78. I is a tense in which we are embodied (from Virtualis)

Jesse got up one afternoon in early January, 2014, and found an email from George waiting in his LARP inbox. It appeared to be a mass email, but there were no other addresses visible.

Hi folks,

It’s about getting away. I don’t know how it can be about anything else. I wish to seal, with wax and lyric poetry, with ceremony and gratitude, the story; to give it to you plain and without missing anything important.

I know I don’t belong on Earth. I doubt anyone who feels that way could love Earth as much as I do. Sixers had to come to Earth to learn to feel love of place (or any kind of love that doesn’t align with personal convenience and self-will, come to speak of it.)

The feeling of not belonging on Earth is not connected to this love. It is in resolving my love for Earth, and my being forced away from Earth by an instinct so strong it sometimes knocks me out, that I have perceived my exit from the impasse.

I can help Earth and leave it at the same time, and I’m asking you to continue to help make it possible. Already everyone who’s ever helped me is at a disadvantage; I only told four people, two human and two Sixers, what I wanted to do from the outset, and the rest of you joined my crew without informed consent.

I’ve had to learn about informed consent. It isn’t really possible for my species, while so much happens when we aren’t truly conscious — while so much happens in the background of our consciousness, where footling dragons from millennia past burn holes in our mental maps. One could argue, given the nature of human consciousness, that informed consent is a social chimera, an imaginary beast with real world significance. I understand the argument, but I give it no purchase.

I’m no longer worried about how bad I’ve been at obtaining informed consent; most humans are terrible at it. I’ve made my attempts, and whether I’ll forgive myself for past lapses and future errors remains to be seen.

I’ve learned so many things. I never used to consider myself as a moral being.  When you’re already perfect, you never have to get better. I’ve been mocked for assuming the appearance of a healthy, well-educated white man,  with all the privilege that comes with it, but for a moment, please consider how my conspecifics and relatives have reacted to my lengthy impersonation.  I’ve fallen a long way out of my clade; from my unnaturally perfect ancestors, through my own sadly deformed and malleable body, into pretending to be something that lives 80 years among bones housed with droopy, papery skin.

In my attempt to deal with humans honestly, I’ve learned how empty of ceremony Sixers are. We have our memories and our ways of sharing them — but we use them more for entertainment than other purposes; as we reach through each other’s memories, there are always favourites we return to over and over.

But that isn’t ceremony. Ceremony is public; it’s held in front of everybody it concerns. But it’s also private; if it doesn’t concern you, you’re not invited. Watching an ancestor’s memory, perhaps of an event that only you have ever watched in many lifetimes of Sixers, is not ceremony; it’s riffling through picture books on a rainy afternoon.

To enact a meaningful ceremony, one that would make it possible to move through the world as one for all those present, is a real challenge when you’re mixing up Sixers and humans. Generally humans have lots of people to call on, in planning and executing something this ambitious, and it’s just me, Michel and Kima. I don’t want any other Sixers here, to be candid, and even if there were more I loudly doubt they’d help me.

They don’t buy my reasoning. I’m exposing Sixers to publicity which may result in their extermination, according to them. It’s a foregone conclusion to them that humans will never rest until we’re all dead. That’s the flapping, painted backdrop of my story. Humans understand that I’m trying to deal with an existential threat in hunting asteroids; Sixers think I’m actively seeking one out on their behalf by exposing them.

None wish to come to Vancouver to help me. Only an insane person would do that. An insane person… like you.

Humans are doing what my people, with two notable exceptions, won’t. All of you are. I can no longer put aside how important it is, that I pause and give thanks. And say sorry. And ask for more help.

I want to say all that – to enact it – in a ceremony. It will take place somewhere in the Lower Mainland accessible by boat, sometime in the spring, and as ghastly as this sounds, it will involve rehearsals.

Do you want to be part of it?

Jesse took a long slug of his coffee, and typed, “Hells yeah.”