chaff

We are sorely lacking, I think, the right word for a kind of story whose purpose is not tragedy, lament, pessimism, criticism, not even a warning, cautionary tale, parable, whatever, no, but, something more like a clarity. Not a prophecy, which looks forward, but a vision of a whole equation.

I no longer set the tone of things
in this crevasse between to seem and be.
And no one came requesting an illusion.
We all had seen through what there was to see.

...That being said, this thing is pretty grim. I can't say if it will be helpful to any given person, so please be careful with whether or not you want to dive into it. And that's not meant as a cheap lure—I'm not trying to front-load this blog post with unnecessary gravitas or a brag of stomaching it. I mean this: Don't read/watch this thing if you're near the edge.

Aniara is an epic science fiction poem by Harry Martinson, written out in 103 cantos in Swedish between 1953 and 1956. It tells of an Earth–Mars colony ship, the Aniara, carrying 8,000 people who become lost at sea, in a manner of speaking, in space for many years, drifting off hopelessly into the void and attempting to reckon with the ordeal and its symbolic meaning at the finale of a ruined Earth.

or

The day before, there had been an update to the knowledgebase. A redundant frontal core, extracted and trained separately for weeks on new data from a rediscovered population, was reconnected with the primary. Integration continued through the night. When the system was back online, finally, in the glowing AM hours of a Thursday in May, the lone researcher on duty downed a ceremonial last swig of tepid coffee and entered the first of the standard prompts: “Request diagnostic report on solving chess.” Some time elapsed—much longer than usual—before the machine gave a response.

SOLVED: BLACK
10 084 718 004 934 623 MOVES 

The researcher hurried to wake the others and found that they were already up, awakened by a thunderous overture of vibrations accompanying the first diagnostic. They stood gazing out through the facility windows with hands clasped over their ears, watching a mandala of interference patterns rippling for miles across the surface of the ocean, emanating from the nearby island of the machine and stretching out beyond sight, past a ring of distant patrol boats, lost into the gleam of the rising sun on the mirror of the water. Could the waves reach the horizon? It was unclear. Surging, draconic heralds of steam rose through twilight off the rocky facility shoreline, directly below, where sea crashed against the blazing concrete of the station and exploded into vapor.