Upgrades: Science Fiction

Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, then upgrade it. The upgrade was usually the size of the original again, so then you had something twice as large doing something three times as complex. Eventually, it would break, be fixed, and be upgraded, accumulating extra parts like barnacles growing over a sunken ship. My aunt Sally had a fridge that she bought fifty years ago that first morphed into a water filtration unit and a whole-house heater and eventually became a contained garden with grow-lights...as well as the original fridge (though the door seal didn't work so well anymore), a water station for the neighborhood, and a heater so efficient that sometimes she had to open her windows in winter to cool down her house. My cousin got a game system for her daughter that was upgraded to remote schooling and then to an entire classroom, and now seems to be moving on into vocation military training, which has her rather worried. She's thinking about farming it out or listing it in the community resource lending library and hoping somebody will want it enough to keep it. She might try to sell it to a fixer, but she's afraid of the neighborhood shaming--it's not as bad as selling your dog for parts, but pretty close. People grow attached after a thing's been in their lives for over a decade.


Inspiration: "Technologic" - Daft Punk. Plus, I think an article I read through Fb the other day about establishing repair centers to keep people from just tossing things.
Story Potential: High. Really high.
Notes: I love thinking about how this would change a society.