The Weight of Gravel: A Journey Through the Clieun and WEIL-HIS Tribes

Understanding Life in the Shadows

The road ahead of them is covered in gravel. Not fresh gravel, mind you, but old gravel—churned and displaced. It crackles under their feet, a sound that is both hollow and definitive. Scattered throughout it are chunks of matter that simply do not belong here. Remnants of something once organised and purposeful, now broken into pieces so small that they have ceased to mean anything individually. There’s surprise buried in all of it. There always is.

Selim often thinks about death. More often than he thinks about food or shelter or the angle of the sun at different times of day. Death sits on the throne of spiritual conversion. That’s how he understands it. It’s something embedded in the thoughts of the Clieun team, seeded long before the current arrangements came into being. The Clieun people have built their entire system of meaning around a sense of foreboding toward the MEGALMEN. This is the ideological drive of the common body of Clieun. It’s not exactly a religion, though it functions like one. It’s not precisely a philosophy, though it borrows its language. It’s simply the organising principle of everything they do and refuse to do.

The WEIL-HIS Perspective

The WEIL-HIS tribe does not embrace death like normal people would. They prefer the sense of permanence. The idea that they work towards something lasting, even if that something is vague or unclear. There’s a naturalness to it that Selim has stopped questioning. You stop questioning things that are simply there, much like you stop questioning the colour of a wall you’ve looked at for long enough.

Selim is convinced of this. He’s been convinced for so long that it no longer feels like conviction. It feels like knowledge. The kind of knowledge you don’t need to argue for because it simply is, just like the gravel beneath their feet, just like the dead weight of the buried SHUPA-Qs.

Dragoj, on the other hand, has no theory. He’s done with philosophy. He’s finished with ideas about surviving in a larger sense—ideas that involve meaning and frameworks. All Dragoj cares about is the resumption of normality. He says the word often. Normality. He says it like others might name a place they long to return to, a specific city or street. Normality. As if it’s a location on a map, if only someone would provide one.

The Exhaustion of Normality

Selim finds this exhausting in a way he can’t fully articulate. What kind of normality is this when you can’t pursue your daily habits? What kind of normality exists when your safety is your first concern, and the safety of those around you comes second? This isn’t normality. It’s something else entirely, something for which language hasn’t yet caught up. It requires a new word or perhaps just silence.

Outside the SHUPA quarters, the WEIL-HIS soldiers, or the engineer siblings as some call them, are building. They’re building well and high. They’ve been at it for as long as Selim can remember, long enough that he can’t imagine the structure without its additions. They’re adding cage-like framed steel bars on top of the brickwork exteriors. The bars are electrified and ready to go live. They will be notorious when they do, for everyone contained within the enclosed clusters. Selim knows this because he pays attention. That’s his particular problem and gift—he pays attention when it would be easier not to.

Selim has become used to it. Not comfortable, but used to it. A person can become used to almost anything if the alternative is not becoming used to it. His daily routine consists of three things. The first is getting his neck to stop tightening, which involves cigars—the ritual of lighting them, waiting, and the slow release of smoke that his body craves, much like others crave water or movement. The second is the laps—the round-the-block walk he does each morning, the same route, the same corners, pausing at the same point where gravel gives way to pavement. The third is reading, though that’s running out now. He’s finished all of Muriel Spark’s works, and the warden won’t provide anything else. He specifically asked for James Peterson’s works, but they refused. They wouldn’t authorise anything in the science-fiction category or anything that might suggest a world other than the one currently being administered.

They’ve grown tired of his requests. There’s now an injunction against further demands because the system cannot tolerate them. This was explained to him in writing, in the dry language that systems use when they’ve made a decision and want you to understand it’s final.

“Since when have I demanded anything?” he exclaims to no one in particular, to the walls of the SHUPA quarters, to the air inside a room that’s five metres by five metres and has been lived in for far too long. “I’ve always been very polite about it. Always nicely.” He ends his complaints with that word. Nicely. As if the manner of asking should have made a difference. As if politeness were a currency that could be exchanged for books.

Dragoj’s Different Reality

For Dragoj, the rest of the day is something else entirely. He moves through it differently, conveying interests without the pipe-network of the MEGALMEN. This means he’s navigating the day without the underlying structure that gives it shape. He envisions a life, when he speaks about it at all, that’s completely immersed in the trenches that NIGELOS serves. NIGELOS as home. NIGELOS as the thing that serves you, that organises the serving, that makes it feel like something other than what it is.

His head has grown bigger—not physically, or not only physically, but in the way a person’s head expands when it’s been inside itself for too long without sufficient contact with the outside. His lips, in contrast, don’t work as they used to. There’s a disconnection between what’s happening inside and what comes out. He’s home-bound, prone to bouts of long sleep that can’t be described as normal sleep. It crosses over into something more like absence, where the body decides to be elsewhere for a while since the place it’s in offers very little.

Selim is often amused by Dragoj—not in a cruel way, but in the way you’re amused by someone whose relationship to reality is so different from your own that it produces a kind of wonder in you. They both live in the SHUPA quarters, sharing a room that’s five metres by five metres, equipped with a timer that measures every human behaviour by the second. Every movement, every change in breath rate, every stillness that lasts beyond a certain threshold. It’s a consistent meaning tool, the kind of thing you need to decide about before it opens up to you, before you understand what it’s asking. A living limited edition of the type of INSTA-OILS moon. How can a claustrophobic human live in there? This is a question Selim asks himself but doesn’t answer.

The Dangers of CODE-XPEER

It’s hard to imagine a claustrophobic elvo in these conditions. Someone who needs to head out for daily walks—not for exercise or destination, but for the simple requirement of being outside and moving. The problem is that the CODE-XPEER runs out. This bluish-to-green liquid is contained in a glazed vertical bottle. It drops and drips every time the lock-code of the SHUPA-Q is activated. Every exit, every entrance, every time the seal is broken and remade. If the CODE-XPEER runs out while you’re inside the SHUPA-Q, that’s it. That’s the end of the specific chapter you’re in.

The liveable block slips under, unseen, into the unseen, and is buried. Nobody watches it happen. Nobody marks it. It takes up to a day for the SHUPA-Q to complete the burial, taking itself and potentially the humans inside it down into the rocky, compacted, indifferent earth beneath everything. There’s no ceremony around this. There’s no sound anyone on the outside can hear. One day the SHUPA-Q is there, and the next day there’s gravel where it was, and the gravel does not remember.

When you zoom out and see a wider angle of the CLOSTOR, the full picture that’s invisible from inside, you see that out of two billion SHUPA-Qs, two-thirds are already buried. Less than a billion remain above ground, untouched, still conscious, still running their timers and their CODE-XPEER bottles and their populations of exhausted inhabitants. Selim and Dragoj are holders of one of these remaining SHUPA-Qs. This poses a terrible problem. Not a metaphorical problem, but a concrete, ticking, liquid problem contained in a glazed vertical bottle mounted beside the door.

Dragoj has not arrived at the point of giving a damn about this. Selim knows this because he’s been watching him. Watching is what Selim does when he cannot read, walk, smoke, or sleep. He’s paid a lot of attention to instructions and guidance over the nine months they’ve been together in this space—what Selim privately thinks of as the closest quarters of his life. Across all those days and nights, in the particular quality of silence that a five by five metre room produces when two people inside it have stopped talking, Selim has never managed to turn over a million burials in his mind without arriving at the same conclusion: they were all gone. Every one of them. They had vanished, disappeared off the face of the earth in the most literal sense.

Selim is clearly traumatised by this knowledge. He doesn’t know much better than what he knows now, which is to say that the knowledge has not led anywhere useful. It hasn’t produced a plan, a resolution, or even a satisfying despair. It has simply settled into him like sediment, slowly, without drama, changing the composition of what it settles into. He’s tempted, regularly, to switch Dragoj off from his particular mode of living and just bring him back to reality. To shake him. To make him see.

But his fear is that he might accidentally trigger some kind of consequential attack from Dragoj. Not a physical attack necessarily—something worse. Some final retreat into the interior from which there would be no return.

A Gentle Approach

Instead, he decides to tap him on the shoulder. Gently. Like you would tap someone who’s sleeping and whom you don’t want to frighten. He asks Dragoj to listen carefully for what he’s about to say.

Surprisingly, Dragoj listens.

“No. I do not believe this malarkey,” he responds immediately, without pause, without pretending to consider the information.

Selim feels he’s not being taken seriously. He feels this the way you feel something you already knew was going to happen, with a tiredness almost indistinguishable from acceptance.

He tries another approach. To see if Dragoj can be convinced through evidence rather than argument, he unlocks the SHUPA-Q, steps outside into the gravel and the quality of the outside air, and asks Dragoj to nip out and see it for himself. The bottle. The dripping. The slow diminishment of the liquid that’s keeping them above ground.

Dragoj, innocently, steps outside. He stands in the gravel with his larger head and uncooperative lips, looking at what Selim shows him. Selim points out the drips coming from the CODE-XPEER. The steady, indifferent, rhythmic drips. Dragoj doesn’t react.

“You see,” Selim says, keeping his voice as level as possible, “this dripping is a constant event. It happens every single time we open the bloody thing. Every time. Without exception.”

Dragoj looks at him with the expression of someone who’s heard a fact and found it insufficient. The expression of someone waiting to be told why the fact matters, why it connects to anything else, why it should produce any particular feeling or course of action.

“So what are you telling me?” Selim asks, knowing Dragoj won’t ask it himself. Dragoj has learned to wait for Selim to provide both the information and the framing of it, sometimes even the appropriate response. “What I’m telling you is that every drip is almost like a moment in our lives. Every single one. Once the liquid is gone and we’re locked inside, we’re finished. This thing begins burying. Deep down into the ground. Into this rocky, unforgiving piece of earth that doesn’t care about us even slightly.”

After a moment of silence, a silence Selim can’t quite read, Dragoj says that what they should do is simply stop going out. Ensure they don’t get locked into the second sequence.

“Simple,” he says.

“I mean,” Dragoj continues, warming to the logistics, “we could do a division of labour type of arrangement. I could monitor the liquid dynamics. Watch the bottle. Keep track of the level. Whereas you would just continue doing your thing and keep tapping me on the shoulder to inform me of anything relevant.” He adds this last part as though it’s a generous concession, as if the offer of being tapped on the shoulder is something Selim should be grateful for.

Selim’s face becomes very still. It’s the kind of stillness that comes when someone is no longer engaging with what’s in front of them but has moved into a space somewhere else entirely. He watches Dragoj. He waits. He waits until Dragoj turns his attention back to the bottle, to the vertical cylinder of bluish-to-green liquid, to the drips that are and have always been the central fact of their situation.

And then, very quickly, without announcement or farewell, Selim steps back inside the SHUPA-Q and pulls the door shut behind him.