Six Seconds

March 31st. International Trans Day of Visibility.

The 15th one, to be precise.

Before we go into the weeds, I want to make a slight callback.

I've mentioned before that I've always wanted to make an immersive sim, but in that post I felt like I did a bad job of describing what, exactly, preempts me from doing so, outside of the thousands of systems needing to snap in place late into development and the fact that I am one person.

The fact of the matter is that I'm not a great writer. I feel I have no writing voice, especially not for fiction. Yet, I write anyways, inspired by works and authors of the past, in hopes that one day I'll be good enough to make my own stories worth telling. Until then, I'm enamored with the imagery of the scarlet stepped pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, reminded by the echoes of a linguistic Metavirus, and personally involved in the actual allegorical basis of two different-colored pills in my own way¹.

However, that's not the point.

In training a skill, one must practice^{[citation needed]}. A skill not practiced holds little practical capability, where it generally fades away into the neuronic noise, overwritten by pathways not beset by one's wont to preserve that little-used skill.

Needless to say, I have been practicing, and obviously the starting results haven't been good per se, but I wanted to describe one of the biggest frustrations I've had when doing my research.

I don't remember who said it first, since I know it's not original, but I can't find the reference anymore - The idea of cyberpunk media in terms of its temporal placement being 'six seconds into the future'. I like to envision that future as still rooted in the old structures of modern reality, but of course those structures being built atop of with technological enhancement and societal decay. The problem with this statement is adequately defining it, but I almost see it as allegorical: 'six seconds' is far away to consider it being 'future' enough to describe it as speculative, but close enough to not be in the realm of settings akin to space operas. Deus Ex (2000) does this really well in my opinion, but it's a bit of an archaic example, mostly due to its age.

I've been kind of a techno pessimist as of late. I love technology but hate where it's going: There's little innovation being done anymore, and generally I have a great dislike for things like streaming services and the modern machine learning buzzword-compliance fad. "Evolve or die" doesn't work if the point of the evolution is to be replaced by some longtermist's wet dream of 'reducing' labor costs by sucking up a lake's worth of water every hundred queries or so to replace programmers, writers, and artists. I have gazed upon wrongs darker than death or night... iconoclastic gods toying with reality in pursuit of the mundane.

Regardless, that pessimism has extended pretty far into my existence, politics, and social media generally.

Everything is stained the same color: Surge pricing at a Wendy's², politicians attempting to ban gender affirming care nationwide, and the inability for anyone to actually do fuckall about the ongoing climate crisis. Hell, even COVID-19 is still around and sucks super hard because people don't want to mask the fuck up. It's incredibly depressing. Not to mention, I'd really like to not give some unhinged CEO some idea about how to create another torment nexus.

However, there's hope in the sense that the fiction I write isn't a training manual.

It doesn't take the gift of Apollo to see how things could progress, but cyberpunk traditionally is one part warning, one part allegory, and one part satire of reality.

Hell, Gibson got the details wrong for how much memory a computer might have, but Neuromancer was written in the 1980s where it was borderline inconceivable to envision more than a few hundred KiBs. I can be wrong, I'm not infallible. And I think the point is, with all of this depressing garbage going on right now, that I can write a story and hope I'm wrong about the bad things. Living a trans existence now means that, when we reach those six seconds, that those predictions come to pass in a positive manner instead of creating the very dystopian hellscape I describe.

As for that modern trans existence, I've been blessed with support from my mother, but cursed with the bitterness from many others around me. I'm incredibly lucky that I have the supportive friends, family, coworkers I do have, but I recognize that's a privilege that many trans folks don't have. Whilst I'm no stranger to being accosted in the street, getting slurs thrown at me, constantly disrespected by people entirely unable to show compassion or envision what being trans is actually like, I hope that those folks that need support more than I do are willing to see this and reach out - I'm willing to listen to your woes, be your friend when others won't be, and empathize with your struggles. You are wanted, you are loved, and I'm happy you're here.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility.