The new candy-colored iMac may seem a far cry from the Six Million Dollar Man. But for children raised on techno-play in the late 20th century, it's not a difficult leap to imagine cyborgs who are human beings evolving into machines -- let alone human beings who "lust" for firewire I/O ports. This is new terrain for the human psyche -- and evokes nostalgia in one American Indian writer for the dolls of her ancestors. PNS associate editor Jacqueline Keeler is a Bay Area writer.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Watching techies caressing the new candy-colored iMac's at the MacWorld Expo this year brought to mind my own cyborg-toy obsessions. Like most children raised in the late 20th century, I grew up on techno-play. My favorite doll was the Six Million Dollar Man.

The doll's blonde head opened up for a look through his amazing blue techno-eye. His arm was bionic. When I was seven, his gimmickry head had a much stronger and more immediate pull on men than the antique dolls of my Dakota grandmother. The Dakota dolls were lovingly made and embellished with leftover beads and the hair of a beloved relative. On his back, my Lee Majors doll was stamped "Made in Taiwan."

I couldn't figure the Dakota dolls out -- not that I was allowed to play with them. They were, after all, heirlooms. With their real hair reddened by time, their wrinkled apple core faces, and their huge padded shoulders, they looked like no image of woman I knew. They looked strong, but not sexy like the Bionic woman -- let alone a computer.

"We design objects that are totally seductive," said Apple's vice president of industrial design, Jonathan Ives. "A computer absolutely can be sexy."

At the Expo, the audience greeted the new iMac with hoops and hollers. "Macolytes" crowded eagerly around displays to see the G3's new door that like the Six Million Dollar man's head gives a peepshow view of the machine's interior.

The Mac Report, a news weekly, described the new best-selling iMac as "the love child of (Steve) Jobs' vision and (Bill) Gates' money." It went on, "(The iMac) features the best backside since Bettie Page was just icing on the cake." A five-minute promo video concurred: "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."

To add to the escalating "technolust", as the San Francisco Examiner called it, Lara Croft, cyberpin-up adventuress of the popular Tomb Raider game, made an appearance on screen. A computer-generated sprite, Croft is described by CNN as an "anatomically, overcorrected digital star" handy with an Uzi. She has sold over $250 million in games worldwide.

Her attraction? "She's a digital creature. She's perfect," one male fan said on CNN. Another, a financial analyst, noted, "You know she's not going to pull a Spice Girl and quit the group." A woman made of numbers, Lara Croft understands the bottom line.

An actress, somewhat enhanced herself, has been getting flack from Tomb Raider fans who want her replaced. They find her lacking the brains and class of the "real" Lara, a wealthy, highly educated (and well-endowed) British aristocrat. "Lara is special because even though she is not real, she could be," wrote one fan. CNN said, "Of course, this isn't the real Lara Croft. This is just an actress that portrays the graphic."

In the pre-Sony Playstation days, my friends and I had made due with our own cyborg game. The Bionic Woman (that was me) and the Six Million Dollar Man fought with Sasquatch as we balanced on huge rocks in my front yard. The rocks were actually stumps of petrified wood my mom brought from her family's ranch on the Navajo Reservation, a Mars-like desert where my grandparents, traditional Navajo, raise sheep and cattle. NASA tested their moon landing equipment there. Astronauts let my grandfather record a message to give to our relatives on the moon. In Navajo he warned, "Don't sign any treaties with these people."

As children we created our own cyborg dance on these ancient roots, knowing few myths beyond those we learned from TV and movies like Star Wars. When my mother was a girl she learned from very different myths. Once she attended a Kachina dance at the Hopi village where she was given a Kachina doll. The doll is supposed to teach each child what each Kachina -- holy beings -- looked like so that as adults they could perform intricate ceremonies to bring the rain. The names, symbols and powers and their stories were taught while the children played with the dolls.

Like my Six Million Dollar Man doll, the Kachina dolls' names connoted their value and the source of their powers. They had heroic stories and superhuman powers but they were not mechanical, they were living beings that had evolved to become spirits. Cyborgs are human beings that are evolving into machines.

Kachina dolls are now sold to tourists, which many Hopi consider blasphemous. My generation -- raised on the Six Million Dollar Man -- falls in love with women entirely contained in machines. We "lust" for firewire I/O ports. What this evolution means for the human psyche we have no idea.

For me, I'm learning to listen to my elders whom I carry with me even as my mother carried those petrified trees of her childhood with her. My grandmother's dolls are now my ideals. To be strong and made of love. Not just gimmicky and worth a lot of money.