Beyond Even Fear

On March 3rd, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt made his now-famous first inaugural address, stating among other things, that the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.

There is much to say from this quote, and from this address, or for any number of other statements made during this time, or really, any other inaugural address, as each comes from one in a position of power who decides the fate of the United States for four years. This specific speech was historic for its own reasons, namely because it offered hope in an otherwise bleak reality, something that was missing throughout the Great Depression until this point (as it turns out, shooting on WWI veterans who are trying to collect promised bonuses slightly earlier than they were supposed to receive them does not generally socialize hope to the listening populace).

However, there is one singular flaw in this quote. Roosevelt was wrong. Perhaps one could defy all fear, and stand against the long night. People are able to conquer their fears all the time, or at least not allow these fears to rule their lives. Thanks to modern psychology, even the most debilitating fear can be broached, if however not bested, through therapy and mutual aid.

And yet there is one thing vaster than fear, vaster than everything really, an undulating mass that has hounded humanity from the very beginning of the species, and perhaps even longer than that, a shade that has stalked every life form on Earth and likely which haunts the nightmares of stars.

This is a pulsar, the collapsed, magnetized core of a supermassive star. Pulsars produce continued beams of electromagnetic radiation, which are effectively just naturally occurring radio waves. This is caused by the instinctual fear response of long-dead stars.

The bicycle.

The bicycle was invented in 1817 by Karl von Drais. According to Wikipedia, “a bicycle is a human-powered or motor-powered assisted, pedal-driven, single-track vehicle, having two wheels attached to a frame, one behind the other”.

Both of these facts are lies; bicycles have existed since the dawn of human existence, and likely were forged at the very dawn of the universe. They burn with a malevolence only possibly manifested at the very beginning of the Big Bang, for even a moment later would have cooled and tempered this well of endless hatred. Their sole purpose is the utter and complete unmaking of all things, specifically the continued torment of humanity, given humanity’s unique feature of self-awareness. It is through this that they allowed themselves to manifest under the hands of Karl von Drais, but their tendrils extend across time and space.

The Enemy, plotting silently

Bikes have been everywhere. Bikes have involved themselves in everything. In one way or another, the root cause of all conflict and suffering ties into the bicycle.

Take the Burning of the Library of Alexandria, shown below:

Somehow, bikes, which have no hands, are very good at lighting things on fire.

See the ships, the various buildings, the people, and the flames. What one does not see is the bicycle, but this is to be expected; such terror could not be contained within the painting itself. Had the painter tried, they would surely have failed and ruined all that they had worked to depict, or they would simply have to redact the entire painting. Had they succeeded in truly depicting the viciousness of the bicycle, though, this piece would almost certainly have become yet another tool of the bicycle. Through their cosmic power, the bicycles would have morphed the painting into a cognitive hazard that could infect all who laid their eyes upon it with their foul power across all of time.

While we have no surviving photographic evidence, bicycles were also involved in the extinction of the dinosaurs. Perhaps the bikes needed to remove all dinosaurs from existence, as dinosaurs never rode bikes (and so could not empower the bikes to continue their vile cosmic ways). Other theories posit this not to be a social choice of the dinosaurs, but perhaps due to the fact that dinosaurs simply did not evolve with bike-riding in mind. Or maybe the bikes needed to assure their own creation (even though they are vast eldritch horrors from before all things), and so needed to wipe away the dinosaurs to pave the way for mammals, then hominids, and then eventually humanity.

According to science, while an apex predator before its extinction, the T-Rex could not have ridden a bicycle due to their small arms not allowing them to properly and safely hold onto a bike’s handlebars.

However, the end result was the same; the bikes unleashed their power onto the world, and caused a mass extinction. Likely, they have caused multiple mass extinctions, especially if we ascribe to the theory that the bikes have been manipulating the evolutionary history of the Earth in order to pave the way for humanity to exist, such that the bikes could torment them. We cannot say precisely what the bikes did (namely again, because for some reason the dinosaurs took no photos and left no video evidence), but we do have significant evidence proving their involvement. See the below image of a comet, taken from a human satellite (and not a dinosaur satellite, which are all bad and inherently garbage).

As we can see again, bikes have an extreme proclivity for fire.

If you looked straight into the comet, and also happened to have eyes that were sensitive enough to see individual photons, you would see that there is at least one bicycle in the center of this comet, and is actually what is producing the motion that allows the comet to shoot across space.

Bikes were also involved in the sinking of the Titanic, having manipulated the global environment for millions of years to create the first icebergs (and thereby causing every Ice Age, in particular the Little Ice Age, which led to numerous civilization collapses following the Bronze Age). 

An iceberg, with deeply unclear and highly debatable (in that none exist) evidence that we can surely immediately agree is proof of bike intervention. It should be noted that this is a break from the fire-related bike schemes, which show that bikes can in fact learn and adapt.

Fearing intervention by horses (who in turn, could have removed the bike from society entirely by replacing them as a means of transportation), bikes caused the collapse of the Roman Empire, which they fermented after Caligula gave his horse Incitatus the position of consul. Of course, Caligula was a horrific tyrant and the Roman Empire the cause of uncountable horrors and mass enslavement (all of which probably at least partially bike-caused), so perhaps its fall was not the worst thing that could have occurred.

To further prove this, numerous science fiction works in the early days of science fiction dealt with the inevitable extinction of the horse, as mechanized travel would make them obsolete. These are all clearly attempts by bike collaborators, who seek to alter human cultures so as to surgically remove the horse and thereby pave the way for further bike interference in our affairs.

Given that Caligula was assassinated, we will never know how Incitatus may have carried as Consul, although some (ie: zero people) believe that Incitatus was secretly a die-hard democrat (likely only Athenian though, we are all products of our historic periods) who would have tried to disassemble the Roman Empire from the inside.

The Emu War, the second closest humanity has collectively gotten to total extinction, given our failure to form a proper defense against an existential terror (unlike the previous Roman war against the sea, which was highly successful), was also precipitated by the bicycle. This is clear from the fact that the Australian government denied attempts to build fences to stave off the conflict, opting instead to utilize puny machine guns against the emus, which are literal manifestations of everything wrong with the universe. This is easily proven, given the fact that bikes cannot pass through fences, and so bikes try to prevent the creation of fencing wherever they can. This is why Brooklyn College has a fencing class (KINS 1003, specifically), to defend against the bicycle threat, and not because of any other possible reason. We can prove this easily by looking at all of Brooklyn College’s records, which clearly state that the campus’s anti-emu stratagems have held firm since the college’s founding (which is also why FDR visited Brooklyn College and helped build the Roosevelt building, so as to further our strategic command and tactical efforts against the emu threat) Of course, the fact that the Australian government did eventually build fencing around the farms under emu-induced siege, does prove that the bicycle can be stopped.

This is the face of our existential enemies, beings of pure hatred, devoid of all kindness, whose depravity is only second to the unimaginable terrors housed within whatever gaping maw the bicycle has instead of a soul.

However, before anyone gets their hopes to high, bikes have two wheels. The Cavendish Laboratory, where the atom was first split, bombarded lithium with generated protons, converting the single lithium nucleus into two split helium nuclei. As the number two is clearly irrevocably tied to the bicycle, we can therefore also argue that the bicycle is similarly cleaved into the atom, and specifically atomic research, which caused the creation of the nuclear bomb and the first instance of humanity being armed with weapons with the capacity for complete species annihilation, something we have yet to ever top since.

People say this was letting the genie out of the bottle, but the real force that opened the bottle was not humans but bicycles (which was probably very hard, on account of the bicycle not having arms, although it is very likely that the bicycle has long ago stolen the technology of our arms and repurposed into their own malign goals, particularly our thumbs, which are highly-guarded secrets such that other animals will not be able to assume control over tools and advanced machinery, but this is a tangent for another time). The horrors of nuclear war are only mitigated by the concept of mutually assured destruction, such that the proliferation of nuclear weapons means that a single launch will doom everything (so we best hope no launch ever happens again), but this only applies to biological matter. The bicycles will survive, given they are inanimate, and watch as their machinations have finally brought about our total and complete annihilation.

It should come as no surprise that Fermilab (technically named the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and named after Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist who could not stomach fascism and so fled to America and naturalized here) has a particle accelerator (given the actual reason that an accelerator laboratory sort of needs an accelerator), and that this particle accelerator’s main section is shaped like a circle, just like a bike’s wheels (given that circles are very common objects not in any way actually tied to the bicycle, but also because the flow of particles generally needs this shape).

Perhaps there are other hopes, for stopping the bicycle (such as using unicycles and tricycles, which are totally different than the bicycle for reasons that surely are not arbitrary) or at least bicycle mitigation, such that we should not simply accept our inevitable defeat at the hands of our first and greatest foe. Clearly, the world has not yet ended, no matter how vast and powerful bicycles are. Perhaps this says something about the indomitable human spirit. Or perhaps the extreme power of friendship, or that of love, or positive thinking, or sheer cosmic stubbornness, the fact that bicycles are actually just inanimate objects that aren’t any of the things this post claims them to be, perhaps the immense power of the IRS shields us (given the IRS is the strongest and most capable anti-fascist organization in the United States), or perhaps we are safe thanks to the efforts of Corporal Wojtek, a bear who carried ammunition and learned how to ride a motorcycle, alongside the II Polish Corps (who formed part of the Free Polish forces during the Second World War).

Corporal Wojtek, right, alongside an unnamed soldier, both studying plans to clearly prevent continued bike interference.

We are now heading towards the beginning of a new epoch; one where the bicycles can no longer hide behind the veneer (and truth) of just being inanimate objects. Soon a reckoning will come, pitting the sum total of humanity against its own unified, original nightmare. Should humanity prevail, the gates of the purest utopia will surely open, given that we will have finally been able to throw away every conflict, social ill, and prejudice, to fight the purest strain of the greatest evil imaginable. If the bicycles win, there will be nothing left; the universe will be sucked dry of all manner of meaning, and that will be the end, sent off not with a bang but with the sound of bicycles laughing. In preparation for this day, we must remain stoic, and keep ourselves away from bikes at the height of their own power, which happens to be the 25 hours between mathematical sundown on a Friday and mathematical nightfall on Saturday, due to the fact that this is God’s Day of Rest, and while God rests, the bikes scheme. However, we can make them waste their schemes but not interacting with them, so as not to fuel their malicious deeds. On the other days though, we must tire them to the best of our abilities, lest they rest during the rest of the week and grow strong enough to end all reality.

The only good bike is a tired bike.