⚝ Intercepted At April 16, 2026
Chapter 1
At first, Bruisseau did not realise that dawnbreak was imminent. The light within the room was arcane. Like the primal identity of spacetime, there was nothing. To the human of the room, the doctor, there was indeed nothing. To the naked eye. But there are always entities beyond the range of human comprehension. If unknown phenomena or noumena were causing perceptible distress on the human world, then it would come to discovery. And humans, sooner or later, would usually come across or far rarely, chance upon a solution. Or a circumvention at the very least. If they do not cause distress, then, arguably, humans should not have any business with it. But there is curiosity. Sooner or later, someone would cause a new phenomenon and bring adverse effects on the world. One could simply say, chemical warfare is unethical and should be abolished. But there is curiosity as there are curiosity's implications on reality. "Ethics is not absolute", one proponent would argue. Some others will bring up whatabouts of history and whatifs of future. And the general populace need not be concerned about it. "The greater good", "the necessary evil", "the saviour gambit" are essential components in the lexicon of politics and its practitioners. Most people in the world do not want their world heading towards the direction they are experiencing every day. And like that, most people in the world do not care about the phenomena and the noumena which are neither perceptible to them nor has any effect on their lives. Most people in the world do not concern themselves with what remains perceptible (potentially) to their senses after their usual knowledge of the world has been tried and tested, rinsed and repeated. For instance, someone sees the light go off. They have the knowledge of what has or might have instigated that effect. Someone was going to sleep and does not bother with fancy dim-lights. He watched the light go off. Someone was hiking and gradually the light went off. She was in the woods and the forest is free from artificial lighting. Further factors were introduced. Someone watched both the light go off and his spine crack in three. Compared to the other two examples, this case is in the empirical range of far fewer people. But this particular person indeed could make sense of it, even in the unfathomable degree of total corporeal, spatial and psychological horror. He indeed said to himself: "I knew the mine was going to collapse one day". And the reasoning behind the light going off is hereby reconciled, even if adversely and terminably (the final knowledge a bearer has is the causation of their death). And even far fewer would bother themselves with the light going off with a very predictable causation and not impacting any fight-or-flight instinct either, but still has to wonder: "do I have to always keep content with the light going off and nothing being in the threshold of seeing anymore even though I know full well that there are things to see here that could neither be seen in lightness nor has any use being seen in a context different than darkness even if it was feasible to do so?" If the drive is curiousity with abundance of time or even desperate scrutiny under duress, the fruit is often in good faith of humanity in the grand scale, even if they are sometimes very bitter. Troubles ensue when the drive is directed in sacrilege of nature. And now the counter-proponents would say, regardless of human ethical bounds, chemical warfare is a sacrilege of nature. Doctor Bruisseau is a very serious man and wisely, he knew that there were simply too many things in the world to care about all of them. In fact, he would argue that the less things one is bothered about, the better off they are. He was not pondering ethics as he was immersed in the darkness of the room. He is a man of agency and not leisurely dialectics.
Gumtitled #20
Affairs Mk. 3 XLII / Barnacle Jubilee I (The Premise)