An old man wearing a ragged tweed suit and broken brogues stands at the side of Front Square. He has stood here every day for as long as anyone can remember. When Trinity College teemed with tourists this old man and his daily vigil was a noteworthy addition to the guided tour of the grounds. Now that the College, like the city, the country, and the world, is about to be finally destroyed this old man is no longer remarkable, is no longer anything. He is just someone else about to die like everyone else.

Since the very beginning it has always been considered that the most likely cause of the final downfall of the human race will be plague or flood or pestilence or virus or war or blast or heat or a final collision with a passing heavenly body. This is the sensible and serious narrative that has caused the world to always be wholly concerned with its own destruction.

The world could never have known that its absolute end would come about as the simple expression of a merely malevolent whim.

Amidst the chaos and the screaming and the suffering and the hatred and the horror and the hopelessness and the gunfire and the pleading and the taunting and the sheer futility of it all, a small child works alone in Front Square. A small child with a broken nose who works all day, using a household hammer to smash bricks until her arm burns and she cannot lift it any more. Spent and close to collapse, this small child then falls asleep near where I am laying. No one pays her any mind.

And yet existence can live alongside the very destruction of the same and though the notion of life here is clearly finite in its duration it is the same life that resolves to sing as the firing squad takes aim or signal eternal defiance with a shout from the scaffold and until there is no-one left to hear the song or hear the shout then there is always the hope that even songs and shouting might actually signal something more than simple silent resignation.

And even in the darkest darkness ever to have descended from way beyond on-high there are still voices to be heard. They may be single. They may be strangled. They may be shortened. But they are voices all the same.

The evil of the NotBeSpeak would make great art, were both things possible of existing in the same space. Which, of course, in this instance, they are not.

New and dizzying depictions of Hell and human suffering to be captured with oil and gauche and mechanical reproduction.

Images capturing earthly contortions and the agony of existence with a clarity and ferocity not witnessed since the Renaissance.

But much like an invisible ink designed to disappear during the very act of writing, any recording is doomed and must likely die in the same second that it is born.

None of this is to suggest or even suppose that the evil of the NotBeSpeak is founded on coffee, committee and conversation. This evil is very different altogether.

It is of the random.

The indifferent.

The deliberate.

Mechanical.

And other words now.

Cold.

Impassive.

Indurated.

Wholly detached from reason and emotion and therefore alive in the heart of other words.

Unfathomable.

Bottomless.

Abysmal.

Illimitable.

Alternatively, these explorers might just leave this planet and cross it off as ‘dead’ on their maps and never wonder how Humanity lost its light. After all, the universe is scattered with countless stars all vying for the attention of anyone capable of exploring them.

So in this way, why should the Earth be any more privileged than any other dead rock floating in the endless void?

Imagine a list complied somewhere and then put before a committee and each item on the list was a planet being considered for further investigation.

What claim the Earth over any other?

When these same explorers broaden their archaeological investigations further from their landing site, they will probably be perplexed by the layers and layers of intertwined skeletons they will find surrounding every half-buried ruin for miles around. Skeletons that will likely take decades to separate so that the story of each single set of bones might be better understood.

Perhaps one of these skeletons will find itself painstakingly rebuilt one day in some distant museum somewhere and maybe the NotBeSpeak might somehow become aware of this rebuilding and be momentarily amused by the wondrous possibility that this very skeleton now on display might once have belonged to one of the humans charged with the destruction of a museum full of skeletons so lovingly rebuilt and displayed previously before they initiated Terminal Transit?