Editorial: Love letter from a hologram

IN A Monica Byrne speculative story, the narrator and her lover Navid bumped into each other some hundreds of years in the future when average human lifespan was 432 years and a large part of the universe was navigable and Earth was where they brought the dying and the dead.

“Well, why do you think we didn’t just pass through each other?” Navid asked.

“We didn’t pass through each other because elementary particles have mass and because the space between particles is filled with the binding energy that also has the properties of mass, and we’ve known that for 800 years,” the narrator replied.

“I thought you’d say that. Think deeper,” Navid replied, took off her belt and said, “Our universe is built so that particles have mass. Without that basic constraint, we’d have just passed right through each other at the speed of light and never even known.”

The cosmic flirtation revolved around the materiality of existence and the whole physics of it, launching a romance that caused a nuanced tweak in the order of stars.

The narrator’s preoccupation was eternal life, looking for ways to extend human life indefinitely. But moving on into the affair years later, Navid fell into a state of “decline,” inspiring a dilemma of sorts for her lover because the former was fascinated by the changes in herself, the idea of dying, of her body changing independently from her will.

“Humans live 400 years now, and we still die. And when death comes, the dying still pick at their bedsheets, and their arms break out in blue and violet blooms on the insides, and their breaths get further and further apart, like they’re falling asleep,” the storyteller complained.

So she pushed her experiments to extend human life, and finally created a “coil dimension” that made the body exist in infinitely slow time, but would be projected to move in normal time. The human would appear in the universe as a hologram, “here but not here.” Excited, she broke the news to Navid, but only to discover that when she tried to lie down next to her, she fell right through her.

“I’d found a way to eternal life, at the expense of the one thing Navid loved the most, which was to touch and be touched. And she threw me out.”

Some hundreds of years earlier than Byrne’s fictional universe, we exist here today, February 14, 2019, reading this editorial with all the tactile constraints of being human. While the hologram technology is yet as inaccessible for most of us, we have the two-dimensional screens on our gadgets on which we have practically transferred most of our means of human contact. “Here but not here.”

How often do we long to be closer to the ones we love, can actually achieve it, and yet how often do we neglect our physical presences because we prefer the coiled dimensions of the virtual world, passing only right through each other at the speed of light?

But we are particles that have mass and that basic constraint is what makes us human as well, with a sense of touch, with the real capacity to exude warmth. We take that for granted, we think we’re ascendant over dogs, cats and monkeys because we have the capacity to exist in abstraction as well, in memory, as thinking beings.

So, today, bring to mind how fortunate we still are to be able to touch, hug, and kiss the ones we love.