The stink of entropy is everywhere. The filthy dirty stink of it. Real heavy duty stuff – the air here is thickly laden with it. The reek is enough to make you gag. It’s enough to make you retch. I’ve never experienced anything like it. My breathing is laboured, painful. The stench of the entropy here is beyond belief and yet to my surprise nobody seems to notice it. People carry on their business regardless, completely oblivious.
I’m here right at the heart of things, right slap-bang in the beating heart of the Great Machine, and it is knee deep in entropy. High grade entropy running off in rivers everywhere I look – the pollutant par excellence. It’s the archetypal pollutant. Industrial run-off of the most toxic sort imaginable. Pure poison. Psychic neglect. How did I ever stumble into this place, I wonder? What am I doing here? This is not a place that one should be in. If ever anywhere was the wrong place to be this is it….
Sleepwalkers are everywhere. Somnambulists. The heaviness of their torpor is palpable. It’s more than palpable – it hits you in the face. It’s as heavy as lead. The somnambulists walk along well-worn tracks performing well-worn actions. It’s all happening as if by clock-work. The people here are ruled by the clock – their thought-processes move in well-work grooves but they don’t know it. They don’t know it because they have their eyes on the goal. They never take their eyes off the goal, not for a second, and that’s what keeps them asleep. Nothing disturbs the sleep here – nothing is allowed to. Disturbing the sleep of the sleep-walkers is the ultimate taboo in this place, the ultimate crime. The penalty would be both swift and terrible – the offender would be torn limb from limb within seconds. The somnambulists would rise up as one giant organism in their anger.
No one here ever takes their eyes off the goal. The goal is everything, and yet at the same time the goal is also a manifestation of entropy. Not everything that is filthy and toxic repels – sometimes it attracts instead! Sometimes it sings to us. Sometimes it sings a siren-song that the onlooker cannot resist. We see the attractive end of the stick but not the other one – not the one that is mired in oozing toxic putrescent filth…
The sleepwalkers would trample all over you if you got in their way. That’s because they can’t see you – they can’t see you because they only have eyes for the goal! They can only see one end of the stick and that’s why they are asleep. They’re marching to a mechanical drumbeat – a metronome. They march towards their doom, hypnotized by their goals. Time is everything, here. The sleep-walkers I see all around me are prisoners of time, prisoners of the hour-glass. They are time-captives. Chronos is the master here and none may escape his law, which is the law of entropy…
