Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down

Robert Plant, Band of Joy

9 Hours to Impact

Mr. and Mrs. Nobelqvist assumed politics would come to their aid, as it always had. It was now almost 8 a.m., four hours before the deadline. They called the director of the FSI personally. Then the chief of police. Both stood behind Muller’s version and denied assistance for the next day.

Heads would roll. They called the president a second time that night, but her personal aide would not put the call through. They offered millions to the most powerful individuals they could holster, both in Switzerland and beyond borders, to high-profile contacts in Europe and Russia. Most calls were not answered, and when they were, the answer was conclusive and cold: It’s out of my hands.

Most of us assume that, when all hell breaks loose, something, somewhere, some governmental agency or country or somebody, will care. It will be there to, somehow and at the edge of the moment, save the day. Save us. That the armored cavalry is on its way. But this is not how politics works, it never has been. Humans don’t just rustle up their sleeves and go all-in in the assistance of those in need. Each of us, each day, naively hopes that if our country was to be invaded, sieged, endangered, attacked, that someone or something out there, wearing a cape or gathering an army or a special secret service crew, would have our back. Well, it just isn’t the case, and it never was.

Tribes of Homo sapiens have wreacked genocide on neighboring tribes in a blink of an eye, while neighboring populations sat passively, watching in dismay. 10 000 years ago, savage indifference reined the lands. Nowadays, thousands of invasions and wars later, in our precious modern, sophisticated 21st century, communities are massacred, wiped off the face of the Earth while the world’s greatest military organizations idly hold back their troops and fleets. Not out of carelessness, but out of strategic, methodical, economic and political calculation. It’s a paradox glimpsing the news channels every night: the politicians we elect to protect our communities, are the same humans who make immoral decisions. Human decisions. Political decisions. Tragic decisions.

Tragedy. The everlasting infinite game of the universe. And, “The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”

We may choose to scroll down our devices or read our books, in the sun or by the fireplace, alone or cuddled up against a loved one. Yet we each know all too well, deep down in the darkest dungeons of our beings, just how truly dangerous and devilish the world is, can be, or will be. We count each passing year as a miracle. Will I make it to the end of my life without the world entering the Dark Ages again? Will I die before World War III? Will my beautiful technological children and I make it? What about my innocent young grandchildren and their children? Will we all make it? Do I care? Should I care? How? Who for? Why?

We do not know that which we cannot know, and we prefer it that way. Blissful ignorance, willful blindness, is the delusional cure for the inevitability of all. The farther out one stretches in time, the more evident it is. Whether the worst of all happens in this century, the next, or some other century further down the trail of time, a new Dark Age, drowned in radioactive rubble, is undeniable. Not if, but when. Not why, how. Not today, tomorrow.

Tomorrow Jonas and Berta will find the answers to all these questions, in just under 12 seconds. World wars, like forest fires, never start all over the place. They ignite in some small, tiny, irrelevant corner of the planet where bears are hunted, bees extinct, politics alive and well.

Or, maybe not.

What the Nobelqvists did not know, they could not know. Neither could Muller, the FSI Director, the president of Switzerland or any one of the 817 employees of Bern DynamiteX that frosty, frozen morning. Each begrudgingly woke up, hopped into the shower, ate maybe a banana on their commute to take their kids to school, heading for the ten-story building to sit behind their desk and make the world go around yet another day. What they did not know, they could not know was that today, yesterday’s tomorrow, would be their last day. At headquarters, the TSBM was about to change description. In just 12 seconds, it would migrate from The Slaughter Bot Machine to TSBM: Trinitrotoluene Slaughtered Building Mayhem. Their kingdom would come tumbling down. Jesus’s own voice would be heard.

Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pivotal contribution to quantum theory and quantum mechanics. He lived his annus mirabilis, his most extraordinarily creative year of scientific discovery, in Bern, in 1904. This where and when spacetime was cosmically speaking, precisely where the great physicist completely revolutionized our understanding of space and time, developing his General Theory of Relativity. 1904, coincidentally, was also the year the last bear in Switzerland was shot dead. Every single bear, gone.

The fundamental interaction of gravitation as a result of the local spacetime curvature being curved by mass and energy and momentum. The Einstein field equations determine the metric tensor of spacetime for a given arrangement of stress–energy, in the spacetime. The inertial trajectories of particles and radiation in the resulting geometry, reducing to Newton's law of gravitation, where the gravitational field is weak, and velocities are much less than the speed of light. The exact solutions can only be found under simplifying assumptions such as symmetry. Special classes are most often studied as they model many gravitational phenomena, such as rotating black holes and the expanding universe. These equations are used to study phenomena such as gravitational waves.

On the 20th of December 2018, precisely at noon as Eva delivered her speech at the World Summit, Mr. and Mrs. Nobelqvist would send BertaX, their most sophisticated autonomous robot, to the fire-escape emergency exit on level -3 of the Bern DynamiteX Headquarters. As their entire staff worked passionately on their projects, preparing for lunch and gossip, the Nobelqvists sat in their penthouse office overlooking the Swiss mountains of the Bernese Alps, and prayed. Absorbed by the images on the array of screens streaming from the BertaX- cam, they held each other’s hand. The robot grew cautiously closer to the door, large luggage bags attached to its rear. The bags had exactly sixty-six thousand 1000-Swiss-Franc notes inside. Owning a bank makes sudden cash withdrawal slightly faster than for the rest of us, common folk. The moment the bot reached the door handle and clutched it open, a click was heard.

A single click. A tiny hint of a sound, no louder than that of a computer mouse button, that ignited two tons of RDX and TNT, a specialized explosive material known as Trinitrotoluene. A sudden outward high-velocity pressure, at 84,368 kilogram-force per square centimeter, expanded at the speed of 8,230 meters per second, catapulting a powerful shockwave blasting and busting through the building’s concrete columns at supersonic speed. Shattering them into tiny chunks. Splitting steel structures into slices, Disintegrating whatever was inside and around their kingdom, Bern DynamiteX HQ.

It's impressively difficult to blow a building up.

Rubble. Not poisonous, radioactive contaminated rubble, but rubble nonetheless. A hill of concrete, steel, glass, machines, computers, legs, arms, fingers, blood, wood, cables, pipes, microchips, plastic, paper, keyboard keys, sliding-chair-wheels and severed heads comprised the heap of agglomerated, catastrophic deadliness. If any new religion out there is still coming up with their ideal image of hell, they could use ground zero of Bern DynamiteX Headquarters as their divine inspiration. Mayhem.

Chaos. Catastrophe. Cataclysm. Calamity. Havoc. Bedlam. Pandemonium. Madness. Wreckage. Anarchy. Annihilation. Obliteration. Dreadful deluge. Drastic destruction. Disarrayed devastation. Disastrous desolation. The Devil’s deed. Satan’s signature. All hell let loose. Trinitrotoluene. Slaughtered. Building. Mayhem.

Tragedy follows the same laws of physics as Comedy. Encompassed in time, space, gravity and chaos, both alternate into existence. Tragedy is what humans call bad luck. Comedy, we call good luck. Both have been around longer than the Big Bang itself.

Today’s bang was no different.

Professor Albert Einstein was asked by friends, at a dinner party, what new weapons could be employed in World War III. Appalled at the implications, he shook his head and after several minutes of meditation, said:

• - I don’t know what weapons might be used in World War III. But there is no doubt what weapons will be used in World War IV.

• - And what are those? – a guest asked.

• - Stones and spears – the father of the Atomic Bomb, Albert Einstein, Albert OneStone, prophetically replied.

E = mc2