I met you on the ice between the islands.

We laid herbs

on your parents' graves.

You said, "light & dark are not so far apart,

masc & femme,

predator & prey.

I've been kicked out and shunned

by my transphobic parents,

despite that, I feel blessed."

We look at the stars for a while

and hold hands in

the cold light.

My avatar begins to shimmer

& become transparent--

a timer somewhere ticks away its alpha value.

We spend the last few minutes of nighttime

swapping

bodies.

When someone comes, the space knows.

it flashes blindingly white--

heat without touch.

When someone comes,

the ground churns

and the material casing of their avatar explodes.

Their bones become reflective,

& break

into fragments.

In the end,

I laid underneath

your whirling body parts.

I laid in the water between

the islands

recording a video from my POV.

Later on,

outside the headset,

schools of fish spawned in the lake.

The next day, I meet you by the roller rink

and we walked side by side

for a long time, not talking.

One of your former lovers passed by,

then one of mine.

We each get a seat at Viridian and order a drink.

I say, "Did I ever tell you about that one time

right in the middle of covid,

when I used a robot to inspect the ocean floor?"

+++

Sometimes, I see the maleness

of the angle of your jawbone

align with a vanishing point on the horizon.

Other times, the dark eyeliner

you wear

accentuates your feminity.

And, further still,

in the best moments,

I see both genders in you at once.

Yesterday, I tried to

explain my own gender

to a friend.

I said, "Not only am I not male, or female,

but my gender is also

wrapped up with machines, & ecosystems."

e.g. I once had this dream of fucking the landscape,

literally fucking a tree, & when I came

flowers burst everywhere and scattered pollen on the wind.

Other times, I think

the only sex worth having

is sex in VR.

I'll often make an avatar

with hundreds of floating external drones

flocking close to it like a school of fish.

I'll give you one of these avatars too,

and then we will just pass our swarms

through each other.

I feel like an astronaut of gender,

dangling in the abyss,

but still connected to the rest of the human race by a thin cord.

If they reeled me back into the shuttle, I would die,

but I don't want to fall too far out

into the earth's gravity well, either.

So I float on this spacewalk

amongst stars flickering and flickering

between genders like a broken hologram.

I call you up, "Hey, let's go get something to eat."

You drive over and pick me up.

"Don't you think we should go to the Hayward zen garden first?" you ask.

We walk in between the pavilions,

past a grave and out onto a bridge

where red and gold koi slide under us.

You ask, "What's the biggest difference

between life

and artificial life?"

+++

I logged into Ghost Club in VRChat

but you weren't there--

virtual rain pelted the virtual concrete.

Mist surrounded me--

Out in the night, red lights blinked

on the surrounding skyscrapers.

I walk into a courtyard in a brutalist building

and the virtual rain stops

because it's hitting the virtual roof.

I walk up to the elevator and click the panel,

enter and rise up to the seventh floor,

then step off.

I walk the path around the central atrium

until I reach a doorway with loud

music.

I push open the door,

and drift

into the light.

I'm pummelled by

a kind of techno-industrial admixture

filled with harsh clangs and hard bass.

The lights are also intense--

across 9 virtual screens they're streaming

a sequence of rapidly shifting red blips.

The room is very small

and we're tightly packed together

but the eyes of everyone's avatars glow.

I hear every language,

but also a lot of Japanese

and a lot of English.

Theres a woman floating in the air

Wearing a fox mask

With glowing bands around her ankles.

Shes tapping her foot to the music

and nodding her head and flicking her fingers--

hand tracking and full body tracking, probably.

I'm here amongst my people--

a whole gathering

of internet orphans.

There's [redacted], there's [redacted],

and [redacted], but where are you?

If this is the nightworld, and the nightworld

connects to the underworld through vice,

what vice here is the portal to the underworld?

+++

Recently, I spent a long day

walking around in Cryptovoxels,

which is a VR world where you can buy parcels of land with Bitcoin.

I saw a statue of an enormous man

made with multicolored bricks

with a hole in his chest the size of a car.

In another part of the map,

I saw a beating heart

thumping wildly.

What does it mean

when the dimensions of a simulation

can be teased apart?

When I can add length, width, height, time,

but also a server

that produces a coordinated social reality?

Or,

smart contracts that

produce artificial scarcity?

When the game engine

becomes the main artistic instrument

doesn't reality become what's at stake?

I watch the grass

sway in the homeworld of SteamVR

and a hawk passes overhead.

I watch the grass

sway by the lake

and a hawk passes overhead.

In VR, the body is modular,

I can add an arm and hand

or I can remove it.

I'd like a body

like that

outside the headset.

I'd like wings, multiple sex organs,

and I'd like to be able to sense

the direction of the wind from miles off, or the fluctuations in twitter trends.

I'd like to find a completely

new and completely different

way to have sex with you.

I'd like to have sex in the water,

in the fire,

in the air.

Can we infinitely construct and deconstruct ourselves

when we're fucking, in this world, and the other,

guided and aided perhaps by hundreds and thousands of other intelligences?