In the arid, unforgiving folds of the Spanish countryside, a peculiar ritual is currently underway. It is a ceremony of high-visibility vests and heavy machinery, a desperate scavenger hunt staged against the backdrop of a mountain range that has seen empires rise and fall, yet remains remarkably unimpressed by our latest mechanical failure. The emergency teams are out in force, picking through the jagged remains of a train that decided, quite abruptly, to stop pretending it was a triumph of modern engineering. They are searching for what remains of the passengers, a task that is as grim as it is unnecessary for anything other than the psychological comfort of the survivors and the bureaucratic tidiness of the Spanish state. It is the ultimate end-game of our obsession with kinetic energy: we spend billions to move human meat from point A to point B slightly faster, only to spend millions more scraping it off the scenery when the physics of gravity and momentum remember their original programming.

The Spanish government, a collective of well-dressed functionaries who couldn't manage a village bake sale without a corruption scandal, will inevitably frame this as a 'tragedy of national proportions.' They will offer the usual pittance of 'thoughts and prayers,' a currency so devalued it makes the Bolivar look like gold bullion. The Left will scream about infrastructure disinvestment and the need for more public spending, ignoring the fact that you could gold-plate every sleeper on the track and still find a way for human error or mechanical entropy to turn a luxury commute into a metallic burial. The Right, meanwhile, will likely find a way to blame the unions or perhaps some vague 'external factor' to protect the sanctity of the private contractors who built the thing. Both sides are, as per usual, missing the point entirely: we have built a world so complex and so fragile that the slightest deviation from the spreadsheet results in a pile of burning scrap metal in a valley no one cared about until forty-eight hours ago.

Observe the 'emergency teams' as they navigate the mountain range. They are the high-priests of the secular age, performing a liturgical search for 'remains.' It is a word that sanitizes the horror, turning biology into a logistical problem to be solved with forensic kits and DNA sequencing. This is the European Union’s vision realized: a borderless continent connected by high-speed arteries that function perfectly right up until they don’t. We are told that this connectivity is the pinnacle of civilization, yet here we are, back in the dirt, digging through the rocks like our Neolithic ancestors, except they were looking for flint and we are looking for teeth. The sheer absurdity of the situation is heightened by the landscape itself. The mountains don’t care about the timetable. They don’t care about the 'European Rail Traffic Management System.' They are simply mass and shadow, indifferent to the screaming metal that occasionally interrupts their silence.

To think that this search provides 'closure' is the greatest delusion of all. Closure is a marketing term invented by grief counselors to sell books. There is no closure when a train flies off a track; there is only a permanent, jagged hole in the reality of those left behind. But the State requires a process. It requires reports, data points, and a final tally of the 'remains' to satisfy the insurance companies and the court clerks. It is a grotesque accounting exercise disguised as a humanitarian effort. We are a species that cannot accept the chaos of our own existence, so we codify our disasters into manageable stages of 'recovery.' First the search, then the identification, then the inevitable memorial service where politicians will stand with somber faces, pretending they aren’t already calculating the electoral impact of the casualty count.

The search in the Spanish mountains will conclude, the debris will be hauled away to some rusting graveyard for failed ambitions, and the tracks will be repaired. We will be told that lessons have been learned, that 'safety protocols' have been updated, and that this will never happen again—until it does. Because the fundamental truth that neither the Spanish authorities nor the EU technocrats want to admit is that we are all just passengers on a high-speed projectile, hurtling toward an inevitable stop, governed by systems we don't understand and managed by people who are more concerned with their pension plans than the structural integrity of the world they’ve built. Until then, the search continues in the mountains, a tiny, pathetic display of human order attempting to reconcile itself with the brutal reality of its own incompetence.