The Consciousness of Politics

Luis Balde was talking to himself again, as if something inside him were listening.

People once believed that conservative, centrist, and liberal had permanent meanings.

They never did.

As time passes, humanity overcomes the struggles of one generation only to discover the questions of another. Political identities change because the world they are trying to describe changes.

When android bodies became common, people no longer cared so much whether someone was a drag queen, transgender, gay, straight, or something without an old name. LGBTQ people did not cease to exist. The questions surrounding them simply stopped defining the political battlefield.

Gender itself became different.

Pleasure took new forms. Reproduction could happen at the cellular level. Some people lived in bodies that were mechanical below the waist. Others possessed almost no biological body at all, only a living brain carried inside a machine.

Then came the war.

For the first time, entire cities contained fewer than a thousand human beings. Other cities became ash.

Nature ate the ash.

Plants grew through bedrooms, highways, churches, laboratories. Strange new species appeared where civilization had disappeared.

Then came the Continuation of Consciousness, and with it came new questions.

Now many conservatives believed biological consciousness should remain at the center of government, power, systems, and spiritual authority.

Many liberals moved toward something radically different: the rights of consciousness itself.

Was a consciousness still entitled to human rights when there was nothing human left about its body?

Politics once again revolved around the oldest questions:

Who has rights?

Who holds power?

Who controls whom?

And perhaps the oldest question of all:

Who possesses a soul?

Luis smiled at the irony.

Many conservatives had once seemed consumed by anger and fire. Now many were consumed by something deeper a desperate thirst to understand the reality in which they had awakened.

And liberals?

Many had spent centuries arguing about the rights of consciousness…

long before humanity realized consciousness could exist without them.