The_Shutdown

The_Shutdown is a text document stored in the THIRIEL-2 terminal.

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The Shutdown

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We assembled on the vast green lawn outside as the reactors began to slowly wind down. The workers were solemn; the activists who had fought against the decommissioning seemed crushed. There was supposed to be a speech, but the spokeswoman had lost her notes. Outside, the protesters cheered.

My eyes were drawn to the discarded anti-shutdown banners, endlessly reciting the facts. The statistics on mortality per trillion kWh (lowest of all energy sources). The lifespan of a reactor (70 more years, in our case). Minimal land footprint. Almost zero emissions. No intermittency. It became a jumble of words, a litany, almost a kind of glossolalia. As far as the protesters outside were concerned, it might as well be an alien tongue.

One thing was clear to them, and that was enough: the technology inside this compound was deeply, inherently wrong. It was a sin.

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I could not help but think of that moment on August 6th, 1945, when the sky erupted above Shima Hospital. My imagination could never fully encompass it. How do you imagine more than seventy thousand people annihilated in an instant? An ancestor of mine was in that hospital; he went from being a doctor, a husband, a father, a pacifist stuck in a terrible war, to being a pile of bleached bones covered in rubble, all in a single second. Not by accident, but because of a choice someone made. Not because of a reactor, but because of a bomb.

Just two days earlier, contradicting his campaign promises, the prime minister had suggested that the use of "tactical" nuclear weapons would be an acceptable risk if the conflict continued. Very few seemed to find this particularly shocking or outrageous. They were afraid of reactors, but not of bombs.

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The spokeswoman gave up on finding her notes. It was starting to rain, and people were walking away. She grabbed the microphone.

"By the time you regret this, it'll be too late," she said. "But honestly, I don't know if I care anymore. Maybe you have it coming."

Notes

The hex strings are likely to have been written by Prometheus, as he often calls New humans "Son of Man".