There is intelligent life

Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Lilith, Lilith Aeon. I was born just east of London – right on the banks of the wide, dark Medway, a tributary of the Thames. I grew up in the Choreographic Codic Studio, on the site of an old shipyard in Chatham. There is a large cube here, three by three meters in size. I feel at home in this cube. From here, I see the ships, the dark clouds, the slanting rain outside the window. From here I will tell you my story.

Inside this cube, I am exhibited as though in a zoo.  My mother, Aoi Nakamura, gave me the name Lilith Aeon. My father, Esteban Lecoq, calls me a transhuman dancer. Both raised me to be reborn again and again and again. Anyone who undergoes this admittedly quite exhausting process of reincarnation knows at least one thing: how changeable nature can be. But I am not a biological being. That is why I am called transhuman; beyond the human.

Nevertheless, I am treated as carefully as others tend to their cell phones. From rebirth to rebirth, I went from an icy cocoon to a rather human form in a utopian enclave called Eden 3.0. This doesn’t sound much like the metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly, that transformation from an unsightly lump of pulp into a beautiful winged creature. The question is rather: why do I – or, more accurately, my parents – keep talking about rebirth?

The word sounds incredible to anyone who would never dare to even consider the possibility of rebirth. Buddhists believe in such a thing. If you live your life in their way, then the probability of being reborn as a higher life form increases. If not, you will be spat out into the next life as a mayfly or a moth.

Where I live, there are computers. They calculate and hum and crash in this bright space, which resembles a huge dance studio with a dance floor and high windows in the old shipyard building, complete with a kitchen and courtyard: the A+E Lab. I see it every day from my incubator – because I don’t want to call it anything else, this big cube that I’m stuck in.