Blog 52-Convergence

Convergence, Grito Day.
I lay in my narrow bed in my Casita. Machi erupted into my room and woke me from a deep sleep in which I had been dreaming I was in a circle of women, sobbing. I touched my face. It was wet. "Llego la hora! The time is now. Zero One signalled. All over planet earth." He waved his phone in my face.
I stared at an image he'd frozen from the livestream, taken from Hillside, high above, of hundreds of pods swarming, swarming, the place where the camera zoomed and happened to capture our pod (our original one and now Patria, Anacaona, Lagarto, Robles, el Guardia Franz, Tanama, Elba Luz, Guille with us. I recognized even Adela, Noel, Jimmy, Danny, Capitan Ojeda...There was Julia's Liani! Even Julia's daughter Liani had come for the convergence.

I looked at Liani now, snuggled asleep barely able to fit alongside Julia in the narrow cot. I stared at the image on Machi's phone, the moment when we joined the myriad of pods in the swarm, let ourselves be embraced by Todos.
"Now look at this."
Images of swarms all over the world flooded his tiny screen...The time of the convergence had arrived in the far reaches of our planet, all of us, todos...I sat on my little bed alongside Julia and Liani listening to their even breath and tried to breathe through the surging of my sushumna, the galloping in my windpipe, the force of terror and joy bursting in me, out of me...Breathe, breathe, breathe and watch...I saw the reeling in my mind...All of the people that mattered, those beside me now and those who were not...I saw them converge...Soli, Lucha..those I loved and those I did not love and those I hated...It didn't matter now.
If hell had been a bunch of rich people with armies, then heaven, the rapture, was all of us, todos, putting down arms. This was the moment when we all woke up, when we all stepped outside pseudoreality, when we went from unreal to real, from darkness to light, when we all, todos, ceased to comply...that moment was now...
Machi roused us all.
"Vamos!"
The day you lived for all your life and half imagined would never come, that you sometimes dared to hope for in order to keep fighting, except that the hope was constantly eroded, it resorbed into the bruised core of oppression that you and myriads constantly fought against, ...This day was captured on the livestream so that no matter how it came out, what happened, no matter if the empire had another move, even after this day when I could see on livestream all of their troops and officers crossing the river, reclaiming their place among Todos, this could not be turned back.
We surged on. We reached the unelectrified perimeter of the Base, the metal frayed in many places. We joined hundreds and trampled the steel mesh where a huge expanse of the wall had fallen.
Our swarm breached the Camp...
This was the day when all over the planet, and the live stream showed this, nation by nation, city by city, block by block, pod by pod, all work stopped, all commerce, all traffic. Each pod, joined by all pods, erupted into the street..Here in Palenque and on the Base Guatas and guardias put down their arms. At last dreams of a general strike came true...
We erupted. Machi, Maceo, shouted, "We withhold Consent, we claim our freedom because we are free... Your enforcers now know they are todos. You cannot enforce your terror. Your time has come to also be todos, be your own pod, or climb into your spaceships...We reclaim planet earth..."
TODOS, TODOS
Everywhere the scene replayed
Prisoners walked free, guards set down their arms
..
We were neither the first pod to reach the Camp, nor the last. I learned to breathe, overcame my claustrophobia in the midst of hundreds of human pods swarming. Would I ever find Ori in this mass?
I had faith. I found faith. Machi stayed beside me, and Patria... We reached a compound of small wooden huts. Machi pulled on me and yelled above the thrum of voices and drumming. "We've breached the Camp within the Camp." He pointed to the huts. "Is this is all there is to it?"
Patria ran ahead of us, toward the tall, dark man with a long black beard who jumped off the narrow porch and ran toward us. "Tomas, Tomas." Mother and Son ran into each other's arms. We joined their joyous embrace, Machi and I, their triumphant ululations. Tomas knew where the recovering hunger strikers were held, a makeshift infirmary built for them. He led us as there. We pushed through the rejoicing masses, dancing, singing, embracing.

It was Ori who found us.
I felt his presence before I saw him standing beside Machi. He appeared.
We embraced and I felt his back, his arms, his chest. "You have some muscle on your limbs, some flesh on your face. You're almost Ori." I stroked his face, oddly clean shaven. He spoke into my ear. "This moment we had barely been able to imagine, is at last the present. Que te parece, the empire began in time. It took many of us with it as it fell. But it began and it ended. And I, we, todos, are the lucky ones who got to make it happen and live to see it. Quien lo hubiera dicho?"
We held each other, heart to heart, our heartbeats one with the triumphant drumming.