Scrubs Up Well

Following a strange plague that destroyed the world’s entire supply of paper – thus destroying almost all written records from the medieval period to the Cold War – historians were left with a difficult time seeking sources giving insights into life in that swathe of history. Archaeological searches for the much-rumoured Last Pentagon – the final military stronghold of the United States – paid off when a vast underground complex was discovered in the Rocky Mountains.

Clearly, this was the major continuity of government facility that the Last Pentagon had been rumoured to be – and evidence suggested that after the US government fell to a revolution, the forces of the Last Pentagon sealed themselves off from the world. Unable or unwilling to counter-attack revolutionary forces in their own homeland, they shunned the outside world, creating a hermetically sealed microcosm of American society as it was when they cut off their connections to the outdoors. Ignored by the new order – for it wasn’t aware of their existence – they persisted for some 72 years, before they got wiped out when a seismic event caused the destruction of the facility.

The most significant discovery from the Building, as its inhabitants had come to call it, was the diary of one of its inhabitants, discovered in one of the bathrooms. It paints a picture of a society which imagines itself in command of the entire cosmos – even though it’s quite evident that the Building is entirely out of control. Almost nobody tells the truth, few people truly know what they are doing, almost everyone is desperately trying to cover their ass to cover up the fact that they don’t know what they are doing, and just enough genuine conspiracies abound to drive this feedback loop into overdrive.

Take the case of the author, who does not name themselves. Apparently, they are a civilian called into the military sections of the Building to undertake an important mission. But so arcane has the Building’s bureaucracy become that their brief verbal briefing from the Commander-in-Chief is incomprehensible to them, their efforts to merely get a full mission briefing become labyrinthinely complex, and several people they speak to assume that the author has rumbled them as spies and commit suicide on the spot. And all this before lunchtime…