Here’s how you become death:
You take a city, maybe it’s in the middle of nowhere. Desert heat blistering your skin, dry air that chokes your breath. It’s isolated, forgotten almost, except now you’ve built it into something more. There are barracks, dull and grey, stretching out across the sand, and inside those barracks, minds are at work.
Minds brilliant enough to twist nature into something monstrous. The work is quiet, steady. They scribble on blackboards, heads bent in concentration, lips pressed tight against their thoughts. Oppenheimer, with his sharp mind and sharper eyes, watches over them all. He is a ghost, almost. The man who will birth the bomb but never touch it. He dreams of stars at night, of destruction, of equations bleeding into nightmares, but in the day, he is only a man. Just a man who wants to know how far is too far. The others follow him — Fermi, Teller, Szilard — all of them with hands trembling slightly as they reach for the impossible.
The test is coming. They don’t say it out loud, but you can feel it in the air. The Trinity test. It’s supposed to be a moment, a single instance where time stops, where all the work, all the sleepless nights, all the fear, the hope, and the regret, hang suspended in the desert air. They gather out there in the New Mexico wilderness, faces half-lit by the dull red glow of the countdown. And then it happens.
They tell you it was like a second sun, that it rose from the earth instead of the sky. That it burned so bright, so white, you couldn’t look at it without feeling your soul catch fire.
Oppenheimer watches it all with hollow eyes. "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," he says, but it’s a whisper. He doesn’t smile. None of them do. There is no victory here, only the realisation of what they’ve done.
The Manhattan Project ends where it began, in the desert, beneath a sun that isn’t a sun. The war is over. The bomb will burn cities and the whole world will be in shock as it realises what this is capable of.
But for now, at this very moment, they are just men standing in the sand, listening to the hum of the universe as they feel the weight of knowing that what they have done will change the world forever.
And so here is how you become death; you build it, piece by piece, and when it's done, you light a match and watch the world burn.
