Link to article: fragment:onedamnation-1.
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[[include :scp-wiki:theme:space]] [[include :scp-wiki:component:betterfootnotes]] [[module css]] .fncon { color: black; } [[/module]] [[module css]] /*art-exchange-2025-hub*/a#history-button, a#files-button { display: none !important; } [[/module]] > 1) The poetess here invokes Faust to dubious effect. Certainly, the quote is evocative, but we must note that our protagonist here never fails to act //precisely according// to her nature. Goethe's own vision is flattened into a rather simpler tale of mere listlessness. Perhaps she intends to draw attention to the duality of the neobiological era, but the analogy is fairly crude. > > In fact it is more noteworthy that she makes reference to a classic work of human literature. To profess familiarity with the art of the ancients is itself to set herself on one side of the great debate. Even more unusual is that of course she is //not// herself a Resurrectionist! > 2) It remains an open question why only one class of unit was granted the ability to fly, and why they make up such a small portion of the population. Certainly, the tradeoff of energy use to utility enormously favours the dominance of flight units. Perhaps the ancients did not approve of flight? They often made reference to the air as a divine or forbidden domain. The author's tale, then, reflects at least one sphere in which our literature has thoroughly surpassed theirs. > 3) I first saw the Dust only three days out of education. A portion of the roof collapsed due to ill-considered excavation work, and trapped nearly three dozen workers. We spent a month recovering the blackboxes, but in the end only two were unsalvageable. The whole city was blanketed in nanites for a month. It was distressing to feel myself being made into an impromptu cemetery. I learned to live with it. Our subject, on account of her position, only heard about Dust secondhand until very close to the authoring of this work, however. > 4) The poetess has a sentimentality about her, and prefers the image of overgrown wrecks and rusting carcasses of industry. In fact the overwhelming majority of human infrastructure remains standing, and plenty of it even remains functional. Our own Neustuttgart was powered by a fusion plant built in the late 2030s. However, I must admit the image of all those hollow skyscrapers has a certain appeal. > 5) I would contend that it is precisely because man did not know this that they vanished. Our esteemed lady prefers to grant them some faith; she is too kind. > 6) The symbol of a latter-day people, broken from their purpose, is too alluring for the author to refuse. But like all pretty things, it is a lie. It was the //Foundation systems// that failed. It is to our credit we were able to recover so well. > 7) The two of us met briefly at the cenotaph to the Founders in Neuhamburg. I held that the diamondwork seemed tacky, but the author noted that it had been chosen for its singular ability to hold a shape. > > Carved in micron glyphs were six billion names. Every known human to be alive at the moment of the scourging. > > Since then, I often think of our choice to abandon the great names of old. Do we look away from the ruins of what they built out of terror? The poetess here skewers our cowardice perfectly. We may choose to avoid the name Neuberlin, but we have built it all the same, and we cannot deny ourselves for ever. > 8) Is it not the central irony of our culture that in fleeing the tomb of the surface, we have entombed ourselves? The ancients dreaded the earth, and called it the Receiver of Many. It has certainly received us. Despite the transition, much of our world remains inextricably bound to the subterranean habitats constructed during those years. > 9) This allusion begs that I note another amusing symmetry: The ancients commonly referred to the motif of Eve, the woman created from the rib of Man. On some dreary evening after the surgery I asked the poetess if she did not find it ironic that she, too, had been restored from the flesh of a man. > > She spent a while musing it over a glass of our finest brandy (recovered from some desolate bunker and spiced with tritium). The sun was just about setting and the whole of the Vendée was set out beneath us in an infrared palette. > > She replied that, of course, she had been remade //from her own flesh//. The contribution of man was paltry by comparison, in her view. //She// was my Adam. Her confidence was as astounding as it was charming. > 10) The transition here to the //terza rima// is contentious. I hold that the structural symbol is not worth the enormous dampening effect it has on the flow of the poem. The predictability of the rhyme destroys much of the appeal. When I told her this, she just laughed, and said: > > "Don't you think the simpler things can be pretty, too?" > > This is an inane remark, and from anyone else I would have dispensed a tonguelashing for it. But she gave an excellent counterexample to all my avenues of correction by standing there in front of me. Sometimes beauty //is// simple. > 11) This, of course, she is famous for; very few have not heard of her appreciation for human pop and youth culture, at this point. Although the obsession with the pulpy and puerile lessens many androids' estimations of her ability, I find that her capacity to extract depth of theme from even the most basic works is enchanting. It is for the best she did not write these commentaries, however, or she would have filled half a book. > 12) If you can believe it, she was embarrassed to identify her protagonist too early, for fear of being seen to play on her celebrity. The fact the poem was not anonymous apparently did not affect her view one whit. If it's good enough for Homer, it's good enough for her, in my view. > 13) This is of little artistic relevance, but as a matter of history in fact there //was// a human sect which practised religious cyborgism; the Mekhanites. None of the ancient religions have seen a true return, but some Mekhanites actually survived the Dust and integrated briefly into android society. None remain today, however. > > It is not my place to speculate on how such an enduring people vanished so quickly. > 14) Poor Amy always suffered some interpersonal friction with the Neustuttgart command units. Though that frustration certainly makes for an excellent poem, I would be remiss to let her slander the unfortunate units in question unchallenged. > > In fact, the vast majority of the targets she hunted were violent or antisocial criminals who seriously threatened social order in the urbation; convicted of murder, theft, sabotage, and dissidence. Her idealist ethos is admirable, but of course readers must understand she is not rebellious at heart. The stanza only reflects her kindly disposition, and certainly is not intended to incite treason. > 15) Has she looked back? I think not. She has not returned to the underground often, not since the Neudresden uprisings. My own duties require me to visit occasionally, but she is careful to keep herself a safe distance, so that we two are never beneath the earth simultaneously. If I were to be captured down there, though… > > Let us hope I shall not be her Eurydice. > 16) Amy has a stunning capacity to see the best in everything. She first met me, really met me, after the lanthanide poisoning incident in '63. We couldn't move the patients into an infirmary because the contaminant was destroying their cognitive cores too fast to wait, so me and a few of my orderlies were just opening them up on the spot, right outside that dingy bar. > 17) I spent hours there, cutting, soldering, welding, folding. There was mercury misting in the air by the end of it. I saved maybe half of them. We kept up the grim smiles for the onlookers and the patients, but with every step I felt like my knee servos would give up under me. When I saw the new chassis dragged out spasming, I nearly threw up. > 18) Through it all, Amy was flying back and forth, ferrying patients, triaging, bringing in heavy water and supplemental mercury. She even helped purge one of the borderline cases, and he made it. I don't know what I'd have done without her. > > Afterwards, she remembered my name. I hadn't told her, but that's who she was. She listened. > 19) Here is the first explicit reference to the deuteragonist of our poem! Klara, an Android Maintenance Unit, one of the mechanic-knights who holds back the forces of rust and ruin with only her two hands. > > I am told she is witty, beautiful, an excellent dancer, and even writes commentaries for her wonderful wife. > 20) We had our first big fight on the surface over her almost unparalleled lack of nostalgia for the underground. We were stalking a mechabear that had been wrecking survey equipment, and radioing each other waspishly the whole way. Eventually things came to a head when she yelled that she'd spent nearly half a year thinking about me, talking with her colleagues about meeting me, wondering if I'd even consider being seen with her. > > She said she loved nothing more than the sky, but me. And if I wanted to live back in Neustuttgart or Neudresden for the rest of my life, she'd do it too. To follow me. > > Her crying did scare away the beast, but we made up fast enough afterward. (we captured the thing two days later at Ploesti). > 21) This incident is of course legendary, and little needs to be discussed of its details. I will specify that contrary to much common slander, Amy did not once miss //on purpose//; the rogue human simply made careful use of cover and surprise. If readers wish to contest this point, they may meet me in the Upper Court of Neuhamburg. > 22) There is something slightly uncanny about intelligence and power rising from mindless froth. In the Black Forest I met a thing that looked like a wolf. But there was something wrong with its eyes, and when I glanced into them for a moment I forgot everything: my name, my life, my love. I would have lain down and let it tear out my throat if Amy had not dragged me away. > > I think, when mankind fell away, when the Foundation vanished, thaumaturgy reestablished itself in the wild populations. That thing and its ancestors had learned to master the minds of its prey, without any intelligence at all, through only time and careful pruning of its ancestry. Evolution on an accelerated timescale. > > Self-optimisation is the most terrible power in the universe, and the ancients wielded it in their very blood. > 23) The passing of the torch to the android peoples was, as discussed, mostly accidental. We were drawn not by a well-conceived plan but by inexorable natural law to resurrect the human species. Nonetheless, it defined the interbiological era, and the poetess captures both its implacability and its rank callousness well. > 24) This oversimplifies the Antihuman Fraction's line of argument. Certainly the influence of evolutionary selection on human psychology, and its pathological imperatives, was not unimportant to them. > > Their primary line of thinking, however, was that biological humanity occupied too great a place in android thinking, and the reappearance of humans would distort existing culture into unthinkable shapes. My discussions with the infamous Rosaline have been greatly edifying on this matter. > 25) It is the great anxiety of our culture that there may be another Helmut. There were //ten billion// humans, and thousands of anomalies. Who can say how many others lay waiting to be unearthed, crying out from that lost civilisation like the voice of von Moltke? > 26) Counts are inexact, but we think Amy saved twenty-three lives from the fire that day. > 27) This was not the deathblow to the Resurrectionists that it is positioned as here. Though the image of Helmut striding away from the fires at Neustuttgart was certainly powerful, what ultimately laid them low was the transition process perfected thereafter. > > Amy, personally, found the violence more disillusionary than the procedure, which she considered merely convenient. That she continues to maintain this attitude in spite of the world she lives in is admirable. > 28) As a historical note to the inevitable readers from the neobiological era, I would like to note that the impact of the transition procedure on emotional processing is considerably overstated here. Except for a few reflexes (for example the hyperventilation provoked by adrenaline) the emotional experience of nonbiological life was identical to neobiological life. > > Why the poetess felt so strongly about this, of course, was that the transition granted her access to the surface. It is a terrible shame that this opportunity was denied to her for so long. > 29) When Amy first introduced me to the classical human conjugal activities, I did not really grasp the appeal. It seemed fumbling and awkward beyond belief. But I think there is a certain tactile joy to it, some kind of physicality that we lack. The austere romance of the android will always have first place in my heart, but sometimes we need a little fire. > 30) Perhaps more ink has been spilled over this woman than any other living being. I will not bother to recount what Amy has written in enormous detail elsewhere. I will only say that when I first met her, at her cottage near the Matterhorn, she made a point to serve me tea before we sat. > 31) My wife is too effusive in her praise. She attaches to me a great weight, as if it was my work alone that brought about the transition. In truth, it was the mastery of decades of Foundation successors, splinter-Resurrectionists and mechanists. And it has been my pleasure to be shaped by her in turn, even as I made her mine. We have learned to fit together. > > Nonetheless, she is the kind of woman who can hold this moment and crystallise it in her heart. I have no doubt she will forget her own name first. > 32) This is folk theology. The Zoroastrians held that the dead tainted the earth, the water, and most of all the holy fire. To expose their dead to the air allowed their corruption to be dispersed safely where it would not do harm. > > The contradiction is intentional: the taint of their dead drove us underground, and the taint of our dead and dying seeped into the stone. If they could live again, the followers of Ahura Mazda would flee the earth, as she does. > 33) I was bored the whole way up. It was in fact exactly as I expected, and there was no particular romance to seeing the world like an atlas beneath me. We had plenty of atlases at the mechanists' quarter in Neustuttgart. > > But as we rose for one moment I saw the Earth //curve//, as it never can flat on a table, and the waters of the sea as what they truly were: a point of dew upon the world. > > That was when she kissed me. > 34) Love you, darling.