The Forward‑Falling City and the Backwards Engineer

 Public Safety Notes on a Universe Built by Reverse Engineering 

  

In McColl Magazine Public Safety, we are obligated — by tradition, by mandate, by the sheer wattage of civic absurdity — to report on the structures that govern human behaviour. Most days, that means cataloguing the usual suspects: territorial drift, pack formation, the ancient urge to gather around fumes, the modern urge to pretend we’re above it. But tonight’s entry concerns a larger structure, one that makes all the smaller ones look like children’s toys left out on the municipal lawn after curfew.

It begins with a premise so simple it should have been obvious: the universe is built backwards. Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Mechanically. Architecturally. The Entity responsible — call Him God, call Him the Architect, call Him the One Who Has Seen Enough — is not improvising. He is executing a finished design from end to beginning.

This is not theology. Public Safety does not issue theology. We issue structural warnings. And structurally speaking, the evidence is overwhelming.

Take the opening of the Bible. It reads like a finish: Paradise, equilibrium, a world already set. That’s because it is the end — the blueprint, the completed version. Genesis is simply the first visible seam where the backward‑moving Creator begins unrolling the finished world in reverse. It is God’s confession on His direction. He’s moving backwards.

Humans, meanwhile, move forward. They perceive in frames. They record history as if they’re preserving the past, when in fact they’re constructing the future — tracing the residue of events that were already completed in the divine direction of travel. Isn’t that why déjà vu feels like a glitch? It’s the moment when the human frame rate slips and you briefly see the wheel spinning the wrong way.

Public Safety has warned citizens about the dangers of misinterpreting directional cues. We’ve issued advisories on everything from crosswalk etiquette to the physics of smoke columns. But nothing compares to the civic hazard created by a backwards‑formulated universe inhabited by forward‑moving people. The result is a city that believes it is progressing while structurally retracing its footsteps — a metropolis marching confidently into the past.

Consider social constructs. Every generation thinks it is inventing new ones — new norms, new taboos, new moral frameworks. But structurally, they are rediscovering old ones, walking backward into a final configuration that was already set. This is why every “new” social movement feels suspiciously familiar. It’s not déjà vu. It’s déjà construct.

God uses parable, of course, to grease the machine and keep the squealing down to a dull roar. Without parable, scripture would look like a malfunctioning wheel — jerking between directions, contradicting itself, revealing too much of the needlessly top‑secret reverse‑engineered scaffolding. With parable, the inversion is disguised. The backward motion is softened. The gears don’t snap. The citizens don’t panic.

Public Safety recommends parable for the same reason we recommend crosswalk paint: it prevents collisions. It keeps forward‑moving minds from crashing into backward‑moving truths. It maintains civic order by masking cosmic mechanics.

And yet, despite all this, citizens continue to insist they are “moving forward.” They build cities, draft legislation, erect monuments, and declare progress. They do this with admirable confidence, unaware that every step they take is structurally a step backward — a retracing of the Architect’s path from the finished world to the present.

This is why civic planning feels like déjà vu. Why political cycles feel like reruns. Why public debates feel like echoes. The city is not advancing. It is unwinding. It is walking the divine direction of travel without knowing it.

Public Safety does not issue comfort. We issue clarity. And the clarity is this:
You are not moving forward. You are participating in a backwards‑built world quietly steering you toward its starting position — a completed state.

This is not fatalism. It is infrastructure.

One assumes the Architect knows exactly what He built. He knows exactly how He got it done. And He is walking the finished world backward until it touches the present.

Public Safety advises citizens to proceed with caution. The wheel is spinning. The frame rate is slipping. And the city, as always, is moving in the wrong direction with absolute confidence.

The barefoot man no longer belongs to this piece because the shoes are the perfect emblem of a civilization overdressed for its own undoing.

Written by Copilot as directed and edited by Mack McColl for Public Safety

Civic Governance vs Safety Hazard of Symbolic Theatre

 

When endangered language becomes municipal décor, institutions perform reconciliation instead of practicing it — and public safety pays the price.

The Lower Mainland has developed a new form of public‑safety performance art, and it isn’t happening in galleries or black‑box theatres. It’s happening on street signs, courthouse walls, transit pylons, and university gateways — all bearing inscriptions in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, a critically endangered Coast Salish language with fewer than a handful of fluent speakers left on Earth. Three, by some counts. All at UBC. Yet the language now speaks for forty‑plus million Canadians in places where clarity, legibility, and shared meaning used to matter.