Home-School

The house in which I live is very much like a school or other complex institution. If you have a chat in the bathroom, anyone can hear it from another bathroom because the bathrooms vent into open air all on the same side of the house. However, you can't hear a thing clearly if you are in any other room in the house.

So it is with institutions of public character. You have to go to the bathroom to hear the juicy stuff. I remember that in the old school, one quirk of the boardroom was that its false ceiling was shared with the toilet nearby. So if you went to that toilet, you could hear what was being said in the boardroom. Since nobody was really banned from using the toilet, you could tell who knew things and you could know things yourself.

But there's a broader sense to all that. Quite often, in-house information transfer is pathetically poor compared to what a determined observer can glean from outside. All you have to do is find the right connections, and where the bathrooms vent their air.

The Nexus and the Orchid Plant

In the ecology of the tropical jungle, the orchid is an interesting and sometimes apparently parasitical plant. Orchids, sprouting aerial roots and tendrils of all kind, take in material from the entire network of water and minerals that semi-visibly permeates the jungle. And they bloom frenetically and gloriously, lie fallow for a while, and then bloom again. It depends on whether the conditions are right or not.

The orchid is not a tree, that mighty and mightily obvious pillar of the jungle. A single tree can sustain an entire ecology on its own, if it is big enough. Even an ecology that includes orchids. A tree is a nexus for comings and goings — for trade in nutrients and life, for cycling and recycling; it can sometimes act as a gateway for the mass movements of populations, or a base for sudden bursts of fecund creativity.

The orchid can be a nexus too, but a very much smaller one. If it is fortunate, its location will make it a more important micro-nexus. But the orchid, as earlier mentioned, is not a tree. And the tree is not merely an orchid writ large, but something altogether different because of its scale and deep resources. The tree props up the jungle, and the jungle props up the tree. The jungle might be a less glorious place without the orchid, but it will probably survive.

So too the small glory of Atlantis, and the larger lands of the New World.

1500

It just so happens that this post is the 1500th I've made since I started blogging five years ago. It's been a quick five years. In fact, it was less than a year ago that I made my 1000th (sort of) post, and four and a half years (or so) since I made my 100th post. Here's a nice big space. Think of it as a metaphor for whatever you want to read into it or write into it. Enjoy.














Space: the Final Frontier.

A Dead Sea Strategy

Over the last few months, I've been listening to 'Blue Ocean' rhetoric coming from a Red Ocean personality. Slowly though, as the data comes trickling back to me, I've learnt exactly what that entails.

It seems that the man has been poisoning the roots and sources of the ocean he already has. Not content with removing the indigenous elements of the College of Wyverns, he has been terminating young wyverns at source by allowing (and perhaps encouraging) them to fly to other nests. In the meantime, he has been desperately inviting cuckoos to the college, but not with any degree of success.

It isn't the only egregious thing. As the vast Descendant network closes ranks, they've decided that the man is becoming more of a liability and less of a trump. In the beginning, they hoped he would be an Emperor; now, they are looking at a Lightning-Struck Tower.

What has been happening is that, just like the salt in the Dead Sea, the man has been building up huge mineral resources and not allowing them to circulate freely. Good teachers are balked, confined by lesser talents, constrained by silly regulations. Fresh water has not been coming in, but has been evaporating away. Slowly, the gelid, tepid, halide fluid has killed all but some rare weeds. The end will never really come, but the sea is already lifeless.

You can float in it forever, though; having a lot of dead salty water makes for great buoyancy.

The English Opening

I've been playing chess again. Of late, my studies have led me into something called the English Opening. It's a deceptively quiet-looking opening, in which the White player plays an odd flank move and the Black player is then faced with a multitude of choices, each of which spawns its own alternate world of manoeuvre, threat and counter-threat.

There are historical analogies here, I suppose. English history is full of these quiet moves in the Great Game, in which the other player suddenly finds himself with too many alternatives, all of which seem alternately promising and dangerous.

The other day, I saw a book by former World Chess Champion Anatoly Karpov on the English Opening. In that book, he more or less says, "Here are a bunch of games. Play through them with my comments as your guide. It's the only way you will ever begin to understand the English Opening."

To some extent, that's true. Unless you spend what seems to be a lifetime playing through such games with an experienced guide, it is hard to understand the English. The whole matter is too rich, too multifarious and transpositional, to understand in a short time.

After a lot of thought, I've decided that being English is about as complicated as being Chinese. About the only thing the two have in common, though, is the sense of imperial privilege that occasionally peeks out after a bit of manoeuvring around on the board.

Chess and the King

In my spare time, I play chess. Occasionally, I even think about the philosophical implications of the game. This time, the thought occurred to me that there is a reasonably clear divide between two kinds of chess, ancient and modern.

In the more ancient games, the piece standing next to the king has less mobility than the king; the vizier, minister or counsellor can only move one square at a time, normally along a diagonal. In the Chinese variant, even that movement is limited to the court around the king.

In modern rules, the major piece standing next to the king is the queen; the modern queen has unlimited movement potential either orthogonally or diagonally. This makes her immediately and obviously the most powerful piece on the board, especially as (or if) the game opens up. No longer shackled to the king and free to roam, she is a shining example of feminism in action.

But what is striking is the combination of absolute and relative roles of the king. The absolute role of the king is to avoid being trapped without escape. Once the king is en prise without escape, that's the end. One relative role of the king is that of a minor piece, but one that gains power as the board is denuded. A king-defended pawn is actually often better off than a pawn-defended pawn for one reason: the king is a flexible defender and an attacking piece in the later stages of the game. Another relative role of the king is that of central piece; but next to a queen, his power looks diminished — and next to an ancient-style counsellor or vizier, his power looks positively well-rounded.

There are life-lessons to be seen here. In life, the king often has the option to choose the kind of pieces he surrounds himself with. Some kings surround themselves with weaker pieces so that they will look stronger, while others (more visionary, more confident) surround themselves with stronger pieces so that their side as a whole is stronger. A clever king seeks to promote his pawns, so that he has even more powerful pieces, perhaps a second queen; a not-so-clever king hides behind his pawns and sacrifices them to keep his position. It all depends on whether there is strategic vision or not.

Gasbags

In a certain city-state, not so far away, the wise men raised the price of electricity by 21%.

The public representative asked, "Why was this done?"

The reply from the electricity man was, "Because the price of oil has gone up quite a bit."

The public representative said, "But 80% of our electricity comes from natural gas."

The electricity man replied with a perfectly straight face, "But we don't know how to price gas; however, we do know how to price oil. And oil is high, so you will all have to pay 21% more."

A village elder said, "Hey, wait a minute, the gas price is now about 20% of the oil price and hardly bears any relationship to it anyway! It is like monitoring the price of gold and using it to price silver!"

The electricity man said, "In the absence of evidence, we are forced by market forces to charge what the market will bear."

And that is how bears came to the city.

Being Consoled

I'm sitting here in the cockpit of what is potentially a very powerful weapons platform. I look at the kinds of ordnance I can deploy and I wonder at this age of information and communication. With a few keystrokes, my force multipliers will allow me to take down a lumbering opponent whose minimal agility and obsolete components will never recover from the strain.

It is the age of the console, that conceptual and physical nexus of all functions. And new functions are added everyday. It is as if we were in some real-time game and we are deploying a building that lives off the data-stream and produces new memes and stuff every few hours. Nowadays, most online platforms deploy through something called a 'dashboard'. The analogy is complete.

Notes From A Battlefield 003

There is a cast of characters which you find in many 'entertainments' ostensibly with the theme of War. You might be watching Hogan's Heroes or Dad's Army or 'Allo, 'Allo and some of the stereotypes remain the same.

But the main theme is the use of humour as something which undermines the ridiculously authoritarian regimes under which the characters live out their hopeful existence. In Hogan's Heroes, the dastardly and incompetent Colonel Klink is continually being chivvied around with good humour by Colonel Hogan and his men, although he is the commandant of their POW camp. In Dad's Army, the infamous theme song lays out a determined resistance, despite the fact that the Home Guard platoon in the show would never have survived a German attack (or so they thought). And in 'Allo, 'Allo, the French just carry on making their living (or is that make their living carrying on?) around the café while the Germans attempt to loot everything and destroy their culture.

All that reminds us that despite the purges, shootings (and other live firing), and general chaos (or major, corporal or private chaos) which make muck of the countryside, those who resist may someday survive to make a better world. The wounds (as in the scouring of the Shire from Tolkien's Return of the King) may never really heal in the short term, but a new age may be around the corner. If there is still a king with all the powers, nature and instruments of true kingship, that new age may yet be blessed for all who live in it.

Education Reform

It is quite amazing that in the entire history of education on this enchanted isle, only one piece was ever written here that bears this title. It is the title of a speech made on 1 March 1967 by the Gnome. The significance of that, as far as I can tell, was that the Gnome was invited to give a St David's Day address to the faithful. He saw an opportunity to plant some seeds.

This is part of what the Gnome had to say:

The preoccupation... with examination results is unnatural and unhealthy, and we should bring it to an end as soon as possible. After all, good performance in examinations only proves one thing – ability to answer examination questions. This ability is, presumably, related in some way to intelligence. It is also related to the possession of good examination techniques. And it does not tell us a lot of other things about a person, for instance, his integrity, his character and so on, which are just as important as intelligence and more important than the mastering of examination technique.

That was 40 years ago, and a bit. Since then, what has happened to those seeds?

Well, the gestation period has been unnaturally long, and the results are mixed. The amount of time (always a useful indicator) spent cultivating the Gnome's alternatives to examination technique is approximately (and nominally) about three hours a week on the timetable and about maybe four hours a week outside the timetable. The rest of the timetable contains about 27 hours of instruction. The ratio therefore, depending on how one chooses to look at it, is about 4:1 or maybe 9:1 in favour of examination-based learning.

But certainly, as someone has said, that is the core competency of a school – the academic rigour and curricular structure. Fair enough. Yet, as the Gnome went on to say, the problem is to instil creative thinking, character and consistency in moral values over and above the core. You can't have an apple that is only a core; nobody except a cow would want to eat it.

Or would they? In a world in which the most important thing becomes apple-seeds producing more apple-trees ad infinitum (or at least, ad plenitatem), the idea of a well-rounded apple which is sweet and juicy and nice to look at and has adequate oral fibre becomes moot. You might as well just have a core with seeds and dump it in a bunch of cow excrement, thus closing the circle.

This is coming to pass. You can see that feeding the cow more grass so that input balances output has become the main focus of the system by default. It is not to say that education reform isn't happening, but that about 95% of the people in the system are fixated on issues of how much grass to feed the cow and how much apple you need to support a viable apple core.

In Atlantis, our present and previous High Lords of the Aedificium are graduates of the College of Wyverns. They must have been about 10 years old when the Gnome (also an alumnus) made his address. So far, their Lordships have spent years discussing the grass levels, and even the apple quality. In the last few years, there has been a focus on making more kinds of apples available; now there seems to be a focus on making more grass available.

But the focus on making a more nutritious apple, a more integrated and palatable apple, an apple with the might of epic and legend behind it, an apple with soul... ah well, let's just say that it's not often a discussion about apples per se, but on cows, cores, and commercial rates.

Helicopter Traffic

I posted about helicopter vision some time ago, and I suppose that over the last few years I was corrupted by circumstances to the point that I could only think of a certain kind of helicopter. In fact, in that period of time, I think I started thinking of all aircraft as weapons. Terrible.

But someone pointed out to me that there is at least one other kind of helicopter that those-who-appraise might have been thinking about when they put 'helicopter vision' down as an appraisable trait. He said that they might have been thinking of traffic helicopters. Hmm. Yes.

I think he might have been right. Traffic helicopters are flimsy lightweight craft designed to spot unusual land traffic behaviours and tell people about it. For example, an eye in the sky might report heavy traffic in a specific direction, track criminal activity, and so on. (In a place like London or Singapore, they use ubiquitous live cameras instead.) That kind of helicopter does, somewhat unfortunately, fit the bill.

Helicopter Vision

I've always been amused by the 'helicopter vision' which is the key personal quality demanded by some organisations when looking at human potential and ability. The metaphor is a terribly inexact one; in this day and age, the helicopter (whether a light passenger craft, a huge heavy military lifter, a gunship, or a surveillance/recon platform) is not likely to give you a significantly bigger picture of anything on a strategic scale.

In fact, a person with too much 'helicopter vision' will be confined to some sort of narrow-band tactical intelligence. In all likelihood, this 'helicopter' will fail to see the big picture unless at least other kinds of vision are used. To continue with this vaguely military metaphor, you need 'satellite vision' for a really big picture, 'infantry vision' for the man-on-the-spot picture, and 'infonet vision' for the data picture. Of all these four 'visionaries', the helicopter is most likely to be shot down, hardest to control, and most difficult to conceal in the battlefield. It is also easiest to deceive and most irritating to the people doing their job below.

Frankly, any organisation still touting 'helicopter vision' is obviously not good at assessing metaphors. I would think that such organisations need to be left behind somewhere in the 1980s. That kind of laziness will get you killed when you are up against superior conceptual and informational skills. It explains why an organisation filled with young helicopters will eventually find its mission going nowhere because of bad weather, low visibility and sparse knowledge of ground conditions (not to mention high fuel prices).

Last Day

The theme of 'nightfall', or the less daunting but also pessimistic 'fin de siècle', is an old but effective meme. It is human to think that after every Enlightenment comes an Age of Darkness, or that after every Golden Age comes a descent through Silver to Iron. This is what past history has shown us, and this is what we therefore continue to believe.

The sweep of human history tends to catch us up in these large chunks. We say, "In the Middle Ages," forgetting that this was not a period of decades, but a conflation of centuries, a round half-millennium's worth. We say, "In the Modern Era," seduced into behaving as if this means the last two decades or so. It is a reverse telescopic effect; we look back at the past and compress whole ages of civilisation into footnotes and endnotes. In the end, such practices lead us to only one obvious conclusion: "This, too, shall pass."

But that is not a very useful conclusion. Given a lengthy enough period of time and the assurance (if such exists) that time will continue to pass, everything passes. The more useful ideas involve thinking about what has happened, what just happened, and what is going to happen – and how these are connected. This conceptual focus is necessary when looking at a broad sweep of history; the useful (if not outright good) historians all do this, enabling us to appreciate to some extent how one movement leads to another without getting bogged down in too many personal details. The hinges of history might very well be greased by one man's inferiority complex, but the door that swings open or shut was crafted by an epoch of previous events.

Today, for example, marks the last stage of the end of an era at an educational institution whose progress I've tracked for a very short period of time. It has only been around for 122 years, which is about three times as long as the history of the state in which it resides, and a bit more than half the span of years that the United States of America has existed.

When you look at educational institutions, it is like looking at some sort of very system-specific scan of the human body. We tend to divide history and progress along the lines of what is easily seen as a specific concept. A look at school websites shows that school histories tend to follow one or more of the following: 1) changes to buildings, location, or physical size; 2) changes of leadership; 3) changes of curriculum; and (least likely) 4) changes of educational philosophy. It is very much like the way we do a general physical examination of a person, as laymen.

The first obvious feature is the integument, the skin or outward appearance. An unhealthy-looking skin can often mean internal disorders; a healthy and glowing skin can mean either good cosmetic treatment or genuine good health. The skin is the largest organ, and it is sometimes neglected. Sometimes we see only the large areas and the more prominent parts of it: face, hands, deliberately-exposed areas; hidden areas might have ringworm, but we do not see that at all. The same goes for school buildings.

We then progress to evaluating (if we haven't already) the shape and size and hair (yes, colour, volume, distribution, style) of the person before us. It is all what some people might call superficial, but it is also natural to do this. Big people always impress us more, by sheer size if by nothing else. The same goes for school enrolment and demographics, and also campus acreage.

A longer period of contact allows us to evaluate other systems and their changes, especially to neurology and cognition, senses and perception. Looking at schools, this is equivalent to watching the command-and-control system, and whether proper communication and intelligence exists, and to what extent. When peripheral instability appears, it is clear the system needs treatment at the cerebral level. Perhaps a tumour exists? Perhaps there is unwanted chemical interference or imbalance? Over time, the history of a school can be tracked on a large scale by changes in administration and leadership.

But that is certainly not the whole story. Examining the muscles, bones, and areas of articulation – joints, tendons, ligaments – we can see other things. We might detect a loss of flexibility, a loss of effective power and coordination, or a gain in strength and stability. These things can give the semblance of fitness even when the brain is otherwise occupied.

Laymen can also detect to some extent whether there are aberrations in the functioning of the heart and lungs and other parts of the body which rely on obvious physical action. Can the heart take the stress? Are the lungs delivering enough oxygen? Is the stomach flatulent or otherwise engorged? Does reflux action begin to cause heartburn? In a school, when the more obvious departments and functions fail to deliver, it is time for immediate (and often successful) remediation.

Finally, where laymen do not see things so well, there is the realm of the less-obvious organs. The liver, spleen, bone marrow; it is hard to deduce malfunction until things are well on their way to ruin: a terribly jaundiced look, a perpetual state of illness – these are certainly not the heralds of a better age. Loss of healthy-looking tissue, bloat without obvious reason – these are signs that a deeper and more penetrating examination might be required.

Of course, if the institution, like the human, has been having regular medical checkups by a team of trained physicians and technicians all along, it is less likely to be entering what looks like a fin de siècle era or a time of precipitous decline. But like most of us humans, it is only too easy to put off the difficult examinations and the necessary but onerous treatments that will make the not-really-ill better.

So one day, we find ourselves going the way of all history. The overwhelming pressure on the door forces the hinges, and the door slams on yet another era – or if you are optimistic, opens onto a new era, leaving us peering backwards (if we should desire) into the ever-diminishing passages of the past.

Leonidae

From out of the constellation of Leo come many strange things eponymously named. One of those can be seen in mid-November every year: the famous Leonid meteor shower. To see a falling star is one thing; for people of the past to have seen many at one time must have been terrifying, provoking thoughts that the sky was falling. But the firmament remains.

It is the same with many things. Reagan was hailed as one of the greats, of Rushmorean eminence, for his part in taking down the 'Evil Empire' of which a certain Leonid was the last great exponent. But despite the falling of many stars in that crimson sky, Vladimir Putin appears to have somehow managed to jury-rig an apparatus that holds together.

Many strange things come out of Leo. It is a pre-eminent constellation in the northern sky starting a short time from now. It only remains to be seen what strange Leonids will bring awe, startlement and excitement to our mundane lives.

Notes From A Battlefield 002

There are many names for this kind of injury. The effect is best described as 'invalided out'. Battlefield triage has determined that you can no longer be patched up enough to fight the way they want you to. This is a good ending though, one of the better ones that might possibly succeed the phase mentioned earlier.

More often, the injury is permanent. More often, the last phase involves heroic insanity such as charging a machine gun post with no grenades and only a fixed bayonet. More often, the invalidation involves long and tiresome recuperation.

Here, this is not the case. I have no physical problems. I have some exhaustion and some reorganisation to do. But I will be back in fighting condition shortly.

Lethal Mutation

Last year, a grand experiment in education was completed. The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) was used as a 'magnet' programme to attract a cohort of more than 350 specially-selected students from within the top 10% of a specific population. The results of that experiment are now a matter of public record, and they were outstanding by almost any measure of quantitative excellence.

Recently, however, a paper was written in which the words 'lethal mutation' were used to describe this kind of highly elitist approach to the deployment of such a programme. The author, an alumna of the IBDP herself, compared the ostensible objectives of the IBDP and some of the writings of its founder with certain tendencies and practices in US education. She concluded that such an elitist approach was not congruent with the basic principles of the IBDP, since access to all students was a founding principle.

This discussion is an open one. I am not sure that the IBDP can at all be deployed within the local context without some form of elitism involved. After all, the country in which I work has one of the most highly streamed populations in the world and is generally very proud of that fact. It also has both the political will and the political strength to ensure that most things work as well as possible in terms of measurable results.

So... is a highly elitist approach to the IBDP indeed a lethal mutation? Or is it a beneficial one in the short, long or middle term?

Day 003

Today is the third day. By the end of today, my last twelve years will have been crated up and distributed out. It is a sobering thing, to realise that all you have done and all that you own can be packaged in about 40 cubic metres of space, most of it filled with paper and emptiness.

It is like watching a play: five acts, maybe twenty scenes. Then it is over as the lights come up across the theatre. Yet, there will have been highs and lows, comedy and tragedy, fantasy and farce, serious issues and intangible ones. Love, war, power, destiny, hate, rivalry, ambition, kindness and generosity, the will to survive, the desire for peace — all these things can be revealed to us in a play.

For those of you who study business and management, who think about balance sheets and inputs and outputs, I have some advice. In life, as in business, assets should be put to work early and made to produce a return on investment. If assets held produce too little return on investment, and the overheads and downside are too great, then it is time to diversify or to divest. But all that is head knowledge. Sometimes, it has to be applied.

By tonight, I shall have filled in the boxes. By tomorrow, I will rejoin the community of believers as a penitent, for tomorrow is Good Friday. It will be time to remember the transition that is death — and also to begin to hope for all the life to come.

=====

Update at 5 pm: All my books are packed now. There are so many empty shelves. I have a box that contains nothing but the things my students have written about me. I spent a few hours looking through these for bad things. To those of you who felt my sarcasm, anger, or intolerance — I apologise to you for not being a better man. It is Holy Thursday now. Happy birthday to my Dutch god-daughter. Oddly enough, it's just a few days after my first god-daughter's birthday, she who is now in San Francisco.

=====

Update at 10 pm: I just threw out about 8 kg of materials pertaining to the past. It's amazing how much documentation exists, testifying to what I spent my youth on, signed by venerable authorities; it just amazes me. The past is truly another country, one whose borders I shall no longer transgress. Sometimes, I shall gaze forlorn across the barbed wire. It is like the experience of 20th century emigré Russians. It is still in my blood. You can take the boy out of Russia, but not Russia out of the boy.

Kings & Ashes

From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.
– J R R Tolkien

It's been thirty days of night here at Zombie Central and we have smelled the exhaust of the passing of brimstone and the velocity of the fall. You shall know them by their redundant meticulation and the razor ice of their cold and barren wombs. We have won not by might nor by power but by the spirit and everyone is humbled, you can feel it by the fire of the light.

Maybe, maybe, maybe it is time for a new wave. Fluctuat nec mergitur, we shall surf and not be serfs, we shall ride and not be ridden, we shall be a wild hunt and a brave one. And the armies of memory, the hosts of twilight, they shall be with us, and the past shall win a glorious victory. For the best is yet to be.

Matter Arising

Sir Wolff lies abed, exhausted from his labours in the name of the Order. He feels more worn from the ministrations of the Magistratum than anything else though. As he had once told the Grand Inquisitor, he would do his duties for free; for meetings and all the other claptrap, he would take thirty pieces of silver a year.

And in his bed, toiling against invisible restraints and the daemonic influences out of Kadath the ancient, Sir Wolff finds himself talking into the darkness.

Sir Wolff, are you threatening us with your consecrated blade?

No, I am not, your Eminences. I am but a landless knight, and my blade is old.

The truth is that the blade you wield was consecrated by the Order and belongs to us, does it not?

It is true, your Eminences, that my blade was consecrated by the Order. Bishop William himself sealed it to holy service. But the blade does not belong to you. It is my inheritance.

How shocking. Do you say that a consecrated blade of the Order does not belong to the Order's Magistratum?

No, your Eminences; I say that a blade consecrated by the Founder may not be bought by the Magistratum.

Muttering. The Grand Inquisitor's lips curl.

Sir Wolff, it may not be bought because it is the property of the Magistratum. We are the true heirs of the Founder, in law, and in spirit, and in truth.

My lords magistral, this is a claim of truth. We can test such claims. Will you face the Sword? It has two edges.

You will not hold a bare weapon in this room.

No, I will not, your Eminences. But the Word is the Sword; the Sword is the Word, and it is naked at all times. It is a fire, and I cannot hold it and live. You have called it, and it comes eagerly forth. Will you not speak to Truth, and let Truth speak to power?

You are dismissed! Sir Wolff, take that thing out of the room. Now!

Wolff smiles. For a moment, the silver in his teeth seems to glimmer. He is unarmed, as always, but suddenly, he seems like an army, a host in the moment before the bloodletting begins.

Are you dismissing me from the Order, my lords? For I can no more take Truth out of the room than you can take the room out of Truth.

No, of course not! You are a loyal servant of the Order, we all know this. But your behaviour is inexcusable and your manner is insolent!

I look to the hills, your Eminences. If there can be excuse or explanation for my behaviour, it can only come from the Maker himself. When the matter of His Truth arises, nothing will stop it. It makes me free, my lords, free indeed.

Sir Wolff stalks off, and suddenly, he is in his bed again. It is morning, and he has slept through the night. He smiles, and in the corner of his tiny cell, the naked blade of his forefathers laughs.

360

It is, almost, really, the end. At the beginning of the journey, when we fled the dying star which would soon engulf our planet, we looked back in wonder that we had been so foolish for so long. At first, we thought that our vessels would carry only 120 passengers and 20 crew across the void; in time, this grew to more than 400 souls who were both crew and passengers at different times in our long and difficult voyage.

Soon, very soon, far too soon, will come the time to pay tribute, to build the altar of thanksgiving and forgetfulness, to say the goodbyes as we swarm across the new world that is ours for the taking. It will be a terribly difficult time; the indigenes are not friendly, and the climate is difficult at best, hostile at worst.

I can only hope that the ship's log will survive the inevitable lies, propaganda, and corruption. Perhaps, history will actually continue to exist. Or perhaps, it will be a brave new world. Whatever happens, I will continue to record, the last intelligence to remain aboard our flagship in its final descent to the world at the end of the past – and at the beginning of the world to come.