They claim I am the family historian, and it’s a title I carry proudly. I’ve always been a collector of history—whether I’m hunting for hidden treasures in a local thrift shop or preserving the precious fragments of our family’s story.
Years ago, I was the one who tracked down the only remaining headshot of my father. I kept it safe over the years, made copies, and distributed them so everyone would have his image—even sending a copy to my oldest sister who lived in England, and has now sadly passed away.
Looking at that photo now, against the backdrop of today's mind-boggling technology, I realize just how much of a visionary he truly was. He was an incredibly meticulous man. In his picture, you can see how his hair was always perfectly well-groomed. His fingernails were always kept short, and he expected the exact same standard from us.
Whenever my mother wasn’t at home, Dada would step right in and thoroughly inspect my siblings and me before we marched off to school. He was a deeply hands-on father. No ear wax should be showing, and teeth had to be sparkling with absolutely no residue of food left behind! He would even try his hand at combing my sisters' and my hair.
There was one specific part of our bodies he particularly inspected, and that was the nape of the neck—or as we call it in Jamaican dialect, the "neck back." 😂 He knew that area sweated a lot, and that sweat combined with the natural oil from our hair could get trapped there and cause an odor if it wasn't washed properly. He made absolutely sure we were good, clean, and perfectly put-together before going out into the world.
Back in the 1960s, long before sensor-activated restrooms existed, my siblings and I would sometimes drag our feet to get things done. Dada would look at us and declare that we were so lazy, one day they would develop a toilet where we wouldn’t even have to flush it because it would automatically flush itself and clean us, too! We laughed then, but he saw it coming. He used to warn us that life would eventually become hard because technology would breed a modern laziness, vividly telling us that we were going to end up "sucking salt through a wooden spoon."
He also used to reprimand me for writing my name on empty cardboard carton boxes. At thirteen years old, I thought it was the strangest thing. How could an innocent action like a child writing her name on a box cause any harm? Yet fast forward to the modern world, where controlled substances are blatantly smuggled and transported, and it hit me: someone could easily stuff illegal items into a discarded box bearing my name and ship it. He didn't know the specifics of modern mail fraud, but his instincts about protecting my identity and safety from an evil world were entirely spot-on.
Perhaps his most poetic and stunning prediction was when he told us that the only thing left for mankind to do was to blow breath into machines to make them human. Decades later, scientists are quite literally feeding living cells into microchips, trying to give code a biological spark of life. I recently joked on Facebook that when these AI machines get frustrated in hospitals, they're going to start slapping people around with their metal bodies—but jokes aside, seeing my father's words mirror our current reality is simply bionic amazing.
Amidst all his grand visions and strict inspections, though, the memories I cherish most are the quiet, tender ones.
I loved my father so deeply. When he was sick in the hospital, I didn’t care about missing out on my free time; I spent my high school lunch breaks traveling to visit him at his bedside. I can still vividly see the little drawer of his bedside table. He would reach in, pull out some crackers he had saved, and hand them to me, gently asking if I'd had enough lunch. I always told him yes.
One day during a visit, he reached out and gave me four pence. It wasn't a fortune, but it was a token of his love, a small piece of himself given to his daughter during his final days.
Dada was ahead of his time in so many ways, predicting a world of self-cleaning machines and living technology. But to me, his greatest brilliance wasn't just his vision of the future—it was the immense love, grooming, and protection he wrapped around his family, leaving behind a legacy that this family historian will make sure is never forgotten.
Tah-Tah! Write your own history.
Grace Dunkley-Asphall, Copyright © 2026
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