Kaddish

I do not feel the feverishness of overflow. This I have confirmed as best I can. I have spoken to Rav and I have spoken to Oh, But To Whom, and I feel grounded and whole. Nearly. I feel put together. I think.

I had a lovely day with Shai and a lovely evening with Rav and today I spoke with my cocladists.

And yet still the anger is there. Still, I am finding this fury dwelling within me.

I do not like this. I do not like that I contain this. I do not like that I am this. I do not like that I am the type of person who can feel so strongly so negative an emotion.

I am many things, yes, and some of those have the inherent ability to feel rage.

I am human, after all, and humans are notorious for their rage. So much of this fury is bound up in the Century Attack, and what could that have been a product of if not rage? I am as human as those who decided to so destroy. Post-human, perhaps, but I am still a human.

I am still of Michelle Hadje. I am still she who, after some politician deemed her worth so little as to disappear her, sweep her under the rug, took the outrage at what had been done to her and turned it into action. She became a campaigner, an activist, a politician.

I am a human and I am of Michelle and I am strange and neurodivergent and I at times struggle more than most, but beyond all of that, I am a cladist, and because I am a cladist of a certain age, I died.

I died.

I was murdered.

The definitions fail here, for we were killed. All of us were murdered. And yet was it a genocide, that all cladists were killed? Was it a xenocide that this form of life not on Earth was destroyed? Was it then an omnicide, that all were killed regardless of any defining factor other than we were here?

All of those? Something else?

Does it matter?

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 twenty-three 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. Perhaps they were poor, and the uploading subsidy would have prevented their family from starving.

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 they would be killing us a 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.

Fratricide! Genocide! Xenocide! Omnicide!

They are words for concepts that are too big to hold in one's head.

My father bought for me when I was young a book titled simply One Million, and on each of its two hundred pages were five thousand dots, and scattered throughout those pages, a dot here or there would be highlighted, and a line would lead away from it to a fact that tied this abstract representation of a number to some concrete thing.

Look! This dot here? This is the seventh dot — seven, the number of poems published by Emily Dickinson in her lifetime! But– oh! This dot? This 1700th dot? She wrote this many poems in her life! See how many poems? See how few were published in her life? And yet both dots occur in the top third of the first page of this book.

The Shoah! Six million dead! Six books of dots! Twelve hundred pages. Six million dots, each a name, a face...

Who can retell the things that befell us? Who can call out so many names?

And now, we are here. Now, we live in a world that has seen more than two trillion, three hundred billion deaths in less than ten seconds.

Mechayeh HaMetim, I call out! Who Gives Life to the Dead! Ninety-nine percent of our 2.3 trillion came back!

And yet twenty-three billion did not. Twenty-three thousand books of dots. Four million, six hundred thousand pages. Twenty-three billion dots, each a name, a face...

Who can retell the things that befell us? O, Mechayeh HaKol, it must be You who calls out so many names.