A new life starts with a single step.

Lee smiled.

Teaching the first step for new inductees into the world of West Coast Swing, perhaps?

Lee sat down to write but something nagged him, tugged at his shirt collar, and it wasn’t the cat.

He looked up from the writing desk in his study.

In all directions, from all angles, copies of himself watching himself watch himself writing stretched into infinity, his body morphing from infant to old man, from human to android, from anthropomorphic form to disjointed sets of states of energy.

Lee let go of Guin’s hand and the image stopped.

Guin laughed.

“What is it, Lee. You look surprised. Did I shock you?”

Lee reached out to hold Guin’s hand again.

They were standing together on Mars, admiring the untouched landscape — their Martian lander behind them, cooling down –exchanging thoughts of uncontrollable joy.

Lee held on to Guin’s hand.

“Do you feel what I feel?”

Guin nodded.  “Now you understand what I’ve been trying to tell you. It’s nothing like a runner’s high.”

Lee swung Guin’s hand back and forth. “But this…this vision I’m seeing…it’s so real!”

Guin nodded again. “I know. It lasts as long as you want it to!”

Lee listened to the rhythm of the song playing over the dance club speakers and began to move Guin in a West Coast Swing right-hand turn while simultaneously lifting Guin high in the light gravitational field on Mars.

How could this be possible?

Lee saw more visions of the future, the intersection of groupthink thought patterns associated with back-to-back readings of books by Bill Gates and Daniel Dennett while wondering if gender still played a part in science writing.

He realised who he really was and would become.

After the song ended, Lee let go of Guin’s hand but the visions persisted.

What was going on?

Five years passed and the visions had come true, one by one, infinities collapsing into single data points, twisting into torii, nonreligious formulae yet sacred at the same time.

Why Guin?

Every time he questioned why, global catastrophe occurred. Every time he accepted why, universal truths revealed themselves with a type of golden aura.

The energy levels that flooded his system overwhelmed him at first but with time Lee learned to channel the energy creatively, on the dance floor and in his writing.

What, then, of an unrealised vision of him in a wooded countryside not far from a university town, playing with her kids?

Why did he feel he is some type of wise instructor in that vision, a duplicate of himself also living in other parts of the solar system, some with Guin, some not, performing parallel experiments on body upgrades for future enhancements on unmodified versions of himself, an iterative process, all of his versions interconnected as one node on the ISSANet?

A vision more real than typing these words about the vision.

Lee looked at his selves again.

It was all true.

No need to ask why.

Raubine hadn’t been to dance class in weeks. Ed enlisted her to recruit new members for Ursa Major and she wholeheartedly embraced the challenge, which oddly enough kept her away from regularly seeing the progress of her recruits on the dance floor.

There were a lot of lonely people in her community, people who filled their loneliness with TV binge watching and social media following.

Not all lonely want attention or to actively participate in physical activities.

Not at first.

Raubine had known loneliness after her first divorce and didn’t know what to do.

She was an introvert, despite success in sales.

She felt like people always wanted to know about her when she liked keeping her personal life private.

When she shared this with others she met online, sensing the ones with little social contact, they opened up to her.

That’s all Ursa Major was about, she told them, a big bear hug of love for each other.

Raubine had never met Mama Bear but she knew enough about her to understand how a woman so different, who literally looked like a hairy brown bear, woild naturally want to avoid public ridicule while at the same time establish close personal ties with people across the globe.

Raubine slid out the driver’s seat just as a cabbage butterfly meanders over her head.

Even in these days of online shopping and B2B just-in-time parts ordering systems, many companies wanted face-to-face meetings to close large sales transactions.

Raubine specialised as a facilitator.

The butterfly hovered over a periwinkle bloom.

Raubine flipped through her mental memories.

“Which one is the annual version of periwinkle, Vinca major or Vinca minor?”

The comedian in her thoughts responded, “Pliny the Elder.”

Truly an inside joke.

Lee drove the Lexus SUV toward town. At the first red light, the 2002 model year RX300 showed its age, sputtering and stalling out.

Karen turned to Lee. “Didn’t you say it was the Ocpam gas that caused this?”

Lee nodded, restarting the engine.

“Then why did you just refill the tank with Ocpam?”

Lee shrugged. “Convenience.”

He shifted the SUV out of park as the light turned green while at the same time trying to calculate the number of days until 6th May 2050, the date Lee had estimated that our species would declare Mars colonisation a total success.

“After we eat, would you like to go dancing?”

Karen sat silently, looking forward. Why did he persist on wanting to dance when he knew her thoughts on the matter?

Lee did know.

Lee wanted to remain friends with his wife with whom he’d shared decades of domestic middle class life. They had patiently grown their investments and wages to put them in the top 3% of income earners globally, able to take trips around the world, afford high quality healthcare, and eat out frequently.

Lee was, at heart, a wondering wanderer, often walking away from parties with friends or business meetings when he needed to explore a thought trail that might feed his creative bent, writing and dancing.

Karen thought that his love for dancing had attracted him to people who thought he should divorce Karen.

“You know what I feel about them. I don’t want to dance. I want us to go home and watch Dancing With The Stars. But I’d like to shop for a companion cat for Papier before we get home.”

They ate dinner at a BBQ restaurant offering free pie to celebrate its 62nd anniversary.

Lee drove them home.

“I’m going to dance but only stay for the lessons.”

Karen frowned. She knew he wouldn’t stay just for the first lesson but sometimes he did only stay a brief time when either his crowd anxiety kicked in or he got a wild hair and walked away.

“Why don’t we stop and look at the cats in the pet store?”

Lee looked at his watch. “Well, if I leave now I’ll just get to the start of the dance lesson on time.”

Three hours later she texted Lee: “Just staying for the first lesson? I want a new cat because I’m very lonely.”

Although the dance class was thirty minutes away, Lee happened to return home only five minutes after Karen sent the text, reading the text as he walked inside the house — a thought had occurred to him and he had left his friends at the dance group without saying a word, saving him the heartache of saying farewell.

He wondered what was the price of the middle class comfort he had, less than five years from full retirement, in comparison to being himself, the person who craved attention, especially the one-to-one attention of dancing, but who also craved time being alone writing?

And how did all of this tie in to the Canus Minor group he had joined as a youth but never completed the adult Canus Major training?

What is love, he constantly asked himself, and how can he separate his love for the characters he wrote about from his love for real people, humans with broken hearts who loved him as much as he did them?

Did all of this get human lifeform equivalents to Mars?

He was raised to be a leader, setting examples for others to follow — what example was he trying to set and for whom?

What was it worth to be himself 100% of the time in public?  And did he have to be as crazy publicly as his thoughts were?

Lee sat three rows back from the dance floor, reading news headlines on his phone, waiting for Karen to show up.

Ed walked along the front row, greeting his dance customers like best friends. 

“Lee!” Ed squeezed between plastic chairs to reach over and shake Lee’s hand. “Where’s your better half?”

“Working a little overtime today.”

“Well, don’t let that stop you from asking these nice ladies to dance!” Ed patted Lee on the shoulder and nodded at Guin.

Guin was talking to an old friend of hers she’d invited for a group lesson.

Guin grabbed Trischnia’s and pulled her over to Lee.

“Where’s Karen?”

“Working late.”

“Lee, this is Trischnia. Would you dance with her?”

“Sure.” 

Lee stood up and walked out onto the dance floor, naturally cradling Trischnia’s right hand in his left as he places his right hand at her waist.

Trischnia blushed, her rosy cheeks matching the bright red hair framing her face and cascading down her back.

“I’m Lee.”

Trischnia looked up, blinking her eyelids several times before she lowered her head to stare at Lee’s shirt. “Hi, I know. Guin told me your name.”

They began a slow waltz. “I love your hair colour.”

“Oh this? Thanks. I did it two weeks ago. My roots are already showing.”

“Looks good to me!”

Trischnia blushed again, leaning her head on Lee’s shoulder, pulling herself in closer, avoiding Lee’s calm gaze.

“You live here?”

“Yeah. I’m taking classes at university while I decide what I want to do.”

“Uh-huh. Alabama A&M or UAH?”

“Both, actually. Guin thinks I should follow her into rocket propulsion but my heart is in my art, painting, mostly.”

“You paint? That’s awesome.”

Trischnia smiled. She could see why Guin liked dancing with Lee, and why she’d want to build his dance repertoire with his wife, Karen.

After the song finished, Lee escorted Trischnia to a circle of chairs where Guin, Shelmi and a woman with purple hair are talking together intensely.

The woman with purple hair leapt to her feet and grabbed Lee’s arm, pulling him close and pretending to snuggle in his chest.

“Girls, unless you know a guy, don’t start your first dance getting all up in his business. I know that’s often all we want, a nice hug with a nice guy, but they’re not all like this guy. What’s your name?”

“Lee.”

“I’m Bai. Mind if we dance?” She continued to hold him close. “Ever heard of Balboa?”

“No.”

“No problem. It seems hard but it’s really easy. Step step step kick. Step step step kick. See, simple.”

Neil, his radar tuned to anyone dancing Balboa, quickly shuffled across the room, yelling “Bal!” as he approached.

He put his hands on both their back, pushing them closer. 

Just then, Karen walked in, seeing her husband holding a strange woman so close it looked like the woman was kissing Lee on the chest and Lee was kissing the woman on her purple-haired head.  More confusing was seeing the only other man she trusted to hold her in his arms, Neil, pushing Lee to make full body contact.

A rush of old fears and insecurities flooded Karen’s thoughts, remembering the times before they married when Lee had maintained an open relationship with several women while he pledged his undying love for her, unknowingly forcing Karen into tears because she was born and raised in a monogamous relationship world.

She would call off their dating only to have him offer his undiverted attention again and again, until the last time when, after six months of being apart and not talking to one another, he showed up at the door of her flat with a dozen roses and an engagement ring as he promised her five years before in a series of poems he’d written when they first started dating.

For their 25th wedding anniversary, they had bought each other dance lessons.

And now this…?

Karen burst into tears and quickly left the dance studio, thinking no one had noticed.

Ed missed nothing.

He watched as Neil and Bai got Lee to comprehend why Balboa was such an important technique to use on a crowded dance floor.

Although Lee seemed comfortable, Ed was concerned about Karen.

“Hey, guys! Let’s save that for Thursday!  Lee, I need to talk to you about your account. Can you come over here?”

Bai let go of Lee. “It’s okay. You’ve got the idea.”

Lee stepped into Ed’s office. “Is something wrong?”

Ed led Lee out the side door of the studio. “Hate to ask but is everything okay with you and Karen?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“She’s out in the hallway, crying. Why don’t we skip tonight’s lesson and you take care of her?”

“Absolutely. I’ll see what’s the matter. She’s been pretty stressed at work lately.”

“Yeah, Lee. That’s probably it.”

There was a time when the very thought of you sent me into a childlike state of sheer joy, nearly uncontrollable, and I acted childlike in return.

But I knew the normal cycle of love, knew the early/temporary emotions that get in the way, the body’s reaction to another body in close proximity.

These words themselves are part of that cycle.

I knew about puppy love, infatuation that comes with getting attention.

I will know it as long as I live as this body I am.

I am patient because the accumulation of moments spent being alive have taught me I am unimportant.

My temporary emotions, although beautiful beyond words, exhilarating and exciting, pass through my system like a summer breeze.

After all, it is the thought of YOU that matters.

Your life for yourself is all that matters.

How anyone fits into your life is up to you, not me.

I am the same, as are we all.

We may sacrifice our self-importance but it is a choice we make, regardless of our self-deception which implies others made that choice for us.

You choose whether you want to feel what I feel.

But what is choice?

That, my friend, is what we understand without knowing each other.

We have studied physics, mathematics, linguistics.

We have written reports for businesses.

We have danced the dance of a thousand parries, deflecting attacks from others but more strongly from ourselves, learning that the defences we developed were related to quantum physics.

The choices we made were as much about atomic processes as they were about social etiquette.

The smallest thought of the slimmest chance of seeing you still sets my thoughts soaring — that will never change.

What has changed is my response to that temporary excitement.

No longer do I simply recognise I am thrilled to see you and go on with the life I led before I met you.

Now, knowing that these temporary fits of exhilaration I feel haven’t gone away and don’t appear to go away, they are cycles, small waves on top of a deep ocean of feelings for you, I turn that temporary joy into permanent written words, celebrating our shared moments, although brief, in a longterm story, a story worth sharing with others, worth bringing in our friends, writing about, showing them how much they, too, are loved.

I give the world these words as a token of my affection.

You are my friend, a friend I can say I love and I miss you because we know “love” and “miss” are only words if you do not feel the same.

The years pass, we grow older, and yet here we still are.

I celebrate our friendship because no two friendships are alike — our friendship goes beyond words — our friendship is not only cerebral, it is atomic, an example of what could be proof of quantum entanglement at a macro level.

If some types of love are said to be a chemical attraction, could the same be said about the quantum entanglement of our friendship?

Once, I was in a hurry to know more about you, fearing death would get in the way if I didn’t know exactly who you were/are.

I don’t fear death anymore.

With you, I no longer worry that I might kill myself.

Not completely knowing you makes our friendship important, leaving room in the future to learn more.

Presentation at a preISSA consortium, also known as a TEDtalk:

Some humans wished to exchange their human bodies for that of another animal — boxer dog, Persian cat, golden eagle, fruit bat.

Has anyone asked a woodthrush if it wants to be human?

More to the point, what were the cellular issues involved?

Mary Shelley had her Frankenstein’s thought pattern described fictionally.

We have our genetic decoding, artificial intelligence and genetically-modified food sources.

We have artists and scientists clashing with ethicists and religious adherents over the possibilities of opening Pandora’s Box or letting the genie out of the bottle.

What do we really have?

We have chemical reactions.

We have observable laws of physics in motion.

We want instant gratification, answers in our lifetimes.

What do we really want?

Another moment with knowledge of ourselves interacting with the rest of the universe?

Why are we still thinking inside the box of corporeal reality?

Do we hold on to a system of beliefs, living vs. nonliving entities, because that’s all we can really understand?

Are we forever stuck in the mode of perpetuating sentience?

Is that the only condition of sets of states of energy that guarantee something of our species’ accomplishments will be remembered, carried on, ensuring survival no matter where/when it is?

If we, not just our species but any Earth-based biological forms are not the only or are even better survivors traveling the cosmos, will we put them ahead of us, ahead of our symbol sets, to venture out through and past our solar system?

Will it matter if nothing about us exists 10, 20, 50 or 100 lightyears from here or 100,000 years from now if we knew something better will?

Is it in us to make that happen in the midst of global capitalist/communist competition, wars tagged with religious overtures and the desire of a child with terminal cancer to take a trip to a foreign country for an amusement park ride?

Would we give our all to send a single bacterium to Alpha Centauri?

If not, how would we be convinced to do so, willingly or otherwise?

Nosaj started the song.

“Uh one, uh two, three four.’

As soon the band started playing, the dancers jumped back on their heels, bouncing Lindy Hop steps as Andielle sang an old 1930s tune.

Or was it a jazz version of a Song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

The band member with coconuts and washboard gave it away.

Years before Nosaj and his trusty sidekick, Andielle, had taught Lee and Karen their very first professional lesson in Charleston.

At that time, Andielle wore a folded scarf around her neck inside which two sugar gliders lived during Andi’s dance classes.

She never actually claimed the sugar gliders were communicating with her telepathically but her teaching skills tripled every time she wore the sugar gliders.

The trombone player started a riff that hinted at a theme song from Lord of the Rings.

In walked Kitrpac, a second generation Haitian, dragging his life companion and two understudies with him.

He eyed Nosaj across the street.

They nodded.

Lylas’ phone beeped. It was Guin. “On my way.”

Although they had known each for years, they did not know they worked together, albeit for different organisations, to complete plans for ISSA, the Inner Solar System Alliance. 

The dance music continued.

Slowly, individually and in groups, Nosaj and Andielle assembled the Huntsville organising committee for North Alabama, also known as “Illegally Parked Cars,” an inside joke about too many human shuttles vying for a spot to park at the International Space Station.

Shelmi and Geoff saved seats for all!