Demon Core: Part 5

[heya_baru]

Magnetospheric Censorship

Part 1

Sometimes I awake in the long valleys of the night, and feel as though a beast planted by god is attempting to break free from my skin; subterranean hands born in the churning deep of the soul rise from their oceanic hovels to wrap around my ribcage, testing the bars that imprison them. Dread itches in my fingertips.

One such night, when sleep refused me, I lay in bed with my phone and read about English Scientist William Gilbert, the first man to theorize the existence of the Earth’s magnetic poles. His scientific treatise on the subject, De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure, published in 1600, describes the earth as not merely having magnetic poles, but as a giant magnet:

The magnetick dip (which is the wonderful turning of magnetick things to the body of the terrella) in systematick course, is seen in clearer light to be the same thing upon the earth. And that single experiment, by a wonderful indication, as with a finger, proclaims the grand magnetick nature of the earth to be innate and diffused through all her inward parts. A magnetick vigour exists then in the earth just as in the terrella, which is a part of the earth, homogenic in nature with it, but rounded by Art, so as to correspond with the earth’s globous shape and in order that in the chief experiments it might accord with the globe of the earth.

Previously, folk knowledge stated that the functioning of compasses depended on Polaris, or upon an undiscovered magnetic island in the north pole. Imagine, for a moment, William Gilbert’s state of mind: one afternoon, after years of experiments and pondering, you realize the earth itself, the thing upon which you have lived your entire life, the only ground you have ever known under your feet, is alien in its function and matter.

In the last week I feel as thought I have become a new William Gilbert; Nabû whispers to me from on high, a mad-god who understands that the wisdom he peddles is anathema to a well-ordered mind. To butcher Cioran, truth is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Truth began to siege the quiet corners of my thoughts after I continued my investigation into the origin of the XDPH; the shipping label I had stolen, although destroyed, eventually lead me to a small chemicals laboratory about a hundred miles outside Semey, Kazakhstan. I was not able to contact the laboratory via Signal, although a former colleague of mine from medical school, who spent a number of months in Semey as part of her health physics research, was able to provide some context via email:

Strange things are happening at Semipalatinsk. The region is known to locals as The Polygon, a former Soviet nuclear test site that looms over Semeny like an eternal fog. During my time there, I worked with scrap dealers exposed to transuranic elements from illegal salvage, but it’s clear that there’s more than that going on in the steppe. Scrappers told me about “stalkers” who set up radio stations and research labs in the Polygon; I treated one man from Semeny who had moved to a test bunker outside Koyan and ingested some kind of chemical he created with fragments of strontium-90 found via homemade Geiger counter. He claimed that the formula was given to him by god in a dream. Similarly, I ran into multiple Russian tourists who had set up camp inside of Semipalatinsk’s numerous craters as part of some kind of religious pilgrimage. One morning as I was walking through the area, I found a line of them leading to a particularly large crater, where they were baptizing themselves in the contaminated waters below.

If you’ll allow me some subjective interpretation, I think that visiting a site where the state detonated nearly 500 nuclear weapons is an experience similar to theophany; one can see the scars in the earth, left by the most energetic devices humankind has ever created, remains of the science that brought humanity to the brink of total annihilation. I remember feeling something similar in myself when we traveled to the Trinity Site in undergrad. You see the giant Trinitite pillar, try to comprehend the violence and scope of something so vast, something categorically outside of what the human brain was designed to understand—a hyperevent.

Atheists love to say that religions in the scientific age are reduced to worshiping a God Of The Gaps— the shrinking territory of the incomprehensible becomes the domain of the divine, while the rising seas of reason drowns the land of faith. A nuclear detonation is a form of theology (literally, divine speech, as in eulogy, not sociology); no human mind will ever be able to comprehend 104,600,000,000,000 joules of energy. Eighty years ago, a group of people walked into the American desert and became the first mortals to talk in a language only god could comprehend.

Before I left Kazakhstan, I asked a villager from Koyan if she had much contact with the stalkers and pilgrims; she told me that numerous outsiders enter the Polygon in search of a “signal” that locals born under the shadow of radiation are inoculated against. She told me that on long nights, when sleep escapes her, she can hear the distant chants of this signal.

If you want to look into this more, the Russian pilgrims gave me the name of their prophet: Pytor Borisovich.