🏁 Week 9: Penultimate

When I sat down a few weeks ago to assess the remaining work on this story, I looked over the scenes I had yet to write and categorized them as essential, unnecessary, or somewhere in between. I figured the in-between scenes could be stretch goals to be attempted if I was running ahead of schedule (as if that were a possibility!).

This scene was one of the in-between ones: not strictly essential to advance the plot (or so I thought at the time), but an opportunity to make the characters richer and more complex. I’m way behind the targets I set for myself a few weeks ago, but I’m glad I decided to write this scene anyway.

I had been looking forward to this scene for weeks, and it was one of the most fun to write. Writing this scene was my opportunity to spill all of my reservations about Life. And spill I have!

Lots of scenes in this story are written from the perspective of a child or an elder, and I have tired to make the dialogue reflect those stages of life, giving the children simpler vocabularies and limiting Mira on her deathbed to the short sentences that are often all a dying person can muster.

This scene, by contrast, revels in the loquacity of middle age, when the characters have acquired the vocabulary (including plenty of vulgarisms!) and opinions to hold forth at length. In short: it’s a rant.

Even as this scene is full of reservations about Life, it’s also the scene which is most densely packed with detail about the history of Life, and that’s part of what made it fun to write. I hope it’s also fun to read!

“Guess what? I got promoted!”

“Yay! Finally!” Natalie claps. Natalie and Mira are sitting on the floor. Natalie’s seven-month-old son, lying on his tummy next to them, bangs the floor and gurgles triumphantly.

“See, even David is happy!” Natalie says.

“I can’t believe they made you give up Life, though. Do you think you’ll pick it back up at some point?”

Mira considers, then shakes her head slowly.

“I didn’t just give it up because my boss told me to. I was tired of Life.”

David shrieks, and Natalie picks him up and bounces him gently. “Not you, my love. Mira’s never tired of you — are you, Mira?” She turns David on her knee to face Mira.

“How could I ever tire of you, David?” Mira asks. She kisses gently the tip of his small nose.

As her lips brush David’s soft skin, Mira thinks of the baby she might have had, fifteen years ago. She has no regrets. It had been her choice to stop the life growing inside her, and it had been the right one. She is still young; she might still have a child of her own one day. But somehow she does not think she will. David is enough. Even though he is not her own, he fills her with something she did not know she had been missing, and she loves him fiercely.

Natalie bounces David again. “You were saying.”

“I was tired of feeling like I didn’t belong. Aside from my letter which appeared in Volume 13 of LIFELINE and yours in Volume 15, have you ever seen any woman’s name anywhere in LIFELINE? The whole thing is so male.”

“I mean, think about it. This obsession with finding glider syntheses for all common patterns. It’s mathematical masturbation. A bunch of dudes jerking off together as though putting enough sperm in one place might spontaneously create a baby without the inconvenience of female involvement. It’s sort of pathetic, isn’t it?”

Natalie covers David’s ears and protests in mock horror: “Mira!”

“Don’t worry. He’ll be fine. Just because he’s a man doesn’t mean he can’t endure a little criticism of the patriarchy.”

They both laugh at that.

When they stop laughing, Natalie says, “Womb envy aside, glider syntheses do actually work. And they’re useful for building things in Life. That’s the real reason everyone tries to find glider syntheses.”

She grows reflective. “Plus, they can be so magical. Spaceship syntheses especially. You can’t deny there’s something beautiful about seeing simple things come together and transform into something new and different.”

Mira shrugs.

“Yeah, they can be beautiful. And you can use glider syntheses to build things. But who cares? It has nothing to do with life — real life. You know how you can remove a cell from a block and it doesn’t matter because the block instantly reappears? Whether the cell is on or off is irrelevant. It doesn’t affect the future. It doesn’t change anything. Life is like one of those cells. It doesn’t matter.”

Natalie is grinning.

“What’s funny about that?”

“For someone who says Life doesn’t matter, you’re using it as a metaphor an awful lot.”

Mira smiles in spite of herself.

“You know what I—“

Natalie interrupts: “Remember that crazy guy who wrote in to LIFELINE claiming that the twelve pentominoes represented the twelve tribes of Israel? And that he could use the lifespan of the patterns in Life to look into the future and predict how long each race would endure?”

“Yes, exactly my point! The whole project is ridiculous.”

“That’s not quite fair.” Natalie demurs. “That guy was completely fringe. He used different vocabulary from everybody else. It’s not like he was an active part of the Life community. Nobody took his ‘occult symbology’ seriously. All the serious Life enthusiasts — Niemiec, Buckingham, Thompson, Petrie, Raynham…you and me, of course — we all were interested in Life for its own sake, not for the sake of cryptic metaphorical correspondences.”

“But what’s the point of studying Life for its own sake?” Mira persists. “If you study chemistry or electrical engineering or whatever, you can use what you learn to make things happen in the real world. I think that’s how the Life guys think of themselves. Like Priestley or Faraday or Dalton or Pasteur — finding new ways to isolate elements and combine them together. I suppose a glider synthesis is a bit like a chemical reaction.

Or maybe they think of themselves like astronomers looking out into another world. Like Galileo and Kepler and Copernicus. Have you noticed how they’re obsessed with attribution? They’re so careful to catalog who first noticed each pattern and when he found it (it’s always a ‘he’). Just like Halley’s Comet and the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, there’s the Gosper gun and the Schick engine and the Corderman switch engine. There’s even a pattern called Kok’s galaxy! It’s right there in the name. They call it a galaxy!”

Natalie cuts in. “Are astronomers so much better than Life enthusiasts? It’s not like a comet or a galaxy is something you can touch. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. At that distance, it’s about as abstract as a pattern in Life.”

“At least it’s real, though. It’s part of the world.”

Natalie raises her eyebrows. Mira can tell she is unimpressed. Mira returns to her original point.

“I’ll tell you what they are. They’re a bunch of boys collecting baseball cards. You know how some of them call their collections of oscillators and still lives ‘stamp collections’? That’s what it is to them! Life is a male hobby, like fixing up old cars. It’s for men to posture and compete with other men for irrelevant prizes.”

“If men want to spend their time on pointless hobbies, that’s fine. It’s easy to find time to explore Life after work if someone else is doing your laundry and making dinner and changing diapers and cleaning the house. But we don’t have that luxury, you and me. Ned is good to you. But tell me: when was the last time he did his own laundry?”

Natalie is nodding now.

“You can keep playing Life if you want to, but I’m out.”

This is the ninth installment of this newsletter, which means there’s just ONE WEEK LEFT! One week for me to edit the story, one week to fix all the bugs in my scrolling-driven Life JavaScript library, one week to format and publish the story to the web so you all can read it.

Wish me luck!

Justin