There is a profound, grim comedy in the specific mechanics of modern disaster. We are constantly sold the shiny, futuristic lie of high-speed connectivity, of European efficiency, of a world where you can zip from one cultural heritage site to another while sipping an overpriced espresso in a climate-controlled tube. We are told that the West is a fortress of regulation and safety standards. And then, reality—that distinctively cold, unfeeling mistress—decides to remind us that we are just sacks of meat hurtling through space on rusty metal, courtesy of a literal hole in the ground.

In Spain, the latest testament to human hubris has arrived in the form of a train crash that has left at least 40 people dead. The cause? A gap in the track. Not a terrorist plot, not a sophisticated cyber-attack from a shadowy Eastern power, not an act of vengeful gods. A gap. A void. A missing piece of the very specifically linear surface required for a train to be a train. If there is a more perfect metaphor for the current state of global infrastructure and the crumbling façade of competence that governs our lives, I have yet to see it. We are building digital empires in the cloud while failing to ensure that the steel bars on the ground actually touch each other.

Officials have described the incident as “truly strange.” This is the standard lexicon of the incompetent authority figure. When the systems they are paid to maintain disintegrate into shrapnel and gore, it is never "negligence" or "predictable decay"; it is always a "strange" mystery, as if the train decided to improvise a jazz solo off the rails. There is nothing strange about gravity. There is nothing strange about the kinetic energy of a heavy object hitting a discontinuity in its path at velocity. What is strange is the persistent delusion that the people in charge of these systems are actually looking at them.

The horror of the scene is being reported with the usual breathless voyeurism, but the details betray the sheer violence of the failure. Bodies were found far from the crash site. Think about the physics required to achieve that. This wasn't a gentle derailment; this was an ejection. It was the universe rejecting the premise of the journey. We treat these machines as safe havens, dull commuter vessels where we doom-scroll on our phones, oblivious to the fact that we are trusting our lives to the lowest bidder’s maintenance schedule. Those passengers didn't buy a ticket for a ballistic trajectory test; they bought a ticket to a destination that, due to a gap in the steel, ceased to exist.

More bodies are expected to be found inside the mangled trains, we are told. The rescue effort is now a recovery effort, a grim sorting of biology from metallurgy. And while the families mourn and the politicians prepare their somber, pre-written speeches about "tragedy" and "resilience," the fundamental absurdity remains unaddressed. We live in a society that obsesses over the minutiae of safety—warning labels on coffee cups, endless terms of service agreements, performative security theater at airports—yet we seemingly cannot manage the rudimentary task of keeping the train tracks solid.

This is the European Union in a nutshell, isn't it? A sprawling bureaucracy capable of regulating the curvature of a cucumber but apparently unable to ensure the continuity of a rail line. Spain will launch an investigation, of course. There will be committees. There will be reports. Someone might even get fired, or perhaps just transferred to a different department where they can neglect a bridge instead of a railway. But the gap in the track is merely a physical manifestation of the gap in our civilization—the chasm between the complexity of the technology we use and the declining competence of the institutions charged with maintaining it.

It is difficult to muster sympathy for the system, even as one mourns the individuals crushed by it. The system is a lie. It promises protection it cannot provide. It demands taxes for infrastructure that is quietly rotting. The Right will likely blame diversity hires or immigration for the lack of maintenance, and the Left will blame corporate greed or climate change, and while they scream at each other on Twitter, the metal will continue to rust, the bolts will continue to loosen, and the gaps will widen.

Forty people are dead because the ground opened up beneath their wheels. It is a brutal, medieval way to go, dressed up in the aesthetics of modern travel. So, the next time you step onto a train, or a plane, or drive across a suspension bridge, remember the gap. It’s waiting for you. It’s the only thing in this story that was truly honest.