Leaving,
capital L, a euphemism for suicide — “the new meaning of life required a new word for death” (a vestige of pious circumlocution?): “there will always be” those who choose to just quit, to escape the samsara of deep sleep rebirths, to break the cycle and never rewind: to “make this time the last.” Despite its bland visuality (and the cringeful initial cap), the euphemistic usage smacks of bodiless Minds' “subdued culture of death”: a naturally dissoluble Mind would often leave it ambiguous (“death is too big a word”) whether she’s completely gone, hibernating, or simply pursuing different joys under a different name. ■ A more literal interpretation of the “capital-L” is “puncturing the bubble” of Earth life — leaving behind, with your past, the whole of the planet and its civilized cosmos. With cosmic leap, this means aiming for infinity, with a very low (per most calculations, strictly zero) probability of emerging within Earth’s observable radius; as Leaving ought to be, that is truly forever: an infinity leap is infinitely unreturnable. With so many ways for the multiverse to be non-flat, you may well pop up into a different physics — possibly lethal; even if you’re lucky to open your eyes to a scattering of lights in a black void, don’t expect to recognize any. ■ People have been Leaving the planet — “riding the sunwinds” — long before the cosmic leap was thought possible; not all of them were ever found, alive or at all. (Even more common was blasting off one’s bodily remains after a comfortable home death: there’s a “sepulchral bubble” of old funerary ships and celestial choreographies.) A leaping spaceship makes it more of an adventure: if only you survive the first leap, you can do it again and again (nothing to lose by now) until you detect a habitable body reachable by coasting; assuming our local matter density, you should be able to get on a planet within a thousand years of meandering — and a space Leaver with an arf seed can (in theory: Crusoe index) survive indefinitely. Multiverse-faring Leavers — loners, families, kingdoms — may end up our civilization’s most lasting export: what better pretext to Leave than a chance to get — and in a sufficiently long term, rule? — a universe of your own.