Lesson Excerpt 39:08 (Petrified Grass)

A possible sequence.

There’s the sound of fire engines and police sirens outside the window. Blue and red flashes slide across the ceiling, but there’s nothing inside the room. A bar of white plastic is embedded with a grid of black buttons, and a plant native to the windswept hillside on the outskirts of our country slowly grows in a ceramic bowl beside it.

A wall covered in scars. New ones form spontaneously, whenever it’s not being looked at. Behind it, out of sight, is an enormous pile of bones. They have been bleached by the sun, and made brittle by repeated freezings and thaws. Electrical storms roam the surrounding valleys, paying the structure no mind. Our country is full of massive, impersonal forces.

In our prisons there are often courtyards surrounded by high walls. In the floors of these courtyards are metal grates, painted black, beneath which rush endless flows of water. The water is opaque, and can come from any direction, but it always leads to the same place. When prisoners are released into the courtyard, sensors track and monitor them by their heat signatures. These sensors control the direction of the water’s current, and modify it based upon the output of a complex algorithm, the particular logic of which is classified.