the world raged and stormed and in the spasms of its fury ancient institutions crushed that had served us well but outlived their usefulness nothing it hadn’t done before empire after empire humiliated annihilated, reduced to ashes and each time a new hope to build back better with each recurring iteration different men, of different mien and different thoughts and cares different ideas of how to build and organize and risk assess and the resulting civilizations bigger, more complex and fruitful but each bearing the seed from the start of their demise as a promise of a new cycle and the men, stranger each time more exotic, foreign, alien less autochthonous, less human but more capable of reckoning, building, dominating their world and it came to pass that death itself became far from reach as men tinkered with the basics of universe construction with the models of life itself in the excitement of discovery they ventured into God's realm remaking themselves in new and wondrous images, products of prodigious imaginations they redesigned, reinvented remodelled the very clay whence they sprang, creating beasts never before seen of claws and fangs and intellect cunningly they intermixed with their precious machines extending their power and reach over what had been impossible redefining the original premises but their souls lacked the love of God and of small creatures and the sense of self-sacrifice that in yesteryear was the stuff of heroes and legends we know and they built great houses of mithril and elven glass, with plenary vistas of a firmament they could gaze upon, with the vertical pupils in their eyes the spectacle of constellations they dreamed to conquer and schemed to colonise propelled a madness to unravel the riddles of folding space the mathematics of wormholes and of Einstein-Rosen fields consumed their lust until a breakthrough was made and hyperspace finally pierced and a parsec became an inch and a thousand years, a day and like Alexander they wept mistakenly thinking there were no new worlds to conquer but God smiled and waited watching his children at play knowing his time to be short the words on the wall in his mind mene mene tekel yparsim [2-II-2022]