Meet Laurent Simons, humanity's future cyborg-prodigy overlord

You’re 11-years-old, you just graduated from college with a physics degree, and you have amassed nearly 60,000 Instagram followers — what do you do next? Tell everyone you’re going to slowly replace your bodily organs and limbs with machine upgrades in a quest to achieve technological “immortality,” of course.

“Immortality, that is my goal. I want to be able to replace as many body parts as possible with mechanical parts. I've mapped out a path to get there,” Laurent Simons told Newsweek earlier this week. “You can see it as a big puzzle. Quantum physics—the study of the smallest particles—is the first piece of the puzzle.”

Simons, who earned his bachelor’s degree from Belgium’s University of Antwerp, apparently also achieved an 85-percent graduating score — higher than anyone else in his class. “Two things are important in such a study: acquiring knowledge and applying that knowledge. To achieve the second, I want to work with the best professors in the world, look inside their brains and find out how they think," Simons straight-up told everybody.

Great, University of Antwerp. Just great. You admitted a tiny Lex Luthor into your academy, taught him everything you know in barely a year, and now he’s openly telling the world he’s gonna “look inside their brains” to achieve cyborg immortality.

At least one university tried to stop the budding supervillain — At least our impending enslavement as a species under the titanium thumb of Lord Laurent was briefly thwarted by another academic institution. As Newsweek reports, Simons was originally enrolled at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands, but dropped out in 2019 at nine-years-old after the school’s administration refused to let him graduate before he turned 10.

Don’t blame yourself for our upcoming extinction, Eindhoven University. You did what you could to slow his ascent.

At least he probably doesn’t care about Elon’s Neuralink — If it’s any consolation, we imagine that Simons is probably extremely underwhelmed by the “genius” of people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the latter of whom is still trying to convince us that his Neuralink project is a novel concept.

We like to think that the 11-year-old Simons is already planning many steps ahead of Neuralink-style implants, which he’d probably describe as, like, “rudimentary” or something equally unsettling. Actually, “we like to think” is a bit of a stretch. We’d rather not think of Simons any longer... we’ll have plenty of time to do that when he’s in charge of everything and peering inside our brains.