It was raining the night the poet set foot on the island whence the last of the Freedom Cities had sent its bitter final transmission to the attentive interest of few and the mourning of none. He had had to transgress not just law but shame to get into the bunkers seeking, he had told others and himself, to understand the petty gleeful atrocities the world was rebuilding itself from driven by a generation's spiteful vow. In this he was honest; not necessarily so in the reason why. The haphazard catacombs he had already known about — the bodies felled by violence and archaic disease piled next to the cryogenic tubes that had failed before any kitchen fridge — and he had not needed any understanding of anatomy to know their uniformity of gender and proverbially quote-unquote "race." The bullet holes, the concentric waves of chaos, the monstrous hints of things they, even they, had tried to hide at the end. Even the endless videos in the still functional backups added nothing to what historians taught about what they had said and done.
Yet the poet's instinct had told him there was something to be found there and not elsewhere. The poet stayed and watched. Hours and hours he scrolled and watched and listened until the familiarity of the bunker's rooms merged with the familiarity of the words and what they did not say. Week by week he felt the far-away bustling of cities more alien than the damp echoing of the tunnels, their prosperity an insult, their happiness predicated on the hollow in his chest he had once written poetry from and for. He felt he understood new things and with the new understanding felt new fears; he had expected both but not what he would understand and what he would be afraid of, nor had he expected the hate that came with the fear. After a while he forgot to notice the fear. It was raining when the man left the island with a tablet full of old videos and the taste of new venoms and ambitions on his tongue.