The Dirty Weapons

This is the era of the dirty weapon.

Nation-states took all the clean ones. The ones that could be controlled. The ones that required hundreds of academics and engineers. And in doing so, they did the R&D for the loners, the losers, the crazy, the broken, the faithful, those huddled masses that clamber atop online forums and find ways to matter. Our taxes paid for our every step of their self-discovery.

In our lifetimes, we’ll watch kids drop drones on the schools they used to shoot up and then silently, anonymously, attend the funerals. We’ll see brittle, shaking hands tape hard-won radioactive material onto a bag of fertilizer before detonation. We’ll watch in horror as a single cough rips through Comic-Con, melting eyeballs as it goes. We’ll run as masked shooters chase us through the streets and then disappear.

This isn’t complex, or hard, it’s warfare. The stuff of simplicity. Of anger and hate. And in that most basic context, good enough is good enough.

-Shlok
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