We're All Going Home

I want to destroy the whole wide world with nuclear weapons. I'm the worst writer in the whole wide world, but that's not why I want to destroy it. I'm tired of all the hatred, anger, hurt, and pain inside of me and outside of me. It's too much.

Pandora's box of puberty opened when I was around ten- or eleven-years-old. I've decided I'm going to commit atomic terrorism against the whole world. And this time, at the age of thirty-six, I'll be opening another Pandora's box, the box of time (Saturn/Chronos) and death (Pluto/Thanatos).

It's after 4am on June 13th, and I'm writing with a pink pen in a pink notebook covered with illustrations of watermelon slices, each the same size and each containing exactly five black seeds. I'm eagerly awaiting my Amazon orders for enriched uranium, plutonium, centrifuges, etc.

My father told me that I'm just another gullible, useful idiot. I don't remember how I reacted, or if I responded at all. I feel alone in a world I'm afraid of, bored of, tired of, yet still attached to.

The screens of my inner eye show maps in which several cities burn in lakes of nuclear fire: Moscow, Kyiv, Los Angeles, Bucharest, Rome, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Saint Petersburg, etc. Will Pandora's box of atomic war be opened?

They are knocking on the door. Could my orders already be here? So fast?

When I open the door, I'm surprised to see an East Indian Hindu man wearing an Israeli shirt with the white and blue Star of David.

"What are you planning to do with all this...stuff?" he asks.

"Destroy the world," I say before erupting in a fit of nervous laughter.

"Can I join you?" he asks as I slowly move the boxes into my rental apartment. "I just want to quit this boring job before the world ends."

"Sure," I answer, almost reluctantly.

"My roommate kicked me out for wearing this shirt," he explains while pointing at the Star of David covering his chest. "I'm homeless."

"You can sleep on the sofa."

"Thanks. Much thanks." He walks into the apartment and notices posters of Mao and Stalin. "So who are you going to nuke...first?"

"Tel Aviv," I say.

"That city is surely guilty of many sins, but what about Moscow, Russia?"

"Them too," I reply. "My name is Ivan (Иван). What is your name?"

"I'm Pranav, P-R-A-N-A-V, Praṇav (प्रणव)."

"I knew you must have a special name to match such a handsome face and masculine body."

"Let's be professional," Pranav says. "I'm thinking we should look for a millionaire or billionaire to fund our global destruction project."

"Exactly, there must be at least one rich person or oligarch (or plutocrat) who hates the world as much as I do; who hates its depravity, its sybaritism and degeneracy, its racism, hatred, and terrorism, its violence, neglect, and abuse. The whole world needs to end before it's too late. We will all die."

We spend the next three days in silence, coding.

It isn't a silence of absence--but of focus, of symmetry. Pranav, with his lean, elegant fingers, sketches circuit diagrams by hand on lined yellow paper. I arrange isotopic schedules using a spreadsheet I found in an old military PDF, combining it with advice from long-forgotten forums. We rarely speak. We don't need to. Each of us knows: this isn't madness. It is structure.

If suffering cannot be healed,

Then it must be neutralized.

Else, the equation remains forever

unbalanced.

The bombs are not built in rage, nor in haste. They are programmed, modeled, crafted--like music.

One night, while soldering, Pranav looks up and says, "You know, according to an article I read, quantum physicist Roger Penrose believes the human brain functions as a quantum computer."

I raise my eyebrow, pausing. "You mean...nonlinear?"

"Dialectical," he says. "Simultaneous states. We're not insane. We're just operating on unresolved paradox."

That makes sense. What we are doing--destroying everything--is not about hate. It is a logical consequence of the world's internal contradictions. Justice doesn't live here anymore. Neither does revenge. Only resolution.

A dialectic implies synthesis. But what if the synthesis is annihilation?

What if the unity of opposites--pain and joy, guilt and grace--is simply light?

Then the bomb is not an evil, but a sacrament.

We decide to name our first device Apocatástasis. The return of all things to their origin.

It's not long before we find a billionaire--an Austrian trans-humanist who had inherited a pharmaceutical fortune and now believes the world is a failed simulation. He agrees to fund us, but only after we promise to detonate over Rome first. Not because of religion, but because, as he puts it, "It's the bellybutton of the West. You slice the umbilical cord and let the fetus die."

We smile politely and sign the contract.

Meanwhile, the world keeps spinning, oblivious. Children are still being born in bomb zones. Governments debate emojis on official documents. On television, another climate summit ends in applause and inaction.

Everywhere, the old war masks:

progress--a vulture in a tie,

tolerance--a sniper's ceasefire laugh,

delay--the clockwork womb

of the next mass grave.

I post my final article anonymously online. Its title: If the World Ends in Light: Nuclear Terrorism and the Struggle of Opposites. Here's an excerpt:

The cause of death will not be uranium, nor the fissile click of plutonium, nor the failure of diplomacy.

It will be teleological exhaustion: the end of purpose.

The world built this contradiction. We are simply collapsing the waveform.

We upload the activation codes to a satellite relay--there are twelve devices, hidden in shipping containers, turbines, silos, basements, dressed in the invisible robes of normalcy. All waiting.

The night before the end, Pranav makes us Masala chai tea. He pours mine in a chipped porcelain cup with gold trim. "What will we feel in the final instant?" he asks.

I think for a moment. "Relief."

He nods. "Like a stone returning to the ground."

And so we press the button.

One by one, the cities bloom in light, not like violence, but like understanding. Like the earth is remembering something.

Moscow vanishes beneath a dome of white fire. Then Kyiv. Tel Aviv disintegrates into plasma. San Francisco crumples like paper in a furnace. The oceans boil. The atmosphere peels. The stars tremble.

The universe itself recoils--and then softens.

I turn to Pranav.

We are now floating, somehow, above the storm, above time. Maybe this is death, or maybe this is what the mystics called the third perspective, the vision outside contradiction.

His face glows with something ancient and primordial.

I smile.

He laughs.

And then I hug him.

As everything--everything--is annihilated in a final, spectacular eruption of radiant, pure, dialectical light.