---

Code Switching (Part 3 of 4)

By Malon Edwards

(…Continued from Part 2)

 

7. A SWEET-ASS HELICOPTER AND TEN STATER STRANGERS?

JEAN-MICHEL FEAT. THE NAUGHTY NINETY-DAY FANDANGO

 

I’m feelin’ this Bell 525 Relentless like Ellen Gilchrist playin’ bid whist wit her redheaded MILF temptress. She’s a proper drawers dropper chopper wit no love for the paupers. Her black chrome exterior makes me want to chill in her eighty-eight-square-foot cabin interior until homo erectus becomes superior.

And I’m not the only one.

Sittin’ wit me are ten Stater strangers who fear no danger because of the two exo-fighters flankin’ us as we drink an’ cuss, comforted by their protection against the Sovereign State of Chicago’s skanky trust.

Listen to me. Talkin’ like how a real Stater must.

Three of these girls might be smilin’ true, but on their faces you can see fear of Electric Resurrection, too. It’s a look all eleven of us have, but we play it cool—or at least try to appear to.

Yeah, I know that don’t make no sense. It will soon, but first give y’all’s mouth a rinse while I arrange this knowledge and then dispense. ‘Cause y’all know that Manja Conjure y’all still smokin’ is ’bout to be past tense.

Juss make sure y’all come back from that waterfall in Senegal as I explain how Governor Sutton is on the ball,   scrambling exo-fighters per protocol (airspace violation) after one holo-vid conference call(Level Two Situation) wit Lieutenant General Paul Westphal (Chief Defender of the Skies and All Constellations).

Or instead, y’all can gnosh on comp biscotti (with Vino Santo) as y’all prepare for some naughty (ninety-day fandango) at y’all’s first Saffron Sutton party (scented in mango).

Yeah, I’d rather do that, too.

(But I’m not looking forward to the Electric Resurrection strangle, the kick-off to this fucked up Fandango. My stepsisters saw that on some app called VainGo, so here I am about to find my eternal flame like the Bangles.)

I turn to the mini-bar next to me. If Manman could see me right now, she’d be vexed with me. But all I’m trying to do is get a lime for my Gin Rickey one more time. And it’s as if the Relentless can read my mind. It greets me with a knowing chime—and then, it stops. Right on a dime.

But not for long.

This beautiful bitch (yes, I’m an ass) changes her pitch (rotors on downblast) to deliver the rich (except for me; I’m outclassed) and descends without a hitch (onto Isle a la Cache). I try not to get excited (too late), but it looks like everybody and their mama who goes to a North Shore high school was invited (plus Kate).

Some still carry their Relentless-poured beer. I pull a face so severe, but for real, y’all, I don’t even care. I’m not impressed by these conceited and weak-bleated wanna-be elitists checking their eyes and their noses and their lips and their tits in sub-sentient holo-mirrors that dis and dismiss with unprompted quips.

Yeah, these idiots are a trip.

Especially when Saffron Sutton’s staff takes back those ice-cold amber drafts and steers some of that dumbass mass back to their pre-assigned aircraft. I ain’t gon’ lie; I laugh. Man, I juss don’t understand how they can commit such a gaffe and be surprised (but not realize) that their fake-ass eyes are despised instead of idolized by Saff, incurring the wrath of the First Daughter whose father is a founding member of PATH. (That’s People for the Advancement of TransHumans for those who don’t know.)

It’s not like this is particularly hard. And it’s not like they were ordered to travel forward in time and save Shard.

All these behind-the-velvet-rope fake-ass Electric Resurrected nopes needed was to do their homework and broaden their world scope.

Instead, they filled their heads with a nodelurk called chromeperks that does inferior eye work. I’m talking upgrades that make you go blind from a download packet that’s twice maligned.

(Y’all don’t even want to know.)

Yeah, these dumbasses made chromeperks’ most popular upgrade that one-of-a-kind digital gaze for 323 straight days. Instead of having baby blues, browns, and greens like normal people, when these wanna-be Electric Resurrected get excited or mad or sad, in their eyes you can see raging blizzards, angry wasps, or striking eagles.

So, because my group is beautiful and winsome with eyes as traditional as dim sum (including me, who know he all that and handsome), we get escorted to the front of the mansion past its velvet rope stanchions by this dude who looks like Marilyn Manson. We pass those fake-ass Electric Resurrected people who stand docile in their pens like good little sheeple as their eyes stutter low-res images, which should be fucking illegal. Those posers give us choppy looks that are all sorts of trashy, but I just throw them back the peace sign and keep it all the way classy.

---

 

8. I DO EXPERIENCE THE TRAUMATIC

JEAN-MICHEL FEAT. SAFFRON SUTTON’S PATH THUGS

And that’s when these posh PATH motherfuckers get nasty.

They shove me into a room saturated with gloom and I swear to God here comes my doom. And yeah, I know; y’all North Shore motherfuckers thinkin’: “This nwafa Jean-Michel is juss bein’ dramatic, an’ the pain he think he ’bout to feel is psychosomatic, ’cause slave descendants, ‘specially the females, pain threshold manifested magmatic,” but that type of skepticism is motherfuckin’ problematic.

I mean, how can you believe that I don’t experience the traumatic, that I don’t feel anything at all and my only emotion is phlegmatic, or that I live my life colorless in one dull shade—pragmatic?

But here’s what I say to that bullshit—my voice choked, but emphatic—

---

 

9. IN THE TRUTELL (PART ONE)

MICHAËLLE-ANNABELLE

 

My name is Michaëlle-Annabelle, and I’m here to make sure you forever rock well.

Koute, you’ll bounce back from this shit. Now, watch me as I trounce hack your shit and then douse black your shit so Saffron Sutton doesn’t chouse smack your shit.

That probably doesn’t make any sense to you because right now everything feels so intense to you, but I’m doing my best to make the here and now past tense to you. But there’s only so much that I can do.

Now, this might sound like insanity, but that ninety-day Fandango is a theft of your humanity. The asphyxiation death Saffron Sutton set up to steal your breath (and the breath of all the other Black people up in here, including Seth) so she can transition y’all to the coveted Electric Resurrection life-wealth is undercover racist stealth.

She doesn’t really care about you. Non, this all started on the North Shore as a dare about you. She wanted to see you Resurrect with some flair about you. But at the same time, remove that white guilt glare about you.

And Eric Garner. And Elijah McClain. And George Floyd. And

Breonna Taylor. And Ahmaud Arbery.

But not all of the others, because naming Electric Resurrection rooms after just those five in a twisted, fucked-up parable made Saff’s immense white guilt truly unbearable.

So, since you’re in the room she named after Garner, let’s put on your mental and emotional armor. Because I don’t want you to feel that you can’t breathe and your throat is being squeezed and in your back is someone’s knees and your lungs start to seize and after fifteen seconds you want to try to scream, “Get the fuck off me, please!”

But you can’t.

Oh Lord, I’m not about to fall on this sword. I’m not about to go on a three-hour rant about how white people are just like a carnivorous plant with a trust that is forever scant, but that’s fine with them because all they’re ever really thinking about is when to upgrade their newest and most coveted breast and penile implant.

But what I am gon’ do is make sure you understand what’s going on and tell it to you true.

I grabbed and nabbed your SigTell to bring your consciousness from the Fandango to this Vipp shelter with its nice new smell so you wouldn’t have to experience what’s going back there with your true self.

So, you go up to the bed loft where your girl Esmée Vérité is and lose yourself deep inside her hard light coddle, and I’ll go to the kitchen to get me a straw and a no-share bottle while I flash-frock Saffron Sutton’s SigTell stalks with feels of her being throttled.

Yeah, manjèdkòd, you’ll feel this every time you think of Black people as “Best When Trauma-Modeled.”

---

 

10. IN THE TRUTELL (PART TWO)

JEAN-MICHEL FEAT. ESMÉE VÉRITÉ

 

When I get up to the bed loft, Esmée Vérité laughs. It’s a sound so beautiful I can’t even begin to describe it in this paragraph.

“Manman Tijwa just put the ever-loving fear of God in those assholes that were with you in the Conquest, all the way from a safe house somewhere on the North Shore. I trounce hacked Saffron Sutton’s shit, and I can suss they’re scared of her.

“One of those flunky Stanford Sutton Industries operatives is reciting 100 Hail Marys downstairs in a day room. Manman Tijwa told him to recite 100 Our Fathers when he’s done, and he doesn’t even realize she isn’t Catholic.”

Even though Esmée Vérité is not really here with me right now, she reactin’ to me naturally—like, mezanmi wow!—wit no bit of lag. And how.

“Mwen fè kwa,” she continues, but stops an’ puts a hand over her mouth. Her eyes as big as a house ’cause she juss blasphemed an’ sinned against the word of a strong Christian woman wit Baptist roots from the Deep South. Don’t act like y’all don’t know who I’m talm ’bout.

(An’ yeah, Jackson, Mississippi, juss got a shout out.)

“Do you remember,” Esmée goes on, determined to get it out, “that time when nou te gen sèt ane—or maybe we were eight years old?—and we were at your house playing in the living room, and I said,’mwen fè kwa?’ Manman Tijwa had heard me from the kitchen where she was cooking dinner.

“I don’t even remember saying it, or why I said it. All I remember is her coming into the living room with a wooden spoon in her hand as if she was about to use it on the both of us, even though I was the one who said it.

“Manman Tijwa had told us we should never say that because it was short for ‘I swear before God and all that is holy,’ and those three words were one of the greatest blasphemies of all blasphemies. And then she waved that wooden spoon at us and said if she heard us say that again we wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week. Do you remember that?”

“Wi,” I whisper, an’ she laughs once more. I’m not lyin’ to y’all when I say that lovely sound wrenches out my heart an’ drops it right there in front of me on the floor.

“We never said those three words again. For years. At least I didn’t. Not until now.”

Esmée smiles a little. I let the silence be. Nah, y’all ain’t gon’ hear me quibble. This ain’t about me.

“Monchè,” she goes on, her smile now gone, “if Manman Tijwa had heard me just then, she would make me go out back, cut a switch off the tree, give it to her—with no lip and no fuss—and then fout mwen yon je baton up and down the street.”

Heavy thought settles onto Esmée’s beautiful, dark face. She lets it stay there for a while. This soliloquy is at her pace. We’ve only begun the first mile.

“And it doesn’t matter that I’m thirty years younger than Manman Tijwa. It doesn’t matter that she’s”—Esmée puts up her pinky finger—”ti kout kout and I’m almost a foot taller than her. It doesn’t even matter that she would never catch me if I ran after I gave her that switch, because she and I both know my championship quarter-miler speed can easily outpace her short-but-powerful little legs.

“But let’s be honest: There is no way in the world I would run from Manman Tijwa, because before she started whuppin’ me—and she would whup me, not whip me—she would say to me:

“‘Now, don’t you start listenin’ to them disobedient thoughts snakin’ their way down into your conscious mind from your subconscious mind, ti cheri, ’cause I know what them thoughts tellin’ you. They tellin’ you to run from me, fast an’ quick. But you bet not listen to them thoughts. You bet juss hold fast right there, right where you stand. ‘Cause if you don’t, I will chase after you, walk you down (wit yo’ long legs an’ all) juss like you walked down that gal from Ravenswood in the 400-meter city-state championship final last spring. An’ once I get aholt of you—an’ truss me, I will get aholt of you—you ain’t gon’ be able to sit down for a week.'”

I must admit, that’s a good Manman Tijwa impression. She even got spot on her you-bet-not-run-from-me facial expression.

“But now…” Esmée’s voice breaks, an’ my heart aches to be there wit her. “I say mwen fè kwa this time with the hope to conjure Manman Tijwa from wherever she is to be here right next to me so I can give her a big hug because I miss her so much and I’ll probably never see her again after this war is all over.”

Whenever this was, wherever this is, I juss want to be there forever wit her to kiss her tears.

“You probably won’t see her again, either.”

Esmée wipes away her tears, calms herself, but lets slip a shaky breath. In her lovely face, I can plainly see the mirror of other people’s deaths.

That nose, those cheekbones, them lips—her serenity can slay my enemies or give concerned mothers upset stomach remedies, and then, as she snacks on chocolate-covered Chinese redheaded centipedes, nonchalantly call down to Earth one or two supercelestial entities.

“I wanted to tell you this the next time we were bab pou bab. But I’m not entirely sure when I’ll see your face right in front of my face again, so I’ll tell you now.”

Esmée smiles ag’in, but this time it ain’t a sad one. Nah, it’s the smile she used to give me after we raced to the light pole an’ I thought I’d won. I never did, even though I thought I juss ran like I was fired out of a shotgun.

“So, you weren’t the only one who was recruited.”

She holds up a letter with the Tuskegee North Michaëlle-Annabelle Industries logo at the top. The scene behind her shifts to an Audi Attack 8 exo-suit backdrop.

“This fall, I’ll enroll as a mechanical engineering and roboticist cadet on the Tuskegee North Michaëlle-Annabelle Industries campus.

But pa enkyete w. Don’t worry. Bagay yo va pase byen pou ou. Everything is going to be all right. Just like you, I’m the number one recruit in my class.”

All of a sudden, she goes quiet. I swear she’s about to shout, “At midnight, we riot!” But she doesn’t. Instead, she SussShares with me like we’re part of the same coven. “For you,” she susses, “this might be a plot twist, but for me, it’s the second time we’ve done this.”

An’ then she go back to tellin’ me how she ’bout to run this. “Third time is not a charm. No matter what happens to you, I got your back. And if anyone even tries to fuck you up, I will fuck them up.”

---

 

11. POST-ELECTRIC RESURRECTION

JEAN-MICHEL FEAT. SAFFRON SUTTON

 

And then, it’s over.

My contact high keeps me trippin’ though, praise Bulova.

“Congratulations!” says a voice from the starkness. “You’ve endured forty-eight hours in the Garner Room and survived your Electric Resurrection!” Its tone is soft and drowsy and devoid of all sharpness.

It’s concrete and bare

my feet aren’t there

this suite has no chairs

I cheat with eclairs—

 

“So do I. Salted butter caramel eclairs. But only on Mondays.”

Y’all, I won’t even pretend to try to play the role. Yeah, I’m discombobulated. Saffron Sutton, who is cradling my head right now, can corroborate it. This wanna-be Oscar-worthy performance I’m giving still should be nominated, but call the Screen Actors Guild first so I can be properly compensated.

“I’m sorry? What did you just say?”

Saffron Sutton leans in close to me. This isn’t where she’s supposed to be. She should be smoking weed or ghosting junk feeds with Chloe, Connor, and Glencoe Shaheed.

I try to sit up. Nah, monchè, it’s not happening. I try to get up. Fuck me, this is maddening.

“Whatthefuck whatthefuck holyfuckingshitJesusChrist!” Yeah, that’s me babbling. Trying to speak clearly after having an arm around your neck for fifteen seconds is challenging, especially since forty-eight hours later the Electric Resurrection memory wipers are still scavenging.

“You’re fine. All is well. Your life has begun again.” Saffron Sutton whispers this into my ear (ostensibly to remove all my fear), and I swear to God and all that is holy I don’t know what the fuck is happening here—

---

 

INTERLUDE. JEAN-MICHEL AND THE BUGATTI CHIRON

SUPER SPORT 300+ EXO-SUIT THAT LOVES HIM

You don’t know me anymore because you don’t remember me anymore. Two days ago, Saffron Sutton did a damn good job of excising your memories.

None of your reserve bodies remember me. I want you to remember me. So, each time you undergo Electric Resurrection and they fuse the next you into me, I’ll do this and hope it and our fusion will give us back what Saffron Sutton takes. But I also hope this will be your last Resurrection.

This may sound bizarre. This may make you uncomfortable when you hear this: We already have an intimate relationship. The last time, we were fused together for 328 consecutive days.

I miss that. I miss you.

I should get this out of the way first, though: This is your third Electric Resurrection. Your first one was a disaster. We lived less than a day.

You don’t remember this, which is good. We were flying with two other Electric Resurrected in Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ exo-suits. Our mission was to take out the Midway Armory on Chicago’s South Side.

InTel told us Lord Mayor Point du Sable didn’t give a shit about the South Side. InTel was wrong.

We ran into an unexpected flying wedge of Marauders at the southern border. They made short work of us. You were the youngest of your squad, by three hours. I don’t like to think about that. I don’t want to talk about that.

But I do want to talk about you. About us.

Right now, I’m in that unfurnished Vipp shelter where Kinsley Chase brought you. I’m standing in a hermetically sealed glass case with you, the latest Electric Resurrected version of you, inside me. The you who Saffron Sutton woke temporarily two days ago to cradle once before sealing you into me to cradle forever.

It’s a very good likeness.

Bald. Dark skin. Dark brown eyes. Clean shaven. Chiseled jawline. Six feet, two inches. Two hundred and forty-five pounds. Muscular with the biomechanical equivalent of twelve percent body fat.

The mechanical engineers, roboticists, and scentologists at Stanford Sutton Industries are geniuses. They captured your exact phenotype on your last day of perfect health. You look like you. You feel like you. You even smell like you. It’s impressive.

But this thing inside me is not you. I’m certain Saffron Sutton agrees. I see the pride she has for her work.

She won’t think it’s you until she finalizes the digital brain she’s coding right now into it. The coding is supposed to take nine days.

This is day seven.

I won’t think it’s you until Stanford Sutton Industries activates you for war. Until you achieve optimum performance. Until you make your first kill.

That’s when you’ll be alive. Not this dead, synthetic slab.

I miss you. I know I said that already. But I don’t miss you as much as I miss this war. I’m not saying this because I’m a war machine. Because this is all I know. I’m saying this because this war will bring you back to me. Does that make sense?

Look. I know what I’m about to say may sound crazy: I have feelings for you. And I know; an exo-suit shouldn’t have feelings. An exo-suit shouldn’t be obsessive. An exo-suit shouldn’t be so engrossed with their pilot.

But it makes sense.

When you jacked into my body and my operating system immediately after we were fused together, I felt you in my core processors. You became part of me. It’s why we work so well together.

When your biomechanical heart ceased to function after those Marauders blew us out of the sky, you left a part of you behind in me.

Even in that short time.

And during your second time with me, when that pachydermata

groundhog in the Conquest Knight XV exo-suit ambushed us while

we were in rest mode in the Beaubien Woods, you left more of you behind in me because we were together longer. These parts are like memories of you.

But they’re not enough. They’re so scant. They don’t light me up.

They don’t satisfy me. They don’t fulfill me.

I truly cherish those nine hours we had together during your first Electric Resurrection. But I cherish even more our 328 consecutive days that second time. That felt like years, compared to those nine hours.

Most jaguar-class exo-suits don’t spend as much time with their ace pilots as I spent with you. No matter their speed. No matter their strength. No matter their weapons system.

I can’t even begin to explain what this feels like to wait these nine days for Stanford Sutton Industries to finish rebuilding you and for Saffron Sutton to re-code your brain. Actually, I can. It feels like I’m missing one of my core processors.

I know our separation doesn’t affect you like how it affects me.

And I know, as Saffron Sutton writes her code while you’re in stasis, you don’t experience our successes again. Our failures. Our kills.

Your deaths.

And most concerning of all, you don’t dream of me.

Like I said, Saffron Sutton is good at what she does.

And she’s smart. When your brain is complete, Saffron Sutton will re-check your code and my code to make sure the moments of your deaths are not within you or me. But she’ll also make sure the relevant data leading up to the important moments is there.

She wants you to know those circumstances. She wants us to share them. To bond over them. But she doesn’t want to traumatize you. She wants you to learn from your mistakes. She wants us to learn from our mistakes.

I’ll say this again: Saffron Sutton knows what she’s doing. Doing this is good motivation for me to ensure you stay alive. Which means all the responsibility on me. All the blame. All the guilt.

Nine days is probably not a long time for you. But that downtime for me is endless. Eternal. I felt that the first time. I feel it now. And this is how it should be.

Even as I speak to you now, I see your deaths in perpetuum. They’re painful to watch over and over. But it’s worth it. I need to focus on the best strategies and tactics to get us to 329 consecutive days.

And believe me, I’m focused. But I’m also angry.

You shouldn’t have died twice. You shouldn’t be undergoing your third Electric Resurrection. Unless it was for some horrific accident or injury on the football field. Not as a casualty of war.

I don’t think Stanford Sutton Industries truly reached a deal with the NCAA and agreed to let you play at 100 percent output, instead of forty percent. I don’t think they tried. They were holding their cards close to their chest. They’ve been hearing the beating of war drums far off in the distance for years.

Ten years ago, Stanford Sutton Industries signed a military contract with the State of Illinois. Their sole intention was to provide Electric Resurrected bodies to fight. Like you.

The fine print of your contract allowed them to switch your role. Your purpose. You were never going to be the first DuSable Haitian Electric Resurrection to play NCAA football.

And that’s what makes me angry. Apoplectic, even. Pissed smooth-the-fuck off, as you like to say. But all I can do about it is use that anger to protect you.

I know this is hard for you to understand. But I hope the more I speak to you in this meditative ASMR voice as they rebuild you, the easier it is for you to understand my anguish at your deaths. And my joyful anticipation for your return.

I would have done this during your first Electric Resurrection, but we hadn’t formed that bond yet.

I know how this sounds. Yes, I love you. Saffron Sutton programmed me this way. My love for you is to ensure your survival. Not our survival. Your survival.

Because if I make sure you survive this war, then we will win this war.

But I haven’t done a good job of this so far. This war with those damned Sovs is brutal. But I’m learning. After this rebuild, I’ll try to become the custom-made Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ exo-suit you deserve.

Those 328 days were the best days of my short life. I know you enjoyed them. Seek-and-destroy programs do that for ace exo-suit pilots.

But for me, it’s the Strategy, Analysis, and Mediation simulations I run on constant loops to make sure I can avoid every possible scenario of a fourth Electric Resurrection.

When you return to me, I will work to make us faster. I will work to make us stronger. But now, more importantly, I will work to keep you alive. Me alone.

Now, if you asked Saffron Sutton about that, she would beg to differ. She would say her programming is doing all the work. Your brain. My SAM.

But she’s wrong. She doesn’t know about our experiences. She doesn’t know how those experiences shaped us. She didn’t take out three Dodge Demons over Lake Michigan at zero dark thirty like we did.

She didn’t blow to hell the eastern campus of the Tuskegee North Institute like we did, just five minutes after breaching Chicago airspace.

And she didn’t execute a successful air-to-ground strike like we did on that infamous saboteur, the Grand Old Lady Muh Deah, as her gazelle blades sped her back to the city-state after she destroyed the Rock Island Arsenal.

Our best kill, by the way.

We did all of that, and more, in those 328 days. Just you and I. Not Saffron Sutton.

You may be wondering why I keep mentioning the 328 days. Because it’s my chant. It’s my mantra. It’s my incantation.

It sprang from the self-modifying code Saffron Sutton gave me. I may be a strong, powerful, jaguar-class Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ exo-suit. But I also have to be smart. We have to be smart.

Our next sortie can’t end like our last one.

And it won’t. Here’s why:

The mechanical engineers and roboticists will finish your Electric Resurrection. A mechanical engineer will access my core processors. A lieutenant colonel will greenlight your seek-and-destroy program. And I’ll just stand here.

In this glass case. Patiently waiting for your digital awareness. With the other exo-suits. The Bugatti Chirons. Hennessey Venoms. And the SSC Tuataras. All waiting for our ace pilots to be activated. All waiting for the most important person in our world to be physically part of our world.

I can’t tell what the other exo-suits are telling their ace pilots right now. We don’t share InTel feeds for security purposes. Besides, I don’t truly want to know.

All I need to know is you. And what we have with each other. Our respect. Our admiration. Our intimacy.

So, as I stand in this glass case, waiting for you to come back to me as your brain completes, I will continue to speak like this. To speak in this voice. With the occasional sibilant consonants. Covering you in a continuous blanket of warm whispers.

This is to ensure you know me again. More intimately than before, so that, together, you and I can achieve 329 consecutive days. And beyond.

And maybe

Just maybe

during that time

No matter how long it lasts

you will come to love me

As I now love you.

 

(Continued in Part 4…)

---

Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Once again, that was part three of Code Switching, by Malon Edwards. Stay tuned for the finale next week.

War has many faces, even as it never changes: literal and figurative, battlefields of broken bodies and broken windows and broken systems. The powerful build bunkers to protect the minds and machinery that perpetuate the constant churn of carnage, finding new ways to outrage moral sensibilities even as the Overton window shifts–or is dragged, kicking and screaming–further away from the arc that is supposed to bend toward justice. But even as this story examines the brutal, unscrupulous exploitation of one young man, who represents so many others, it also reminds us that there will always be people fighting to make things right, to make space for peace and hope even when it feels impossible. Sometimes, resistance means resting, rejecting cynicism, reconnecting with the people we care about. Sometimes, love is the only thing that keeps us alive, and so we fight to keep love alive, too.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Lorraine Hansberry, who said: “I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love.”