Inside Of An Empty Collective 1 (Bing Nam)

A New Old Civilization

Bing Nam looked out onto the city streets from the balcony of his fiftieth floor apartment. A melee had broken out down by the center district. Smoke was rising from the Chemical Research building. Bing worked there during the day and hated every minute of it. He sat there feeling a devilish hopefulness that only a child watching his school burn to the ground could ever understand.

Bing watched as man armed with a shanty, d.i.y. blowtorch contraption, melted the synthetic barbed wire fence surrounding the “Meyer’s Center For Advanced Social-Chemical Research” building. A huge structure made out of synthetic wood fibers, painted to look like stone. It was only four stories high, but took up three city blocks of area. A squat castle-like structure surrounded by a forest of hundred story skyscrapers--made of plastic. The grass surrounding the center took up another two blocks, with rounded glass picnic tables scattered every so many feet across the grounds. No one had ever eaten lunch at those tables. They were an utter waste of space.

The man with the blowtorch had created a big enough hole in the fence to awkwardly make his way through.. He pointed his contraption at one of the picnic tables and pulled the trigger. A blaze enveloped the table leaving it cherry red and melting to the ground. He stopped to readjust the shoulder pack that seemed to be spilling flammable liquid all around. Bing could tell that this man had not thought his plan through. This was an act of blind passion.

A small patch of ground some hundred feet away from the fence, closer to the attacked property was disturbed. It opened up like a storm door made out of grass and solid dirt. Military men in bright green suits emerged from the opening carrying guns attached to long hoses that came out of the hole.. The men ran forward until their hoses ran out of slack. One of the men held up an arm, signaling the others to take aim.

The man with the blowtorch ran towards the small platoon waving his flame thrower toward them, as if he could somehow make the flames go farther by flinging his arms. The flame thrower hiccuped spewing a twenty foot stream of hell fire melting the face of the platoon leader as he dropped his arm signaling the others to fire, while dropping to the ground.. A high pressured blast of water sprang across the lawn towards the man with the flamethrower, hitting him so hard that he splashed into the sky. The only thing remaining was his broken blowtorch, which had been reduced to a tiny flame burning on the muddy earth where the rest of his fuel had leaked out and caught fire.

Fifty floors was a long way to fall. Bing wasn't suicidal, but lately he been catching himself contemplating the physics of falling from his balcony. He'd been having an increasingly difficult time making sense of his life these last few months. Everything that used to make sense, was now up in the air. He was certain of nothing and couldn't even be certain of that. He wanted to figure it all out. But how could he when he didn't even know what he wanted to find out? There was just this hole in his mind. He could remember his life. He knew the who, what, when, and how of his life, but recently he'd been plagued by the question "why".

He figured that it would take about 12 seconds until he hit the ground. Splat. Then he’d too become a bag of water. Splashing in the sky.