All This Life

I am the great emancipator of my neurotransmitters, I have a brain that is free from any oppression and is open and listening to every wave emanating throughout the galaxy. I have spent hours listening to that deep space crackle, crackle, know it and have never tired of waiting to find the channel to maneuver through space-time, so our minds can bring you back here, so our work can be united. You have to come back, Albert. Humans are antiheroes, we have reached critical mass, the earth waits for the wrecking ball and it’s coming, it’s close, it is ready to level this place because if its own inhabitants don’t care if they’re about to cook, why should anybody else? I understand such questions but this is no time to be petty or petulant, this is a time to rise above any arguments, and I am strong enough to do so. I possess the knowledge of existential mathematics and the inner strength to conjure you, our Savior. I possess the necessary means to see you re-enter our atmosphere and salve our wounds. Yes, you despise the word Savior, any atheist would, but that’s what you are. Science is the only piety to salvage us. I understand the sacrifice you’re asking me to make, I’m not afraid to commit a mortal sin. The only way for you to enter our space-time is if there is a spot vacated, and at the precise moment that someone dies here, that is the trigger for you to return. It’s a two-way portal, one comes in, one goes out. Of course, I value each human life. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be willing to go to such extremes, but I can’t see any other way, it would be impossible for me to pinpoint down to the nanosecond exactly when somebody has died if I’m not there, if I’m not directly involved. I’ll do the unthinkable if it saves seven billion lives. That’s not a crime, that’s a celebration, one comes in, one goes out. We’re all connected. I will murder one person for you, Albert, I will throw her over the edge and open the portal. I will do it to reset the earth’s thermostat so life can be sustained and the sadness will wane and we have a fighting chance. We might make it. There’s beauty here.

21

Jake enjoys leaving the bus, stepping off of it, walking toward the bridge on the Marin side. He’s fifty feet away from it. On the clip of the first lunar landing, those astronauts climbed out of the probe, and that’s exactly what Jake is doing too: getting out of a protected habitat, so he can explore an untamed ecosystem, so he can explore a world he’s never known.

He’s been here before, but not like this.

They also launched monkeys into space, but not for the more glamorous assignments. It wouldn’t have had the same effect if the first descriptors of the moon weren’t from Armstrong or Aldrin but a chimp talking jungle gibberish.

Astronauts are always more articulate than chimps.

Everybody knows that.