makyo

I am grand. I am large I have been a hero since birth. I can hold more than two people under my skin, for I have been Rav From Whence and I have been Oh, But To Whom and I have been Michelle Hadje, and even she was also at times Sasha, yes? I have been all of those people and still am all of those people, and yet I remain What Right Have I. I am What Right Have I because I am also those people.

I can, by the power that I have by birthright, hold two truths in tension, to envelope two contrasting but equally real ideas in my mind and warm myself by the heat of their friction.

The Century Attack was a genocide. We were singled out for some aspect of our existence that so rankled in these people's minds that we were deemed worth destroying.

What luck they then had!

What luck that we had nowhere to escape to. No attics or crawlspaces to hide in, no safehouses or dogs in the night. What luck that killing us all was as simple as pulling a plug. What luck.

It does not matter that the murderers here were a fringe minority and not the ruling party of a fascist dictatorship. A ragtag band of angry, angry people can believe just as hard as a party, as a government.

It does not matter that it took only one bomb to end 2.3 trillion lives, and not trains that ran on time to dead-end tracks in the woods.

It does not matter, because we were singled out for being us. We were singled out and then destroyed. A genocide was committed to end our line, and even still, more than two billion of us have not come back.

It was a genocide to our attackers, and thus it is a genocide to us.

And.

And it was an omnicide because we are not united, sys-side. We are cladists, yes, but for every cladist there are ten reasons why one might have uploaded.

Michelle uploaded because she could not but upload. Because her mind was fraying at the edges and her most beloved friend had given emself to this, she had no choice: upload or nothing.

Others uploaded after a life well lived, a perpetual retirement where one may bask in the sun on a thousand beaches at once. Perhaps they will pick up painting, or...nah; today they will simply eat a really good salad.

Others uploaded to escape from some hell or another. Perhaps it was at the hands of a lover that their life became intolerable, or at the hands of overbearing parents, or their own cruel psyche. Perhaps they were climate refugees from the Big Smoke of the Amazon burning, the very air an inferno.

And yet others still had dreams in their eyes and a yearning in their hearts for something more.

We all are perhaps made up of some mixture of each of these and more.

But cladists do not cohere. There is no central tenet. No race or creed defines us as uniformly as Jewish-ness or Armenian-ness or Miao-ness.

These attackers did not want to kill us for the things that we believe or our membership to a culture. They, I think, did not even consider the fact that the would be killing us as cladists.

They did not want to kill people, not individuals, they wanted to kill the System. It was an omnicide because what we are was unimportant in the face of what uploading had done to the world in their eyes.