aggregat
again, more unfinished yr 12 chaff. purpose? none! influences? obvious! luckily, im slightly more autonomous in my writing now
The Aggregat-4 lands back-to-front. Not physically. But sensationally. It travels three times faster than the speed of sound,,, incapacitating, white blaze comes before the sound of its descent to any observer beneath it. Well,
any invulnerable observer.
Here, however, no observer is impervious to the warhead. Instead they lie disfigured, burnt beyond recognition... (official reports), except it is that burnt beyond recognition can’t even really begin to cover the crater, the limbs mated with exhaust vanes with the soil with the detritus.
This explosion in reverse, no warning whatsoever, a body arriving before its usually-forewarning sound, lends itself to a certain type of schizophrenia- no doubt induced in the population but also attributable, diagnosable to die Rakete, the black and white cone travelling through the sky, at over 1500 degrees, not exactly determined, bent on its own destruction, but predetermined, from launch- no, from its very conception, only ever headed in one direction. Quadrille paper was as much its deathbed as any London avenue. Designed, designated for devastation of the enemy - caveat here - through its own self destruction.
Its up with the sun, 7am launch, the rockets waxing a mechanical, cacophonous, somehow bittersweet aubade to the solid ground beneath it- the two will meet again of course, but only in a fatal tangle on the other side of the water, the two lovers naked, arms strung around each other, dead in the process of life, desecrated, limp, desiccated, metal meshed with dirt, ethanol saturating, evaporating from, the pavement, obliterated circuitry embracing the rubble. L’amor fati. The engines whine on separation.
It’s an intoxicating miasma of heat and light that surrounds the Meillerwagen. Hot as hell and white as heaven. All Yugas at once, ascension, transfiguration, transcension (this one in both senses), obliteration, all temporarily present in the superhot stellar soup beneath the wrath of rockets. A white noise, every sound at once, every colour at once, created by a mechanical wheezing, convulsing of pure light varying only in degrees of immanence, planes of immanence, on a plane all of its own, but this was no plane. It was the collective attempt of humanity to “reach immortality...”, (or at least to take a step in the right direction), “...amongst the stars”. Subsequently, in this case to destroy itself.
Die Rakete climbs higher, slowly beginning to keel over to almost due west, this one is going to strike northern London, disregarding possible malfunction.
The primitive flight computer has a simple task: it must perform a double integration on the readings provided by the accelerometer, first converting to the velocity of Die Rakete and then to the distance travelled. Near the intended apogee of the flight path it must cut off the engines powering Die Rakete. Brennschluß. The point at which the rocket can only lose kinetic energy, the point at which it is consigned to crash. The flight computer continues to map out its course towards its own doom, it cannot save itself, only integrate.
Eventually the plume of smoke following the A4 also visually supersedes it, Die Rakete no more than a rapidly moving morning star, sun glinting off the now-miniscule body. All is now silent but for a small crack echoing in the distance-t. sound barrier. The sky is cloudless, baby-blue. Innocent.