Octavia Butler's futurism, 1000(xRESIST) years later

The Destiny of Earthseed
Is to take root among the stars.
It is to live and to thrive
On new earths.
It is to become new beings
And to consider new questions.
It is to leap into the heavens
Again and again.
It is to explore the vastness
Of heaven.
It is to explore the vastness
Of ourselves.

- The Book of the Living, Parable of the Sower 

"Do you think we can really do it? Live on the surface again?"

- Fixer, 1000xRESIST

(This post contains spoilers for Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Sunset Visitor's 1000xRESIST. It is not necessary to have read Parable, but I highly recommend playing 1KxR first.)

I finished 1000xRESIST a few weeks ago and I'm still turning it over in my mind. One of the strands I've been following is its theme of futurism (and its roots of speculation, desire, and hope). 1000xRESIST is a game filled with regret, nostalgia, and ghosts. It also carries a longing for change, for a future that can either exist in spite of the past or because of it. It is a game that requires you to move on, because there is nothing else you can do.

1000xRESIST is a monument to science fiction's ability to speculate. It is the ludonarrative analogue to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, dreaming not of an end to the apocalypse but the beginning of something new. Speculative fiction does not claim to predict the future, and I would argue that it doesn't even posit a possible future (regardless of how possible their worlds may seem to us; the world may burn, but it will not be by fire). We cannot possibly predict the future, but we can imagine what it would be like to be comfortable with uncertainty, and we can imagine a present that works for a uncertain future.

-

1000xRESIST imagines a subterranean society of clones, over a thousand years after the Occupants came to Earth, bringing with them a disease that killed nearly all humans. You play as Watcher, one of six "shapen sisters" each with a "function" to serve your creator, the ALLMOTHER, who carries immunity to the Occupants' disease. You dream to join the ALLMOTHER on the "other side", where she will grant you immunity. This dream is never realized: the game cold opens with you, Watcher, murdering the ALLMOTHER.

In playing through the events leading up to the ALLMOTHER's death, I knew that our world was dystopic, and that the Sisters needed to shed their nostalgic, reactionary beliefs and traditions if they wanted to move on. But I never once considered what would happen after ALLMO's death, and the game never asked me this question either, until it was too late. The majority of 1000xRESIST's narrative weight derives from the baggage of a dead god, and a society that does its best to move on, and a dream of a new world (the other side; the surface; the Earth) that persists. 1000xRESIST's futurism is not focused on merely toppling tyrants, but one that forces you into the depths of the revolution; it is not post-apocalyptic, as much as it may seem to be. It is just apocalyptic, because the apocalypse never really ended.

We also cannot imagine an end to Parable of the Sower's apocalypse, in which the excesses of global warming, capitalism, and fascism have been pushed to their limits. In Parable, we will never know what it is like to kill President Donner, nor do we particularly care about him. Yet regardless of our ability to bring an "end" to the way things are, Parable's future is one rooted in change. Its protagonist, Lauren Olamina, spends the novel travelling across a ravaged California to spread her religion, Earthseed, and to find a suitable place to begin the first Earthseed community. The primary tenet of Earthseed is that "God is Change". Earthseed's dream is to "take root among the stars": it believes that, if we are to survive, we must change and be moved. Butler's futurism in Parable of the Sower is one centered on diaspora. As followers of Earthseed, we are migrants, both through space and time. We will live to see the other side, and we will build something new there.

1000xRESIST, like Parable of the Sower, imagines a diasporic future. A large portion of the game involves exploring ALLMO's memories, when she was a teenage girl named Iris in the 21st century. We see her trauma and the trauma of her parents. We see the apocalypses of the present, and we see what happens when we migrate away from them. Iris's parents met during the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests; though they live in Canada during Iris's lifetime, their loyalty to Hong Kong never wavers. They hold on to the dream of returning, even when they're sheltered in their apartment at the height of the Occupants' pandemic. In the end, they remained. But it does not have to be that way for us.

-

Both Parable and 1KxR ask us to remember the past. But they do not ask us to be nostalgic. For you, playing Watcher, to remember is your function; it is who you are, it is the labor you perform, and it is a burden to you. The most difficult choice 1000xRESIST asks us to make is what to forget and what to remember. Diaspora does not exist without a homeland. We need to remember what we once were. Even among the stars, we still remember the Earth we came from; even under the oceans, we remember the city we were born in.

Speculative fiction may not be able to predict the future, but it can remember the present. Parable of the Sower and 1000xRESIST haunted me when I read and played them, because the things they were remembering were the same as what me, and everyone else on the planet, was living (Parable even begins in the year 2024!). It was a haunting of the past, of lost futures, and of an uncanny present. It reminded me of where I am now, and where I came from. The diasporic futures of speculative fiction do not ask us to carry the past. It's enough to know who you are, and to take that with you when you leave.

To survive,
Know the past.
Let it touch you.
Then let
The past
Go.

- The Book of the Living, Parable of the Sower 

"We have to go to the surface. There's nothing left for us down here. We'll die out."

- Fixer, 1000xRESIST 

Playing the Nonbinary Future in Citizen Sleeper (a short rambling)

(spoilers for Citizen Sleeper) 

What does the nonbinary utopia look like? What are the nonbinary futures we dream of? The central desire of the nonbinary identity is existence. What else could the nonbinary and transgender future be? We want nothing more than to exist, and to not be denied existence. Our futures are not near; we may not even see it in our lifetimes. It is a possible future, but an unsure one.

Citizen Sleeper is a sci-fi video game about roleplaying in the ruins of interplanetary capitalism. It imagines many futures, but the one I am most drawn to is the nonbinary future. In Citizen Sleeper you are a sleeper, not named after what you are but what you aren't: a human. You were once human, but you were also never human. Sleepers are emulated minds, built to pay off the debt of the human they may have once been. In CS, you have escaped this fate. You live on the outskirts of capitalism (the space station Erlin's Eye, long abandoned by its corporate founders), working to free yourself from the corp hunting you down. You also work to free yourself from your own body, designed to rely on the drug "stabilizer". Your life is precarious. Your body was created to kill you.

To be nonbinary in CS is a liability to yourself. You did not choose it. You were created to be nonbinary. Your gender is a technological invention; it is both your software and hardware. Your gender is violent. It is a miracle that you exist, when other nonbinary characters across the cyborg-machine spectrum struggle to do so. Most of those characters exist only within the digital "data cloud" of Erlin's Eye; the only character that physically manifests is a goddamn vending machine. The body exists as a technology and a tool; it would be incorrect to say that Neovend is a vending machine, but rather that they are hiding in one. I have a hard time figuring out where the body-as-technology begins and where the body-as-gender/gender-as-technology ends. Perhaps the nonbinary future of Citizen Sleeper is one in which technology is gender; the gender of the ghost in the machine is the machine itself. For Neovend, we can distinguish between the ghost and the machine; we cannot do so with the sleeper, trapped in their body.

Stabilizer is your HRT; it keeps you and your gender alive. In CS1, you are never free from stabilizer, but you might dream of not needing it. It is the one thing keeping you going, cycle after cycle. I think there's something appealing about living in a mechanical body, having a body that actually matches your gender and a gender that matches a body, but the trans futures of CS are not so much different from the present. Though you are born as a machine and born as nonbinary, you are still called a name that is not entirely yours; you live in spite of those who created you; you do not know nor care about what became of the person you once were. You cannot help but feel that you are human, when your creators tell you that you are not. You were designed with a dysphoria for something you have lost, or something that is out of reach. You are an emulation, you are not genuine, you are unnatural, constructed, a pretender.

The trans nonbinary utopian desires of Citizen Sleeper are of an inscrutable existence. Near the end of the game, you gain a new, sustainable source of stabilizer: mushrooms. Your body, however rigid it may be, is still an organic technology, one that grows and survives not just in spite of but because of the precariousness of capitalism. In its ruins on the Eye, you learn how to keep yourself alive.