Welcome to the Dark Walls

            The special live broadcast began:

             “No one ever notices everything: but sometimes it happens, when no one is noticing everything, everyone misses the same thing in the same moment.

            “Sometimes, even in a controlled environment, phenomena escape detection and disappear instantly, without apparent provocation. At other times, undetected phenomena continue to exist locally but continue to exist undetected.

            “At first, the dark walls would evaporate undetected with the conclusion of each experiment conducted with the Large Hadron Collider. After hundreds of accelerations and numberless particle collisions, at some point the dark walls no longer disappeared but instead migrated off-site into apartment blocks and office buildings, churches and courtrooms, cafes and restaurants, hospitals and schools, garages and stables and basements and attics and closets and elevator shafts and stairwells and all the physical structures that make Geneva and its environs a metropolitan area.

            “Why the dark walls migrated only into interior spaces remains a mystery, but they began sinking into every unoccupied enclosed space, constantly moving and shifting away from human occupants or visitors, in all those locales that Geneva's residents and visitors otherwise never investigated and routinely failed to examine. The dark walls, we can say now, gravitated to all untended spots, hiding in the apparent desolation typical of unobserved places. (It does not go without saying that these untended spots were never subject to surveillance camera monitoring.)

            “Soon enough, the dark walls became sufficiently numerous and disseminated throughout Geneva and its environs, without regard for human occupancy. Dark walls began spawning dark corners at their inevitable intersections (some dark walls, taking advantage of local physics, acquired the unremarkable aspects of dark ceilings and dark floors): and those dark corners became the specific locations from which the real trouble began to emerge.

            “At first, unsuspected rooms were infiltrated by only a single dark corner. Quite soon, every room, every cubicle, every divided and sundered space in and around Geneva provided by architecture, design, and construction was host and home to multiple dark corners, never fewer than one and often the full complement of eight permitted by standard interior configurations.

            “The dark corners clung soon enough to every corner unobserved. By the time the mute crusts of greenish black began swallowing sound and cancelling out all amplitudes and frequencies, all echoes and reverberations, all timbres and tones, all pitches and decibels, all harmonies and dissonances, it was far too late to— . . .”

                                            -END-