After Forever – 2
When I finally worked up the courage to speak with them, I discovered Anax was nothing like I’d assumed they were. They were quiet, unassuming, shy even. When I’d told them that their essay was the most amazing thing I think I’d ever read, they’d responded with silence, followed by a whispered thank you. Their casing turned a bright shade of pink, just as mine must’ve, and we were soon paired. Father celebrated the news by reminding me of two facts. One, that you don’t need to head to the reprod centre with the very first human with whom you pair; you get to search, to seek. That searching – seeking – is, in fact, a large part of what makes the human experience the human experience. And two, that it’s amazing – isn’t it? – the way we pair now. That bodied humans had to go through a far more elaborate courtship ritual every time they wished to pair. That due to the nature of the ritual, so punctuated with chicanery, the act of pairing itself left every human confused about their own emotions and those of the human they were attempting to court. So confused were bodied humans, father concluded, that they identified the very source of the emotion ‘love’ incorrectly: across nearly every one of humanity’s million cultures, they believed it originated from the human heart, when of course it couldn’t have. The hearts of bodied humans did not have the capacity to create that emotion, to be the prime mover of all of the bodily responses that emotion evoked for the benefit of the sustenance of the race of bodied humans. And thank goodness too, for if the great engineers, who had shepherded the race through the Stew had had to engineer both brain and heart, they might not have been able to save the human race.
I, for one, just wished father would be happy that I’d found pairing with someone so wonderful. That, for once, he’d see me not as a symbol of millenia of human progress, but as a human being. Not ‘human’, but ‘a human’. But like all human beings, I concluded, he’s imperfect. All humans are imperfect, I concluded.
Except Anax.
It didn’t matter that I’d read all the great romantic works, watched all the great romantic cinema, listened to all the great romantic music. It didn’t matter that I knew that I would feel – wholly irrationally – that Anax could do no wrong. Knowing that all human beings are programmed to feel this way didn’t make any of what I felt feel less real. Anax’s thoughts on the bounds of human imagination in the absence of a physical form seemed to me just as profound as their thoughts on what made our relationship work: equal give and take, I never thought it possible, they’d said. I hadn’t ever paired with anyone before – in fact, I’d never had the courage to even try to pair with anyone before Anax – so I had no barometer for ‘possible’. Anax had had two serious pairings during their L3s. Relationships, they’d called them when first speaking of them; that’s what bodied humans called pairings, they’d said. Both had ended prematurely, both due to incompatibility. This time it’s different, I can feel it, they’d said about six months into the two of us being together.
We spent most of our time during the L4s together. I learnt that their grandparents had been reconstructions of discovered consciousnesses. It had never been too clear what their lineage had been, but evidence seemed to point to all of their parents being American. This lack of a concrete history remains a frequent theme in conversation between us, and it has animated much of Anax’s career as an essayist, which began at the end of the L4s with the essay that launched their career – ‘Boundaries of the History of Self: Reflections’. In it, they explore the simultaneous importance and insignificance of what they call a 'bodied history’, a term they coined in that essay. In their hauntingly beautiful exploration, they write of the struggle to balance two simultaneous thoughts.
It shouldn’t matter whence the bodied humans that generated one’s consciousnesses came; the parameters of modern living are wholly different from the parameters within which bodied humans lived. Every human being has, in some sense, been liberated from the cage that is the body.
The absence of a ‘bodied history’ resolves in the absence of a ‘bodied presence’. Seen another way, humanity’s liberation from the limitations of having a body is an untethering of sorts. All that keeps us tethered to the idea of our humanity is the mythologised past of bodied humans. They’re the only humans we know for sure to be ‘real’, because they had something we could never have – skin, flesh, bones. To not know one’s link to this ‘bodied history’ is to imagine oneself generated, not born. Freed not only from the limitations of the past, but also from a link to reality.
Like much of their writing since, the essay centres on themes of cognitive dissonance and employs dialectical thinking to reach closer to resolution. Like much of their writing, it’s beautiful. But I can’t help but think sometimes that all Anax does is think. They write about thinking. They talk about thinking. For much of their time, they think about thinking. Is that all they do? If you were to ask them, they’d probably say – what else is there to do? We can’t walk down a street, run up a hill, make love, shake hands, laugh or cry. What else is there to do, they will likely argue, but think, think about thinking, think about thinking about thinking, recursively, ad infinitum. In the beginning, I’d love every thought they would conjure up, but ten years into being paired, it has begun to, on occasion, annoy me; sometimes I’d rather just be than think.
Just last week, on a lazy afternoon, Anax asked me – do you think we’re human at all? Or are we just figments of human imagination? To me, the answer is as clear now as it was then: we’re human. Of course we are. If we’re only figments of human imagination, then Anax is not real. I’m not real. Father is not real. Nobody after the Great Stew has been real. The great survivors were not real. The arrow of human progress after the greatest catastrophe in its history is all fake. All we are is creations of mortal deities. Worse, we’re creations of deities that have themselves died. Worse still, we’re creations of deities that died by their own hand. Deities that perished in a disaster fueled by their own avarice. A disaster which the deities tried to survive by committing the act of ultimate hubris – playing god. And what kind of god? The kind that tried to create us in their own image, failed, and resorted to creating us partially: without form, without function. The kind that not only died in pursuit of their own survival, but also killed – en masse. Every animal, every plant, all life, save for those heat-resistant bacteria that managed to thrive in the Great Stew; this deity killed them all for the express purpose of birthing us into half-life. If I were to employ Anax’s line of thinking, are we even alive? Have we ever been?
If they believe what they wrote in their essay in ‘Mind’, titled ‘Electric Sheep: What is it to Dream?’ – in bodied humans’ early forays into generating consciousnesses, they were limited by the technology of the time to creating fairly limited intelligences. And they rightly called these intelligences artificial. – what’s the point of perpetuating this farce? What’s the point of adding ‘more iterations of an experiment gone awry’ as they appear to have suggested? If they see neither themselves nor me as being human, then why go to the reprod centre? The question at hand is, should we come together?
After Forever, a sci-fi romantic dramedy, continues with this, its final instalment. The work is a narrative that’s set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans – as we know them – exist only as stored consciousnesses without physical bodies.
Chapter 7 of the story concludes the series, and serves as a culmination of introspective journeys and decisions about personal and collective futures. It wraps up the narrative by reflecting on the essence of existence and human connections in a new era.