Commune

Making Time for Peace

Hadi Aziz — 2599

So many stories about paradise tell of places without, without, without. Sometimes, they will even tell of places with endless, boundless, eternal joy. They reflect our senses back into us, our lacks and creature comforts and passions all. I once thought this a limitation of imagination, an unwillingness to contemplate a world too different from our own. I once thought the storytellers had erred, or that the world within our minds was too small to contemplate the alien potential of paradise.

I do not think this anymore. I realized that the lives we live must have value, or else that we all are lost and incomplete. I cannot hold in my mind the idea that paradise is so very unlike our world and also believe that our world is an approximation of it. It is an argument from contradiction, yes; circumlocution that leads ultimately to the very same ideals our ancestors propagated since before they had the skill with which to write them. It is an acknowledgment that there is meaning in joy for joy’s sake.

That is why we have not done away with our hunger, our thirst, our need to feel the warmth of another like the sun on our skin. It is why we have not elevated our minds to some eternal machine, why we have not escaped to a faraway world, why we do not grow and grow and grow and grow. It is why, upon the arrival of the 27^th^ century, I am sabering a bottle of champagne in the middle of Vancouver on the roof of my commune’s apartment building and not, say, contemplating the infinity of the cosmos with my Matrioshka brain or drinking my woes away while a little robot welds the bullet holes on my cyberlimbs shut.

“Have you ever noticed the growing gap between the publication date and the time in which science fiction is set?” points out Yule, her hands moving the bottle seamlessly from mine and pouring each of us a drink. “It used to be you picked a year a few decades in the future and that was good enough. Then Y2K happened and we realized nothing changed, so we lowered our expectations and new space operas were set centuries out. Now everybody wants a five-digit number before they’re comfortable imagining robots and aliens flying about.” She hands me my drink last, holding another in her spare hand for herself. “What do you think will really happen this century? What will be the black swan of our lifetimes?”

Yule is a nerd, yes, but she is our nerd. Ours as a neighborhood, a demiwoman who earned each of our affection the long way around up until we became a commune and suddenly our relationships were a lot less complicated. She earned mine when we both found ourselves caught in a layover, the only two strangers in this big empty airport. One could be forgiven for thinking ours was a relationship that could only happen because we were the last two people on Earth; in truth, she talked my ear off for six hours and I found myself falling immensely in love with her vibrance.

I wonder how such a story looks now, with our minds flying about through the air overhead; we cannot exactly be caught stuck at a transit center together when it takes just a few seconds to hop over to another continent anymore. I suppose it does not make much difference to us eight who have become one.

“I think they will finally figure out how to use all that information they collect when moving us from place to place in order to put us somewhere where we can live forever,” Nabi answers without skipping a beat. “Maybe they will even figure out how to index our memories so we can browse them.”

“Can you imagine the backlash from that? They’d have to shut down the entire transit network to keep people from burning it down.” Iris doesn’t look nearly as concerned as she sounds; she’s smirking, teasing Nabi in just the way they like it: a game of Devil’s Advocate. And who better than our resident punk?

That’s how I know her, at least; Iris and I met at a community consensus-building event, where she gave a whole speech about the unique housing needs of polycules. Housing as a human right is about more than just any old roof over your head, after all; we all deserve to be with our loved ones. It is hard for someone like me to listen to words like hers and not imagine we have so much more in common.

Arthur sips his drink, and we all look to him expectantly. “I’m curious to find out whether we will finally figure out genetic senescence,” he says with a performative sigh. “A century and some change is a lot, sure, but there are still people breathing their last tonight somewhere nearby.” He looks out through the neighboring buildings, scratching his head. “Every couple days, probably, over at VGH, don’t you think?”

Normally it is Nabi waxing eloquent about mortality and legacy, but Arthur has been on a morbid streak since losing one of his partners. We formed our commune only rather recently, so we all were hit with the full force of his grief. It has been a harsh lesson in compartmentalizing ourselves where the need arises, but there was also a great deal of euphoria in sharing that pain as a community; that shared adversity was a stabilizing force when we might otherwise struggle with regret as reality dispels fantasy.

“I can’t imagine how the nurses cope with all that,” Opal asides. “Are they all just attending smaller wards where they don’t have to deal with it so often, or is that just part of the deal?”

“I think the latter, love.” Arthur shrugs, sitting down in one of the padded folding chairs we brought up. “I mean, if you volunteer as a firefighter or an EMT or something, you’re kind of just going to see it a lot, right? It’s probably the same way with working at a hospital. You either know what you’re getting yourself into, or you resign fast.”

“Do you think communes will stop being this weird thing kids these days are getting into? Maybe there will be better peripherals for us, or something like Nabi’s idea makes it easier to keep track of all our shit.” Shiloh follows after Arthur’s example, and — like dominoes — the rest of us fall to our seats in his wake. “Or maybe they’ll get better about policy, I don’t know. It feels like nobody actually gets it. I brought it up one time at one of the town halls and I’m pretty sure I was the only person in the room who had ever encountered a commune in their lives.”

“I’m pretty sure you were also the only person in the room interesting enough to single-handedly entertain seven different partners at once,” Yule muses, grinning slyly.

“That is incredibly lewd,” Adil teases in turn.

“Oh my gods, you two!” blurts Nabi, shaking their head despite the mirth on their face. “Look, Shiloh, this whole thing is like a decade old. Don’t let the wizards get you down. They’ll be dead soon enough anyways.”

To which I point out, “Unless Arthur is right.” I smile his way, hoping this juxtaposition of comradery and absurdity meet him well.

He squints back and sticks his tongue out, but the feeling ran through him and back to me before he moved a muscle. Sometimes a little quip goes a long way.