Liber8 — Ariel Rose Cooper

an excerpt of Liber8 is provided below. Read the full story published by Cantine Press here.

The price of the Park went up with the new year. Seems like everyone included a “fresh air walk” in their new year's resolutions. Not sure I’ll be able to afford going once a week, but I went yesterday and almost cried. It felt so good. The smoke has been so thick that Joan and I stayed indoors most of last week and the filters in our apartment already need to be changed. I feel the depression creeping in, but I know there is a way through. There must be.

It’s a new year. 2032. I’m recommitting, access to the Park be damned. Every act helps, every strategy, I’ll take it. Joan and I are meditating every morning, working out, and then showing up for the real work. Liber8 got another round of funding so hopefully we’ll be able to expand our mutual aid network for climate refugees down South. I’m leading go-live for the service sites and will have to go down in-person at the end of the year. Another big wave of fires burned Arizona to a crisp. I remember it as a desert. How does a desert burn? Not sure I want to see.

Joan met Paul at the Park. I’m a little wary, but he seems rad. He works at a bioengineering lab up in Berkeley where they’re trying to gene-edit humans’ hydrogen-retention capacity in order to decrease our reliance on water. Smart shit. He came over and showed us a huge variety of nootropics — lion’s mane, creatine, piracetam, L-theanine — to, in his words, “optimize brain function and enhance mood.” As if that's not what we’re all looking for. I would pay him whatever price he wanted but he’s contributing them as a donation to Liber8, or more so to Joan now that they are sleeping together. I don’t care, as long as he is hooking us up. He brought over all the supplements in little pill boxes with a hand-written catalog of benefits, all the potential side-effects, and best dosing practices spelled out in clean capital letters. He was quiet and methodical as he walked us through the various combinations we could take. We need that exacting energy when it comes to this messy world, so I wouldn’t mind if Joan keeps him around.

A heavy fire hit the North and the smoke has been horrible all week. We’ve been ordered to shelter in place. I could see the sun burning smokey orange through the window today and it made me nauseous with impending doom. I added an extra 10 minutes to my morning meditation and asked Joan what she and Paul were doing to cope, hoping he had revealed another “life-enhancer” to her while I was busy staring at my screens. Apparently, his current hack for the climate stress is sex — copious amounts of it with my sweet Joan. She came home sweaty and exhausted yesterday morning, and I couldn’t help but be jealous. She had this calm floating look on her face, like every muscle in her body had given its all, and just for a moment, that was enough.

I can’t stay too envious for long. I’m leaning heavily on Paul’s nootropics to get through work. We had to activate all the Liber8 sites across Portland and Seattle to support the fires and I got pulled away from my deployment efforts down south. Putting out fires all damn day, from this tiny-ass corner of our apartment. The metrics show that over $2 million was donated, enough to support 12,682 climate refugees with the resources to temporarily relocate if we stick to our budgets and can find the supplies. I’ve been coordinating with the community-based organizations who are helping us with distribution and I oscillate between utter exhaustion and relentless optimism, one eye glued to the Liber8 dashboards, meticulously tallying every donated dollar, and one eye on the inevitable next disaster. Will we be able to make it? I hate that the numbers keep me going but they do. From here they’re all I can see, just little boxes on a screen, blinking code. I try to imagine each family forced to leave everything, and then finding at least a glimmer of hope through a Liber8 distribution site. And they are the lucky ones. The others are left in ash. I have to keep imagining them so all this shit is worth it.

We treated ourselves to an all-day Park day on Sunday and I believe in the world again. I don’t care what they’re filtering the air with, I feel fucking amazing in that place. The hazy blue of the ceiling sky could have fooled even the toughest cynic on Sunday, and we put it to good use. Paul brought the latest CRISPR treats — they’ve found a way to snip out the part of a bee’s genome that allows it to see the ultraviolet spectrum. “It’s the best hallucinogen out there,” he tells us. “You get to see how each plant was designed from the perspective of who it's ultimately trying to attract — its pollinator.” He looks at Joan, she giggles and they pull each other close for what is clearly a delicious kiss. I grab whatever it is that he’s giving us and slump to the ground, relieved to escape myself for just a moment. Let me be the bee. Soon enough the world explodes with ultraviolet light and I can see the hidden architecture of plants, three dimensional with flashes of purple and blue I never knew existed. We crawl over to the carefully curated rose garden and stare longingly into a kaleidoscope of petals, the visceral beauty and fragrance of each bloom begging us to taste its sweet nectar. I reach for Joan’s hand and we smile at each other through silent tears of wonder, her brown eyes shining with hints of green. Our tender moment of awe turns into a full body fit of laughter as we catch sight of Paul’s face completely buried in a rose. We roll to the ground, clutching our sides, and laugh until we cry again. I soak up every second, forgetting for a moment that we are on borrowed time.

read the rest of the story here.