On an asteroid
there was an alien artefact.
If such it was… a droid…
I’ve no idea, in fact.
Its metal (leg?) seemed (deployed?)
and so I touched it, but responses lacked.

Once there were women; once I was a man
(touching a leg then always brought response)
before the search for life and light began
to change me into this dark renaissance.
The teacup storms on which I’ve tossed,
when she or I have bitched and bossed
till all the loves I’d ever marked
were all the women that I’ve lost.
They chose the certainty of Dark
over the uncertainty of Light.

The joys of life are what’s uncertain:
hopes of what’s behind the curtain,
knowing the results will grate
of things that you anticipate,
knowing your life could be wrecked
by what you never could expect.
And though you think you’re circumspect,
you can’t deflect, inspect, collect.
Knowing the harvest is unknown
with crops that grew from deeds you’d sown,
while all your greatest hopes and dreams
will be exceeded by the future’s smallest gleams.

Because change never stops, you find what matters
is never really known.
You may get verbal assurance of your future status,
but was it “throne” or “thrown”?
The only certainty would be
if, offered immortality,
you feared what such an altered world would lose, would save,
and chose instead to go into the Dark
with furnace no less dark than the grave
wherein there lies no risk of further blight.
Most people choose the Certainty of Dark
over the Uncertainty of Light.

But we who strive to stay alive
long enough for rejuvenation
hope, hope only, we will thrive,
post-humans in a re-Creation,
unknowing what our ape-based genes
will do with power dominance,
with war, with sex, Earth mined and undermined,
but glad to take the chance.
How else can we see scenes
of how it all turns out — destroyed? refined? —
unless we scrape through, level up with wounds and scars
and watch a world we love and leave behind?
So at last I am here, between the stars,
transiting the darkness of the Void,
the empty galaxy’s apparent night,
chanting the mantra that keeps spirits buoyed:
Let there be Post-Humanity’s own light!

Between the spiral arms in the near-void
there’s still thin light of distant galaxy and star,
still specks of dust, rarely an asteroid.
Earth left (millennia in old Earth years ago),
I cross the dark immortally, beyond, afar,
through what is darkness only to Earth-eyes
which myriad wavelengths up and down can’t know,
but which I now apprize.
Light here abounds,
and boundlessly surrounds, astounds.

Take the smallness from slight,
take the bad from the blight,
take the fear out of flight
and you’re left with the light, the light, the light.
We stumble from dark caves of night
into day, trying not to tumble;
our parents the dark; post-humans the light;
ourselves just the stumble.

*****

This poem (published in this week’s Bewildering Stories) is a response to conversations in which people have expressed pessimism about the value of life extension, rejuvenation, cryonic preservation and resuscitation… anything beyond the certainties of a clear end to life after a normal lifespan. “How will you… why would you… what if they… you won’t understand… you won’t have…” Ah, but everyone who has immigrated into a foreign culture has done this: had to learn a new language in order to find a job and start making friends and find out how everything works. Some of us are comfortable doing this; some people aren’t. I’ll take the uncertainty, and enjoy its discomforts… because it’s just so interesting!

Photo: “Into the Light: The Future is Uncertain” by tenzin.peljor is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.