THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: LAST CALL (Patreon)

When I first read the books and picked them apart for the group, I was unmoved. I was young and idealistic. I thought I would make my mark. I thought the things we were doing (or more importantly, preventing others from doing) would shape the world. I didn't fully realize then what I had worked on. I didn't know what it really meant. That was 35 years ago.

I know now.

First, the hard facts. We're not going anywhere...permanently. Oh sure, we'll visit the moon again and probably Mars, but no one is going to be living there. How do I know? Radiation. The Apollo astronauts were outside the electromagnetic protection of the Earth for a day or two, maybe, and even then — even shielded — they all seem to die of strange damage to the heart from the high energy radiation in space. When they closed their eyes they'd see flashes behind their eyelids. This was high energy particles colliding with portions of their brain. And this, this was a day, two days outside the safety of Earth's electromagnetic field at most.

Try 18 months to Mars. And then there's low gravity and gamma radiation day in and day out on that dead planet. How's that for human pregnancy? We have absolutely zero idea. It takes hundreds of people to keep a single person alive on the International Space Station 248 miles up. Now try to keep someone alive 20 light minutes away.

Yeah, we're going nowhere. If it ends here, we end with it. And it's looking like it's ending. Sure it is. It'd be really hard to pretend it wasn't. Don't you just want to stop pretending? Sure you do. It's tiring putting on that face. It's exhausting playing pretend with the world. My dad used to say this to me: on a long enough timeline, things never work out.

Closed energy systems rise, plateau and collapse. That's just what they do. We're a closed energy system and we've plateaued. There is no stable state possible. We're on the downslope; the point where it spills out into chaos. The wobbling of the tracking line, the movement as we pretend to try to find some unachievable equilibrium? That's what we call 'history'.

Ever look around and think boy, everything seems so much more unhinged than it used to be? Well, it isn't just you. World leaders invading random countries. People throwing airline emergency doors open mid-flight. People creating any excuse to not only not help, but to actively harm. People clutching at manufactured stupidity like it was a security blanket. It's all happening, more and more everyday. It's all real. That feeling. It's in us all. No one is free of it. It moves us.

It is us.

And it's not history. Oh fascism is on the rise again, when will we learn! No. It's not that. I mean it is that but it's also more than that. It's primal. It's built in. The system directs itself and causes the pieces of the system to unconsciously comply with the madness. And that's us. The pieces. And what directs us? God? Order? Entropy? All of these things? Can we even give something outside of ourselves like that a name?

Does it even matter?

The books were about that. But more, the manifesto in it had a lot to say about Gods and demons and magic and the concepts of reality. But I wasn't being paid for that. It was only later...only now that I started to really see it. We're on the downslope and we're speeding up and we can't change it, because this is how time here is structured.

People talk about global warming, politics, society, war and disorder as if they are all different things; but they're not. They're one mass, pulling in different directions. One wave function cresting and collapsing like some great comber. One final ruinous crash of chaos from what was once intersticed minds struggling for greater order smashed into nothingness. But those minds only worked together to crest that wave. They only built things so that chaos could tear them down. That's it. That was the plan.

The books said a lot about the ruin. About what comes next. Though they didn't cover anything really up until 2025 in any detail.

Yeah. The books were from the future.

We think.

What kind of security clearance did I need to look at something like that? Nothing I say is going to make you believe me, really, and I'm not here to convince you, and of course they'd never let a thing like that out of the lab, so no, I don't have a copy. But I remember what it said, there, in the end.

I remember the author wrote in an unsteady hand that when the real end came it was just a surrender. The last surrender. People just stopped caring. They each went off on their own and fulfilled their strange needs, no matter how hideous. And the world followed that ruin. As it was written small, so it was written large. People surrendered and countries fell. Flags burned. People stopped cooperating. People stopped thinking.  

It's already begun.

In the end, the author said, mankind would be beyond good and evil. Free. The ultimate freedom. Free to revel in ruin. To abase themselves to the wave. To collapse into a perfect and implacable chaos that would undo every bit of order our species had ever wrought. And we would like it because, in the end, it was what we had been made to do. It was our function. To explode at the end of the ordered wave. To bleed and starve and kill and die.

To be here now, at the end of history and to look about and see the madness in everyone else's eyes and to know, to know that you look exactly, precisely the same...it's a gift. It's last call. Everyone drink up.