The Last Litany of Lunev
Reports from the Bunker at the End of Time
“The killing of birds is forbidden — the birds are involved in the creation of time.” -Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov
Another era closes its eyes. The air is thick with a sleepy silence that is not the absence of sound, but the presence of too much lost meaning. No one believes even their own stories anymore, not really, and that’s just one of a thousand things that led us to this juncture. But we cannot help but repeat in imitation, even if we can no longer recall what we mimic. Ancient cargo cults of mental habit are the true architects of the future.
The world we knew is already gone. To say we linger would be both accurate and misleading; we are residues, not remnants. To be in the Bunker is to be unanchored, a fugitive reality evading capture by meaning or memory, making my task an essentially futile one.
This is not the apocalyptic moment. This has always been the state of affairs.
[Translator’s note: the rest of the first page is blank, and the next appears to have been ripped out. Given the author’s signed note later in the text, it raises the question of what preceded the sentence that runs onto the subsequent page.]
Text continues: … a fascinating odyssey, but a folly, imagining that places and people have names, and names and dates hold meaning. “1991”? I write this out of a sense of duty, or habit, perhaps something else entirely. All names and numbers are meaningless.
Many years before the fateful event, we were taken through the then recently constructed Chilean National Subterranean Preserve, which I will henceforth refer to as the Bunker. It is, was, will be an underground city carved into the Andes that began as the Chilean government imagined they would be a potential target in the event of a nuclear attack.
But you also might say the Bunker was an idea put into the press back in the Cold War days, as some people were predicting a nuclear war in the late 80s. You’ve probably seen a few images of the old Cold War bunkers that were dug into the mountainsides and hastily bricked up by the Russians (and then the Americans) as an exit strategy in the event of the atom-war that would see civilization collapse.
Stage the end of the world in your mind, any old apocalypse will do, and this is probably what you see. You have just created “the Bunker”, laid its first brick.
[Translator’s note: Written in the margin without attribution, “Art, music, and literature were recognized as an attack on sanity. Aloud, I told my family, the silence was my friend. With my ears pricked, I read a secret scroll of drama, from a movie lost in time… Here, no talking…”]
The idea behind this edifice is, in its way, as old as the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Chichen Itza. Immortality and the grave, a barrier, an exaltation in preparation for sacrifice. When you see how they are the same, you will understand where we have been living.
Not that you would ever hear talk like this on the record from a reputable source, even if I imagine many of those who live and work here have come to similar conclusions. A thousand years after the Sun was supposed to vanish from the sky, this underground city would still be thriving, the government officials said, and with it all the amenities you would need to make the long, slow recovery.
There would be enough water, they said, the underground roads and buildings would have survived, the area would be pleasantly illuminated, and if there was a nuclear war, then maybe the worst that could happen would be global cooling. Win-win, given the anti-terraforming project now well underway in the atmosphere in the sky far above our heads. As long as we all believe together, it will be as-if true. So they say.
As you will soon come to understand, it doesn’t matter in what manner the end comes. But there is no story more apocalyptic than a nuclear war. Thus, let us imagine it was nuclear fire that cooled our hunger. 20,000 years before the advent of the Hydrogen bomb, nomads hunted great beasts to extinction — following an internal design of natural causes, natural effects. The ash-shadows of bodies, painted on concrete walls, lives abridged in stone.
The world we once knew was gone when we first imagined it. We held onto seeds, and to the scant phrases and tokens we could remember. The new world is not to be mistaken for the old world, which lives only in invented memories. These memories exist because they cannot be proven false.
My first tour of this former city at the end of time — ‘the Bunker’ — took place when people were still living in the open. My tour guide, Stanislav Lunev, made quite an impression. Like many of my subsequent co-workers, he was Russian, an emissary sent by the Kremlin after their conquest of Chile to overlook new projects.
Russia Seizes Control of Chilean Government, Expands Influence Across South America
Moscow announced today that Santiago, along with key cities in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, now fall under the governance of a new “South American Socialist Federation” led by Russian appointees. This comes after months of clandestine operations, which sources indicate have been in the works since the early 1960s. The situation escalated rapidly. After weeks of sporadic civil unrest and protests demanding greater economic equity in the region, Russian military forces, disguised as peacekeeping troops under the aegis of a fabricated international mandate, executed “Operation Southern Dawn.” The overnight operation witnessed minimal resistance due to pre-arranged pacts with disenchanted factions within the local military and political landscape.
The international community has expressed deep concern over Russia’s sweeping actions. The United States, already preoccupied with the Vietnam conflict, has called an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council. Secretary of State Robert McNamara stated, “This direct intervention by Russia in the sovereign affairs of independent nations cannot and will not be tolerated.”
Inside Chile and the other affected South American nations, the response has been mixed. A segment of the populace, long frustrated by economic disparities and political corruption, has welcomed the Russian intervention. However, dissenting voices are increasingly stifled as local media outlets have come under the control of Russian information officers.
Economic analysts predict that the region will experience a short-term boost due to Russian investments in infrastructure and energy projects, particularly with the exploitation of Chile’s copper reserves. Yet questions remain about the long-term viability and self-determination of these nations under Russian governance. — By Jonathan S. Anderson Moscow Bureau Chief, International Daily Times
May 14, 1965 (Station 217 standard timecode)
Lunev had a number of peculiar mannerisms, which made us immediate acquaintances, whereas I recall no one else with us on that tour. For instance, at every imaginable opportunity, he made a point of telling me: “Life is a shit volcano.”
I have no earthly idea what Lunev meant when he said this, but nevertheless found it strangely endearing. He repeated it frequently enough that it took on the rhythm of a litany, spoken with all the certainty and reverence of a Priest, punctuated with several curses in Russian, and then a shot of liquor and one over the shoulder as if to ward off bad spirits. (Or perhaps feed them). Every time, in this order.
This impromptu but always observed ritual dispelled my inclination to pass it off as an example of a poorly understood idiom. Both of us mostly communicated in Spanish, however, as a US native, and a Yankee at that, I still maintained certain linguistic habits. His English was good, but perhaps he did not have “shit volcano.” No, I decided after the third or fourth repetition, this was not a case of misunderstanding.
He offered no explanation for this expression, beyond a knowing look and a nod, as if to ask if I saw it too. Silence would acknowledge our silent brotherhood, however on one occasion I broke my cover and pressed him.
He seemed disappointed in me, or perhaps exasperated, but finally explained, “our life was neither good nor bad, it was life; nothing more.” His changed expression told me there was no use pressing further, that he would not forget we were not in fact of one mind. Soon he broke into song, and shortly thereafter, retired to his quarters. Now he was gone.
You see, Lunev decided that he would simply pick up and move to another timeline. A strange wrinkle, but their Bunker, their way of life. As one of the Journalists sent from Station 0, I was just an observer, no matter how long I’ve been here.
The note he left for me I take to be a kind of wry joke. It said “Ψ=∫Φdτ. ничего нового”.
“Nothing new.” Or, as I might have once been inclined to say, “same shit, different day.” The equation was a generalized form of the wave function in quantum mechanics, which I do not pretend to understand, but I have an intuition that these equations are like runic symbols, possessing the power to alter reality but eternally inadequate in describing it.
The meaning of his note seems clear, however. In the conventional expanse of our linear existence, these runes could be reduced to a mere mathematical operation, an act of integration. However, when viewed through life in the Bunker, it implied possibilities which I dare not speak, and would rather not think.
Losing Lunev was not in itself a significant event. He was not functionally important to the operations I was involved with, and he was always drunk, so far as I could tell. Besides, People were disappearing all the time. It wasn’t long before it was as if he had never been with us. But his absence nevertheless started to remind me of how many people have been replaced by photographs.
I hold onto what I can, and fill in the rest. Something about an artist in Brussels who once painted a city, not of bricks or stone, but of memories. There, tribes of nomads and journalists from another Bunker hunted the great beast of time. I am told their hunger was an insatiable melody that consumed the bodies of those left behind. Anything that can occur may as well have occurred. The melting of a sapphire moon, the signing of the Eternal Accord, a cannibal god that predates creation itself.
[Translator’s note: Several sentences are here stricken out so forcefully as to be unreadable.]
This degree of uncertainty was terrifying to a great many people, and so soon myth was outlawed. The very fabric of this underground city rejected the idea of lingering in the past. Its winding tunnels and vast chambers were designed for the new, for progress, for those who looked forward and not behind. Certainly, we would not be left behind, surely someone would find a way through. But from time to time hopeful rumors travel through the corridors, even in the city’s quietest corners. There one might catch a faint, sorrowful hum — the melodies of speaking voices. Caught up in that mood, I too sometimes pondered those who found themselves secretly pondering those who existed in its margins, in alternate timelines, or merely in the receding echoes of what remains in the vaults below.
A series of increasingly odd and desperate Operations have come and gone in the time since I first arrived on this assignment, their budgets in inverse proportion to their grandiosity. One of the ideas put forward was to create a mass population exchange, to help human beings deal with the introduction of a massive immigrant population into the mix — something that settled humans en masse cannot really deal with for long periods of time, and which would have to change their way of life.
This debate appeared purely theoretical at the time, whatever migrants might actually have existed before the gates were shut. Some officials were concerned, because they knew a then-secret temporal relocation program was already in development. For my part, I felt relieved that my time living undercover would soon be at an end.
Soon enough, major nations decided that they would simply pick up and move a select cadre to another timeline. Lunev was eventually among them. Others remain to dig this mass grave in the name of life.
This is what has been learned: end-points are effectively the same. Many universes exist, mirroring the countless possible outcomes of every action, every decision. This is not mere fantasy; rather, a scientific consideration, giving voice to the otherwise inexplicable phenomena that our limited faculties struggle to comprehend. Despite their multitude, a single event horizon consumes them all: some in 1980, 1963, 2200, 2106, 1996… The dates continue virtually endlessly, but the results are the same.
Intrepid explorers have gone in every direction. None have physically returned to tell us what they found. Their very absence tells us all we really need to know. They may search the future, but all they will ever find is the past.
From this, other conclusions seem to follow. Translocation only allows for a one-way trip, once. (I am told that it has something to do with the “spin” of electrons and the flow of time, based on mathematics which are quite beyond me). We do however have their “postcards”, as we’ve come to refer to it. Some such travelers have sent photographs back to their points of origin through the PSI RetroSpectrum X-7. From this, we know that they are not simply being cremated.
However, we are forced to draw our own conclusions.
I have neither the time, expertise, nor inclination to detail all of the Operations currently running at 217, but PSI does require some sort of explanation. A NSA memo from 1977, although largely redacted in public forums, raised the question of harnessing the raw, unexplored force within the human psyche. Dr. Leonid Vasilev, in his controversial and largely underground studies, theorized about the vast, untapped reservoirs of potential within the human mind — a force that could rival the transformative power of nuclear reactions. Skeptics dismissed such pursuits as folly, although some madmen hoped it might be the next frontier in both warfare and human evolution.
Nothing of the sort was true of course, but exploration in this direction did produce the X-7, a method of capturing imagery from other timelines on film using neural nets trained on psychic mediums, who in the process bravely donated their bodies to science. From what we have seen of these peepholes across the chasm of spacetime, the message appears clear: any part of eternity that enters the field of time remains subject to the laws of entropy.
You were probably right to have left, Lunev. Best to die on your feet. A toast to you and your family.
Here in the Bunker, those who remember themselves can still lie to one another, and say that these remembrances, once inscribed in stone, now danced in the wind. Or that the silence wishes to speak of a world long gone, where cities whispered secrets in the ear of nomads and journalists etched memories into andesite rock. “The melodies of the old, in tunnels’ glow, tales of a world we used to know.” A recalled fragment of a once-popular song, or I may have simply invented it.
To think that the past will occur again for eternity is frightening, but how about when the past and the future become functionally interchangeable? Another toast for release from the prison of time and flesh in sweet apocalypse! One excuse to drink is as good as any other.
The Architects were so busy working on their public works monument to the future that they did not think they were engaging in the same project that had once obsessed the Pharaohs, with a similar outcome. Time is a spiral, a collapsing orbit, and the Bunker is its center. Here the machines continue to contemplatively whir and whine. Occasionally another photo arrives.
Let me ask you one final question: Do their bones remember their names here at the end of all remembrance? Do yours?
Assortment of images received from the PSI Operation interspersed throughout.
Notes likely belong to the unnamed author of this recovered document.
From Top in eschatological order: Stanislav Lunev photo, 1990, from the Czech Republic; Jim Wickwire photo, 1984, Cern (Europe’s giant particle physics lab), Switzerland. Source: Jim Wickwire, my business partner. Unnamed Journalist (not pictured). Source: Eric van Haren (Unknown, my sister), found with the note “All lost in the blast at the end of time.”
Legal Notice: The Chilean government has issued no statement concerning the discovery of this document or the existence of the alleged subterranean facility described within it. For now, it remains an object of speculation and scientific debate.
Translator’s Comments:
In the dim corridors of the National Library of Argentina, fate played its cards. My search for documents on Cold War espionage for an unrelated project, through some cosmic irony, led me to an obscure and forgotten manuscript of Borges tucked playfully in the corner of a folio on Lunev: “The Last Litany of Lunev.” This was fortuitous, as I was at that time considering changing the focus of my PhD studies, and this document provided such an opening.
Borges here seemed to intertwine reality with the surreal even from beyond the grave. This was clearly an early draft, a sketch of an idea perhaps considered too intricate or flimsy to execute in his time.
Stanislav Lunev, the covert protagonist, wasn’t purely a creation of free imagination. A once-decorated officer of the Soviet GRU, Lunev defected to the United States in 1992, disclosing vital intelligence about Russian espionage activities. In this tale, Lunev collaborated with scientists, engineers and architects bracing for the nuclear winter, as well as record-keepers such as the unnamed Journalist. Was it a world where the Bay of Pigs had a different outcome? It’s left ambiguous. All that’s clear is that choice requires our ignorance of the future. Living in the Bunker is to be already beyond that horizon. We might imagine an endlessly branching spider web of seeming infinite complexity, ultimately terminating with a final strand.
The narrative uses post-nuclear apocalypse as a literary device, revolving around the Bunker, a figurative and perpetual last bastion. The Bunker is eternal, timeless, that is, in a literal sense, outside of linear time. It is a threshold, a boundary that can only be approached but never crossed. “Time is a spiral, a collapsing orbit, and the Bunker is its center.” Clearly a reversed reference to the Liber XXIV philosophorum. Rather than no center and omnipresent circumference, we find the opposite, and so the “collapse”, a spiral rather than a circle.
Instances of the Bunker’s appearance are like an avatar in regard to a godform, or the sun (source of light) contrasted with the moon (reflecting that light back at us, all of Creation). In countless scenarios of mass extinction on any Earth once teeming with humans, the specifics of that ending are equally inconsequential.
The Bunker signifies the juncture where human tales — whether joyous or grievous, hopeful or desolate — cease to have meaning. The “Event Horizon”. While it represents an effort to safeguard our legacies — seed vaults, arks, museums — one must ask: for whom? Often, preservation becomes a hollow ritual, performed out of routine, stripped of hope or anticipation.
Addressing phenomena as final as extinction inherently challenges the notion of discourse. An author is cornered by this dichotomy. Perhaps Borges envisioned Lunev as the life that is beyond a need for explanation, and the author as his witness. A kind of neo-Freudian Id and Super-ego.
The distinction between the factual Lunev and Borges’ Lunev might bear concealed implications. Was it the melancholy reflection of a spy trading one confinement for another? Or perhaps Borges’ contemplation on our innate desire to narrate, to bestow significance? Venturing deeper into Borges’ world always involves the unraveling of multiple layers. Here, the duality of Lunev — the ‘real’ defector and the fictional observer of humanity’s final act — suggests a meditation on the nature of existence itself. By placing Lunev in this dual role, Borges challenges the idea of definitive reality.
You will notice that Lunev plays no real role in the story; yet he has been placed at the center of the labyrinth, perhaps as a nod to Heidegger’s “throwness”. Ultimately, Borges appears to have retrieved Lunev from historical obscurity, spotlighting him in humanity’s concluding drama, merely to assert that our storied past and artistic endeavors were fleeting.
The text introduces the concept of “Cargo cults of mental habit” as an indicator of our collective reliance on past models of thinking. This term has roots in anthropology but extends here into the realm of cultural critique, reflecting our propensity for repetition and mimicry, even when we no longer comprehend what is being replicated.
When the narrative broaches the subject of immortality and grave as being two sides of the same coin, it seems to draw upon Ernest Becker’s theories in “The Denial of Death.” The underground Bunker, much like ancient monumental architectures, is both a sanctuary and a tomb; a physical structure aimed at overcoming human finitude and an eternal resting place for those who built it. The womb/tomb analogy is facile, but clearly present. More pointedly, the Bunker is a trans-temporal sepulcher, a monument, an art museum, and in the end, a forgotten grave, with the name rubbed away.
Borges’ deliberate obscurity and interplay between fiction and reality also serve as a critique of our tendency to constantly seek the final word, to comment, postulate, theorize and equivocate. The human desire to find stories and patterns in everything, even in the face of the monolithic edifice of the Bunker is both our strength and our downfall. The monolith shall remain forever silent.
The Bunker, then, is not just a physical structure or even a symbolic one. It is the embodiment of humanity’s relentless drive to preserve and make sense through the naming of the world (e.g. Landnáma), and to place ownership over that name like a dragon slumbering atop their hoard, even when faced with our imminent end. Above all, that which we have owned will persevere. One might argue that the Bunker serves as an ironic artifact of humanity’s hubris. Amidst the radioactive rubble of Chernobyl and the declassified archives detailing Operation Northwoods, a testament to our desire to assert control through naming and categorizing. What’s in a name when the named doesn’t recognize itself, when the world rejects its own imposed taxonomy?
A handwritten annotation by Borges in the manuscript’s margin only deepened the mystery: “All must follow Lunev in his odyssey.” This solitary remark is the only comment Borges provided on this work with his name attached, which is mentioned nowhere else by either him or his many commentators, as if it was intended to be forgotten. While its provenance has been debated with me on this account, I believe it to be the genuine article. If anything should be able to travel through time, to recall the future as the past and the past as the future, why not fiction?
After documenting and translating this fragment for my PhD, I could finally return home. It felt like the first time I had stepped outside in quite a long time. But the world took on an unnervingly familiar ambiance. Buenos Aires, with its storied past, now only mirrored Borges’ Bunker. This sensation trailed me to Milan, Paris, and eventually to New York. I can feel it underneath all things manifest, casting a pall upon the world. Its essence lingers, shadowing my every move.
