Burnt Out

It’s a shell. It’s a ruin. The shell of our hopes. Where our hopes went to die.

 

Cracks in the concrete. Dripping. What did this?

 

When did it happen? When was it all exploded?

 

It’s blasted. It’s burnt out. No one could live here now.

 

Who fire-bombed this place?

 

I can’t believe we missed it all. Why are we always too late for everything?

Scorched. Blown out. It all went ka-boom down here, and a while back.

 

Like there was a police raid. A counter-terrorism raid. They decided to blow it all out.

 

They did it to depress us. To spite us. They wanted to destroy our hope. Why are they so cruel?

Because they’re cruel. To demonstrate their cruelty. To flex their cruelty muscles, or whatever. They do what they do. They follow their logic.

 

We don’t know it’s them.

Who else could it have been?

The Bug.

Who is the Bug anyway?

There might have been a Bug-based civil war among the paragraduates.

 

Their ruined experiment. It’s a desolation. A mockery.

Their enemy found them.

 

Why would Organisational Management bother with some rogue philosophy types?

 

And what happened to the paragraduates? Did they go deeper underground? Is there any deeper underground? Did they jump into the Abgrund? Into the crack of doom, or whatever?

 

The paragraduates escaped. They go amongst us now. They became surface dwellers again. Infiltrating the university. Taking lowly jobs of various kinds. As janitors. Doing admin. All around us.

They have ways of hiding in plain sight. That they haven’t been destroyed.

What about their eyes? Black in black … won’t that give them away?

Contacts, maybe.

 

Maybe the paragraduates did it because they knew they’d get caught. They wanted to destroy all trace of themselves.

 

They bombed it themselves. To destroy the evidence. The evidence that could indict them.

 

If they could destroy this, couldn’t they blow up the whole campus?

 

I see our future. We can come down here. And – And what? I don’t know. Spend time. Sit things out.

Things will come to find us. And fuck with us. We won’t be left alone. No one’s left alone anymore. It’s the clear and hold op. Crushing internal resistance.

Like anyone could be bothered. Like we could be a fucking danger.

 

I’m disappointed there’s no golem.

Perhaps they took it with them.

We should make our own.

We’ve got our own  Helmut. Our Heideggerian golem. Made out of authentic Geordie boulder clay. With entchllessenehti written on his forehead. Wor golem, as the Geordies would say.