Fragment 1 - About Super Critical Polar Bears (4)

January 1961, Idaho Falls. A military-used boiling water reactor becomes overcritical for a few milliseconds. The pressure of the highly heated water sends small parts of the piping system shooting through the building like projectiles and catapults the twelve-ton reactor lid to the room ceiling several meters away. On falling back, the dislodged control rods are completely reintegrated, the reactor closed again, and the impending core meltdown thus prevented. Three young soldiers, performing maintenance work at the time, meet their death. One of them is struck by a flying casing, impaled, and nailed to the ceiling. Two weeks later, the lifeless bodies can be retrieved from the contaminated area, but they contain so many metal splinters that even unclothed, they still radiate with five Sieverts per hour.

October 2012, Berlin. Three hundred people lay red roses at the inauguration of the monument 'The Dreamer'. It is the 140 centimeters tall and 15,000 Euro expensive bronze statue of the recently deceased polar bear Knut. Besides 'The Dreamer', there are two other animal sculptures in the zoological garden at this time, those of hippopotamus Knautschke and the gorilla baby Bobby.

June 2022, mental level. The word 'dungeon' usually describes dungeons located in windowless basement rooms, originally from the Dutch for loss, formerly also 'to get lost' or 'to become invisible to others'.

N. lay on the bed in his basement, pondering nuclear accidents, polar bear memorial ceremonies, and dungeons. Eventually, he sat up as if awakening from a trance, put aside his tablet for a moment, and drank the rest of his now cold tea. How much time had passed? The light elements were still emitting blue light, and the music of Pink Floyd continued to play in an endless loop. Yet the air, enriched with nicotine and incense, had become milkier over the last hours, unnoticed by him. - Diffuse Cherenkov blue in the fog.

"‘What time is it?’ asked N.

‘It is 06:49,’ answered the room.

N. let his upper body fall back onto the bed and reached for his tablet again. Perhaps the few sentences he had managed to put on paper that night should have alarmed him, but routines breed carelessness. - And the routine of spending nights searching for the right words without finding them, he had successfully established in recent years. - He had fallen into a trap. - Entangled in the labyrinth of his own thoughts. - Yet something had changed. Had he actually found the way out he had been searching for so long?

N. opened his journal and wrote: ‘There are many levels of tragedy. - And perhaps one day there should be an emotional Richter scale to help people better categorize their experiences. - Nuclear accidents are powerful enough to shake me, even if I don't know the involved persons and wasn't alive at the time of the accident. Personal fates are more frequent and can be just as powerful. - They are just less often noticed. Reports, on the other hand, of people laying roses at polar bear monuments, seem suitable to demonstrate the emotional and mental decline of a mass of utterly irradiated people who either never lived or forgot how to live over time. - Also a tragedy, albeit in a roundabout way.’

N. closed his journal and prepared to leave the basement.