Describo todo lo que puedo percibir, intento ordenarlo, darle un lugar, allá en el mundo y en mí: letanías, hombres robustos con camisas blancas, formas redondas de color azul, deformaciones, palabras que fueron pronunciadas de forma diferente, nuevo gris del cielo. Describí a las personas del bus de las 7.00 AM: diecisiete mujeres, trece hombres, dos niñas, cada uno con sus gestos, sus zapatos. La esquina de la casa rosa con bugambilias donde hay un perro con un juguete de color rojo en el hocico. El señor de la tienda que barre la acera y usa un gorro ridículo de navidad en agosto. Quise incluir recuerdos o ideas del pasado pero no hay memoria, al final opté por describir y hablar sobre las ventanas, de cómo se crearon para ver.

En la noche describí mi cuerpo, veinte dedos, lunar en la espalda, orejas un poco rojas, ojos aún oscuros, cabello un poco más largo, los dolores habituales y las mismas cicatrices. Soy yo. Conté los libros y están dispuestos: blanco, blanco, café, rojo, azul, blanco, negro. Suena una olla en el fogón, un par de televisores y ambulancias. El olor terroso de la cúrcuma se acentúa con el calor y la luna llena.

La imagen se presenta como una alucinación, natural y santa. Los cuerpos, incluso los inertes, son límites inquebrantables. Solo los insectos tienen hambre y beben fruta podrida durante el verano. Los sonidos se enredan a mis ruidos biológicos y no logro conocer sus orígenes. Las nubes caen, no se deslizan. ¿cómo hablar acerca del rumor de esta hora? Todo se arrastra.

No existe forma en la que pueda entrar. No existe forma en la que pueda memorizar o cuidar. El cuerpo inútil. El cuerpo incapaz. El cuerpo desbordado. Susurro y anoto lo ínfimo, cada detalle, sea alucinación o no, sea dolor o no, me pertenezca o no. Este registro descriptivo me permite reconocer las simulaciones, los objetos puestos y los vaticinios que susurra el enfermo desde la casa del frente. Escribí sobre el jarrón de barro que alguien puso a mitad de la cama y contenía todos los ríos con sus millones de muertos; las estrepitosas corrientes de agua por tres largas noches. Escribí también sobre los días de lluvia y sobre una mujer que caminaba un sábado en la tarde.

La mesa vieja que sostiene el plato de lentejas humeante a la altura de mi ojos es mi vínculo con lo real. Yo sé que no eres real y solo has llegado para servirme el café con su cuncho maldito en donde leerás mi mala suerte. Yo sé que no eres real, pero estás desenterrando mis árboles. Yo sé que no eres real y vienes a dormir conmigo.

The hillside above Adavivaram has been stripped to red earth and cut into terraces, a staircase of raw laterite climbing away from the coast. Reuters journalists who walked the site in early August found work proceeding at full pace, earthmovers reshaping a slope that until recently was green. Below the cut, roughly 120 metres away according to the Human Rights Forum, sits the Mudasarlova reservoir, one of the water bodies that keeps Visakhapatnam's taps running. Within a kilometre in the other direction lies the Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary, home to leopards and pangolins, and, in the assessment Reuters reported, only 860 metres from the construction site itself.

In the city below, activists and children have marched with banners reading “We cannot drink DATA”, some painting handcuffs on to the Google logo. On the Sunday before the Reuters visit, campaigners met to plan door-to-door awareness drives and beach protests. It is not the reception a 15 billion dollar investment usually gets.

This is Google's largest AI infrastructure project outside the United States: a gigawatt-scale campus, built with the Adani Group and Bharti Airtel, announced in October 2025 and intended to make Visakhapatnam a landing point for subsea cables and a node in the global machinery of artificial intelligence. Andhra Pradesh's chief minister, Nara Chandrababu Naidu, laid the foundation stone in April 2026, targeting completion by September 2028. The state calls it historic and transformational.

It is also being built in a city that does not have enough water. By the state's own accounting, cited by Reuters, Visakhapatnam receives about 410 million litres a day against a requirement of 480 million. Rationing is routine for a population of roughly 2.5 million. Mongabay India reported that Visakhapatnam district holds the lowest volume of available groundwater of any district in Andhra Pradesh, 2.12 thousand million cubic feet as of 1 April 2026. Into this basin, the state has promised the project guaranteed water for twenty years.

The question that raises is not simply whether Visakhapatnam can spare the water. It is a question about the shape of the AI economy: what it means that the physical substrate of a technology consumed overwhelmingly in wealthy countries is being poured, literally, into the ground of places that cannot afford it, and what anyone in those places is entitled to demand in return.

Why Andhra Said Yes

Start with the strongest possible version of the case for building it.

India is not a bystander in the AI economy. Mongabay India reported that the country hosts something like 20 per cent of the world's data while holding around 3 per cent of global data centre capacity. That asymmetry is not neutral. Indian data sits on foreign soil, under foreign jurisdiction, and the value generated by processing it accrues elsewhere. Every argument European governments have made for digital sovereignty applies to India with more force, because India has more to lose.

Andhra Pradesh wants to change that, pursuing roughly 6.5 gigawatts of compute capacity. India's total stood at about 1.5 gigawatts at the end of 2025, up from around 375 megawatts in 2020, with Deloitte forecasting 8 to 10 gigawatts by 2030. Visakhapatnam, with its coastline, port, subsea cable potential and engineering colleges, is the obvious place for a large slice of it.

The economics offered are considerable. State officials have put job creation at up to 188,000 across the project's ecosystem. Google has committed to new transmission lines, clean energy generation and storage, and says it is building its own renewable generation without state or central incentives. The Tribune reported the allotment of 480 acres across Visakhapatnam and Anakapalli districts. Land has been discounted, stamp duty waived, electricity and water tariffs reduced and tax reimbursed during construction, a package the News Minute totalled at around 22,000 crore rupees.

Then there is the moral argument, which deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away. Western commentators objecting to a data centre in India are objecting to infrastructure of a kind their own countries have built freely for twenty years. Northern Virginia hosts more capacity than most nations; Ireland's grid has been reshaped around it. To insist the footprint is acceptable in Loudoun County but not in Anakapalli requires justification, and “we got there first” is not one. Refusing the Global South the compute the Global North takes for granted, in the name of protecting it, entrenches precisely the dependency that sovereign AI programmes exist to break.

So the case is real. The problem is that almost none of it survives contact with the specifics.

The Arithmetic of Thirst

Water numbers in the data centre debate are unusually slippery, and the slipperiness is not accidental.

The first distinction is between withdrawal and consumption. A facility that withdraws a million litres, passes it through a heat exchanger and returns it a few degrees warmer has consumed almost nothing, though it has still altered the river. A facility that evaporates the same million litres through a cooling tower has consumed all of it. The water is not destroyed, but it has left the basin, and for the people downstream that is the only definition of loss that counts. Headline figures routinely conflate the two.

The second distinction is between on-site and off-site water: what the cooling system uses, versus what was consumed generating the electricity the facility draws. For most of the world's grids, the second dwarfs the first. The third problem is opacity. Nobody outside the companies knows the real figures, because until very recently nobody published them.

Consider what the Visakhapatnam project has declared. According to the News Minute's reporting on the clearance documents, the special purpose vehicles behind the campuses declared a combined water requirement of 501 kilolitres a day, of which 446 would be fresh and 55 recycled. That is roughly half a million litres a day. Set against a city deficit of 70 million litres a day, it sounds trivial.

Now set it against the other numbers in the same documents. The declared power requirement is 1,626 megawatts, plus 971.5 megawatts of diesel backup. A facility drawing more than one and a half gigawatts while consuming half a million litres a day would be, by a wide margin, the most water-efficient large computing installation on Earth. It is not impossible; fully air-cooled designs approach that profile. But it sits uneasily beside estimates from the other direction. Raja Rama Mohan Roy, founder of the non-profit Green Visakha and author of a widely circulated analysis in Countercurrents, puts the cluster's likely freshwater requirement at 55 to 70 million litres a day.

The gap between half a million litres and seventy million is not a rounding error. It is two orders of magnitude, and it exists because there is no mandatory, audited disclosure of data centre water use in India, or almost anywhere else. Mongabay India found that of the fifteen Indian states with dedicated data centre policies, most set no performance standards at all for power or water usage effectiveness, and that a national policy drafted by the electronics and IT ministry has sat unfinalised since 2020. A community cannot argue about a number nobody is required to produce.

The Water You Cannot See

Even if the on-site figure turns out to be genuinely small, the off-site figure will not be.

India's electricity still comes predominantly from coal, and thermal generation is intensely water-hungry because steam turbines require cooling. Under India's Environment (Protection) Amendment Rules, plants commissioned after 1 January 2017 may consume up to three cubic metres of water per megawatt-hour, a limit itself diluted from a stricter 2.5, and one the Centre for Science and Environment has repeatedly documented the sector failing to meet.

Do the arithmetic. A facility drawing one gigawatt continuously for a year consumes roughly 8.76 terawatt-hours. At three cubic metres per megawatt-hour, the embedded water in that electricity is on the order of 26 million cubic metres a year, around 72 million litres a day. That is a back-of-envelope figure, and the real number depends on the generation mix, on how much load is genuinely matched to wind and solar, and on whether the thermal plants use once-through or closed-cycle cooling. But the order of magnitude is the point. The water embedded in the electricity is plausibly a hundred times the water declared for the cooling system.

Google's commitment to build its own renewable generation matters, and in the right direction: solar and wind consume almost no water in operation. But grid-scale matching is an accounting exercise, not a physical one. A data centre running at three in the morning draws electrons from whatever is spinning, and in Andhra Pradesh that is largely coal. The declared diesel backup is a further reminder that keeping a gigawatt of silicon alive on an imperfect grid does not resemble the press release.

This is the analytical heart of the question, and it appears in neither the sustainability report nor the protest banner. The relevant footprint is the pipe entering the building, plus the river cooling the power station, plus the reservoir behind the pumped storage plant that firms the renewables. Count only the first and a gigawatt of compute consumes less water than a mid-sized hotel.

Air Cooling and Its Bill

Google's stated answer is air cooling, and this is a material concession rather than a public relations gesture.

On 3 June 2026 the company published water stewardship commitments that go further than any comparable operator. Google said it would only consider water cooling where local resources are healthy and resilient, and that where a source is at high risk it would choose air cooling or recycled water. It committed to replenishing more water than it consumes across its sites by 2030, a broadening of the 120 per cent replenishment target it had previously set, and put figures behind it: 165 water stewardship projects across 97 watersheds, expected to replenish more than 19 billion gallons a year, more than double what the company consumed in 2024, supported by more than 500 million dollars for water and reuse infrastructure. It also committed to reporting data centre water use by location, the first major cloud provider to do so. Its 2026 environmental report, published on 30 June, stated the company replenished approximately 7.7 billion gallons in 2025, roughly 78 per cent of its freshwater consumption. Google has cited a new Indian data centre as a site where watershed assessment pushed it towards air cooling, and told Reuters the Visakhapatnam project would use advanced air cooling to protect vital local water resources.

Take that at face value and it is a win for the campaigners, and it is also the direct result of pressure. Google did not adopt a watershed risk screen in a vacuum. It adopted one after Querétaro, after Santiago, after years of local resistance in exactly the places where communities had the standing to make trouble.

But air cooling is not free, and the bill lands on the other side of the ledger. Removing heat with air rather than evaporating water requires more fans and airflow, typically around ten per cent more electricity for equivalent cooling. On a coal-heavy grid, that means roughly ten per cent more embedded water consumed at the power station, plus the associated emissions. The net effect can be to move water consumption from one basin to another rather than eliminate it. It is a real improvement for Mudasarlova. Whether it is one for Andhra Pradesh depends on arithmetic nobody has published.

Replenishment carries a similar asterisk. Restoring a wetland in one watershed does not put water back into a different one, and a pledge to return more water than the company consumes is portfolio-wide arithmetic. Nineteen billion gallons replenished across ninety-seven watersheds is a global ratio, and a global ratio says nothing whatever about any particular basin, including the one above Mudasarlova. The commitment means something only if it is basin-specific, same-year and independently verified, and it has not yet been tested in Visakhapatnam.

Nine Days in April

If the water numbers are contested, the process that approved them is not. It is documented, and it is remarkable.

According to the News Minute's account of the clearance record, two special purpose vehicles owned by Adani Infra applied online for environmental clearance on 9 April 2026. The State Level Expert Appraisal Committee met on 10 April. Clearances were granted on 18 April. The foundation stone was laid on 28 April. Nine days elapsed between application and approval for one of the largest industrial developments in the state's history.

The mechanism was a classification decision. The projects were appraised as Category B2 building and construction projects under Schedule 8(a) of the Environment Impact Assessment Notification of 2006, a category requiring neither union government appraisal nor a public hearing. Schedule 8(a) defines it as covering built-up areas below 1.5 lakh square metres. Each of the two Visakhapatnam parks declared a built-up area of roughly 149,000 square metres. E.A.S. Sarma, a retired Indian Administrative Service officer who served as secretary to the Government of India in the power ministry and who lives in Visakhapatnam, has written repeatedly to the environment ministry arguing that the clearances were rushed, leaving little time for meaningful appraisal, and that states sometimes use Category B precisely to avoid central scrutiny. He has asked for them to be revoked.

The deeper problem is structural, and the government has confirmed it in Parliament. Kirti Vardhan Singh, minister of state for environment, forest and climate change, told the Rajya Sabha on 2 April 2026 that AI data centres do not, as such, require environmental clearance under the 2006 notification, and the government restated the position in Parliament in August 2026 with the thresholds spelled out. A data centre needs clearance only if it forms part of a building and construction project with a built-up area above 20,000 square metres, or a township or area development project covering fifty hectares or more, or one with a built-up area of 150,000 square metres or more. India's assessment regime has no category for a facility whose defining impacts are electricity demand, water demand and heat rejection. It regulates the shed, not the machine inside it. A structure is assessed on its square metreage; the gigawatt it draws and the aquifer it taps are, formally, somebody else's department.

The consequences are predictable. The Human Rights Forum has objected that the forest department granted a no objection certificate for a 160-acre site adjacent to Kambalakonda and its notified eco-sensitive zone, and that nearly 90 per cent of the Tarluvada site overlaps the Pedda Chukka Konda reserve forest. Sarma argues that construction is blocking natural water inflows into Mudasarlova. The Forum has filed three cases at the National Green Tribunal. Bolisetti Satyanarayana, national convener of the water conservation network Jal Biradari, has a public interest litigation before the Andhra Pradesh High Court asking it to determine whether statutory environmental and wildlife clearances were required at all for data centre projects near Kambalakonda, and to protect the natural streams and drinking water sources below them. That case was listed for 2 September. The High Court advanced it to 24 August after an application alleging that land levelling, tree felling and other construction activity were continuing on the slopes of the Simhachalam hill range, and directed the respondents to file their answers before the earlier date. A court moving its own timetable forward because the building is outrunning the case is a precise measure of the difficulty: once the participatory channels are closed, litigation is the only instrument left, and litigation moves more slowly than an earthmover. The state denies the project was fast-tracked, and says no water intended for rural or residential use will be diverted, and that the nearby reservoir will not be drawn upon.

Notice what is missing. At no point was there a statutory public hearing. The people of Adavivaram, Tarluvada and Rambilli were not asked. They are litigating because litigation was the only channel left open to them.

The Sovereignty Trilemma

Visakhapatnam is a specific place with specific hills and a specific reservoir. It is also an instance of a pattern that has now been mapped.

In July 2026 a team led by Muntaser Syed, with Marius C. Silaghi, Sheikh Abujar, Sharun Akter Khushbu and Amal El Ahmad, published a study on arXiv titled “The Environmental Cost of Digital Sovereignty: Water, Energy, and Emissions Impacts of Sovereign AI Infrastructure in the Global South”. Nations across the Global South have committed over 200 billion dollars to sovereign AI development, it notes, and the environmental consequences have gone almost entirely unexamined.

The headline finding is stark. Of 52 developing countries with active sovereign AI programmes, roughly 70.6 per cent face high overall water risk according to the World Resources Institute's Aqueduct atlas. The overlap between where sovereign compute is being built and where water is already scarce is close to total. The paper models four cases: the United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh, India and Kenya. A hypothetical 1,024-GPU cluster using evaporative cooling in the UAE would require over 30 million litres a year. Bangladesh's plans, the authors found, contain no siting strategy at all, in a country where more than a fifth of the land floods in an average year and as much as 70 per cent of it in an extreme one.

The authors name the bind precisely, calling it a sovereignty-sustainability trilemma: the difficulty of simultaneously achieving AI sovereignty, environmental responsibility and affordable resources for citizens. Pick any two. A country can have sovereign compute and cheap water if it is prepared to wreck its basins. It can have environmental responsibility and affordable resources if it is prepared to rent its compute from Virginia.

India's position sharpens the point. The World Resources Institute ranks India thirteenth among countries facing extremely high baseline water stress, a group in which agriculture, industry and municipalities withdraw more than 80 per cent of available supply in an average year. This is the country in which the world's largest overseas AI campus is being built.

The global demand curve makes local decisions cumulative. Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Mohammad A. Islam and Shaolei Ren, in the paper that first forced water into the AI conversation, projected that global AI demand would account for 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic metres of water withdrawal in 2027. The error bars are wide, and its authors say so. But no plausible version of it is small, and every cubic metre lands somewhere specific. Pedram Bakhtiarifard, Pınar Tözün, Christian Igel and Raghavendra Selvan, in a position paper accepted for ICML 2026, argue that treating sustainability as an emissions question alone obscures the tension between expanding access and expanding resource use.

Who Gets To Be Consulted

In July 2026, at the annual session of the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, data centres appeared substantially on the agenda for the first time.

Maren Storslett, a member of the Sámi Parliament in Norway, told the meeting that AI is resource-intensive and requires vast amounts of energy, and that in Sápmi large data centres already put immense pressure on their territories. She added a formulation since widely quoted: that the world must not only ask what AI can do, but what it should do, and that respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples must apply. Cheyenna Morgan, an enrolled member of the Keetoowah Band of Cherokee and coalition coordinator for Stop Data Colonialism, put it plainest: these impacts will be felt by regular people who did not ask to have these facilities in their neighbourhoods.

The demand was specific. Delegates called for data centre projects to comply with free, prior and informed consent, for in-depth impact studies before permitting rather than after, and for participation across a project's whole lifecycle. Roberto Anacé, a leader of the Anacé people of northeastern Brazil, described how a ten billion dollar facility proposed near his community had divided it; his people filed a formal complaint in 2025 alleging their consultation rights had been violated. Delegates cited precedents where consent regimes had bitten: a Google data centre in Santiago suspended by a Chilean environmental tribunal in 2024 over an inadequate impact assessment, construction moratoriums adopted by the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and a 650-megawatt project in Alberta in which the Woodland Cree First Nation holds a 51 per cent stake.

Transpose that framework to Andhra Pradesh and it stops working. India does not accept that the international category of Indigenous peoples applies within its borders. It has not ratified ILO Convention 169, and it voted for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples while maintaining that all Indians are indigenous and the declaration is therefore not applicable domestically. What India has instead is a constitutional category, Scheduled Tribes, and a domestic architecture: the Fifth Schedule, designating Scheduled Areas; the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996, requiring consultation with the gram sabha before land there is acquired; and the Forest Rights Act of 2006, requiring gram sabha consent for diverting forest land. On paper this is not weaker than free, prior and informed consent. In practice it is chronically under-implemented: Andhra Pradesh published PESA rules in 2011, fifteen years after the Act, and awareness among the communities it protects remains minimal.

Here is what gets lost in the framing. The three campuses are not in Scheduled Areas. Adavivaram, Tarluvada and Rambilli sit in the coastal belt, not the Fifth Schedule agency tracts of the hills, and the people fighting the project in the High Court are urban environmentalists, retired civil servants and residents worried about their taps. Presenting Visakhapatnam as a straightforward story of Indigenous dispossession would be inaccurate. The Adivasi dimension is real, but it is one step upstream, in the electricity.

The Power Comes From the Hills

A gigawatt-scale campus needs firm power, and firm power in a renewables-heavy system needs storage. Andhra Pradesh's answer has been pumped storage hydro, and its pumped storage projects are overwhelmingly located in the Fifth Schedule agency areas of the north of the state.

Reporting by The Wire documented five such projects allocated to private developers, with a combined capacity of 6,600 megawatts across around 2,260 acres in Parvathipuram Manyam and Alluri Sitharama Raju districts, ranging from Karrivalasa at 1,000 megawatts to Pedakota at 1,800. G. Rohit, state secretary of the Human Rights Forum in Andhra Pradesh, said the organisation was shocked at the brazen manner in which the projects had been granted in open contempt of the law, and that no information had been conveyed, no discussion had taken place and there had been no transparency. Ramarao Dora, convenor of the Andhra Pradesh Adivasi Joint Action Committee, said Adivasis in the scheduled areas oppose the projects because they rightly perceive them as harmful. The alleged breaches are specific: Section 5 of PESA, Section 6 of the Forest Rights Act, and the absence of the statutorily required consultation with the Tribal Advisory Council.

These projects predate the Google announcement and are not formally attached to it. That is exactly why they matter. The energy system that will make gigawatt-scale compute viable on India's east coast is being assembled in Adivasi territory, under a consent regime the communities concerned say is being ignored, and no clearance for a campus in Anakapalli will ever ask about it. The impact assessment stops at the fence line. The supply chain does not.

This is the governance gap in its purest form. Consent, where it applies at all, applies to the project on the land. The AI build-out is not a project on a piece of land. It is a system: a campus, a substation, a transmission corridor, a reservoir in the hills, a coal plant burning through a river's cooling capacity. Consent granted or withheld at any single node cannot govern the whole.

Counting the Jobs

The economic case deserves the same scrutiny, and it does not emerge unscathed.

The most careful recent evidence comes from Dany Bahar and Greg Wright, whose analysis of data centre employment effects was published by Brookings in May 2026 and updated on 10 August. Their finding is two-sided. Labour markets receiving their first large data centre see employment in data processing rise by 56 per cent over the first decade, with telecommunications gains of 43 per cent, an effect larger for hyperscale facilities than for colocation providers. But wages remain flat, home prices rise by two to five per cent, and the facilities themselves generate roughly 100 to 200 local jobs each. The authors' summary is that data centres do create jobs, but fewer than industry advocates claim.

Hold that against 188,000. The figure is an ecosystem projection covering construction, indirect and induced employment across a multi-year build-out, not a headcount of people who will work at the campus. Construction employment is genuine, substantial and temporary. Permanent operational staffing is measured in hundreds, because the facilities are automated by design.

That does not make the investment worthless. Subsea cable landings, transmission upgrades and low-latency compute are genuine public goods, and hyperscalers attract other hyperscalers. But it changes how the trade should be evaluated. If the state is discounting land, waiving stamp duty, cutting electricity tariffs for fifteen years and reimbursing tax up to 2,245 crore rupees, the public is buying something and should be told accurately what. Guaranteeing water for twenty years in a city with a 70 million litre daily deficit is itself a subsidy, and it is the one that has not been priced.

What Protection Would Actually Look Like

The gap between what communities in Visakhapatnam can demand and what communities in Santiago or Oklahoma have secured is not one of moral entitlement. It is a gap in legal machinery, and machinery can be built. Six changes would close most of it.

First, make data centres a distinct category under India's Environment Impact Assessment Notification, triggered by connected load and water demand rather than floor area, with mandatory public hearings above a threshold. A facility drawing 1,626 megawatts should not be appraised as a building. The government's own answer to Parliament establishes that it currently is.

Second, require cumulative, basin-level assessment. Visakhapatnam is not receiving one data centre but a cluster, with other operators also planning capacity in the region. Assessing each special purpose vehicle in isolation guarantees the aggregate impact is never examined by anyone.

Third, mandate full water accounting, disclosed publicly per site, independently audited, covering withdrawal and consumption separately and including the embedded water of purchased electricity. Google's per-location reporting is the right template and should be a licence condition rather than a voluntary pledge, applied to every operator. A two-order-of-magnitude gap between declared and estimated consumption should not be possible in a regulated industry.

Fourth, extend consent obligations along the supply chain. If a data centre's firm power depends on pumped storage in a Fifth Schedule area, the gram sabha consent requirements of PESA and the Forest Rights Act should attach to the offtaker as well as the generator. This is not exotic; it is the logic already governing due diligence for conflict minerals and forced labour.

Fifth, price and contract the water properly. Twenty-year guaranteed supply in a deficit basin should carry a full-cost tariff, a hard volumetric cap, automatic curtailment ahead of domestic and agricultural users during declared scarcity, and same-basin replenishment verified annually by an independent body. Credits earned in another watershed should not count.

Sixth, negotiate a binding community benefit agreement rather than relying on corporate social responsibility. The Alberta precedent, where a First Nation holds a majority stake in a 650-megawatt facility, shows the alternative to exclusion is not obstruction but ownership. Equity, local hiring guarantees, funded municipal water infrastructure and an enforceable grievance mechanism turn a community from an obstacle into a counterparty.

None of this requires India to accept a category of Indigenous peoples it has rejected for four decades. Every item is achievable inside its existing constitutional framework. They require only that the framework be applied.

Answering the Question From the Hillside

So what does it mean when the technology powering artificial intelligence in wealthier nations is fuelled by water drawn from a set of countries composed, almost entirely, of countries that cannot spare it? Of the 52 developing nations with active sovereign AI programmes, 70.6 per cent already face high water risk. That is not a claim about the developing world in general. It is a claim about the particular list of countries that have decided to build their own compute, and that list is made up, very nearly without exception, of places where the water has already run short.

It means, first, that the transaction is not what it appears. The exchange offered to Visakhapatnam is not water for prosperity. It is water, land, forest, forgone revenue, discounted power and twenty years of guaranteed supply, in return for a few hundred permanent jobs, a modest ecosystem effect, and a claim on digital sovereignty that will be exercised mainly by a company headquartered in Mountain View. That may still be a trade worth making. It is not the trade that was described.

It means, second, that the injustice is procedural before it is environmental. Nine days is not enough time to appraise anything, and a classification that avoids a public hearing is not a technicality; it is the whole ballgame. The people of Adavivaram did not lose an argument about water. They were never given the argument. Everything that has followed, the marches, the banners, the tribunal cases, the litigation the High Court pulled forward to keep pace with the diggers, is the sound of a community using the only instruments left after the participatory ones were bypassed.

It means, third, that the exported thirst is invisible even to the people exporting it. The user in London generating a summary cannot know that the marginal electron came from a coal plant in Andhra Pradesh, that the plant consumed three cubic metres of water per megawatt-hour, or that the reservoir firming the renewables sits on land an Adivasi gram sabha was never asked about. The trilemma identified by Syed and colleagues is invisible from the prompt box by design.

And what protections should exist? Not a veto exercised from abroad. The paternalism objection is right that the Global South should not be denied infrastructure the Global North built without asking anyone. But it cuts the other way, and harder. Communities in Chile, in Oklahoma and in Ireland have won moratoriums, suspensions, disclosure requirements and equity stakes, because they had standing, hearings, tribunals that would listen, and in some cases treaty rights. The paternalistic act is not insisting that Visakhapatnam gets protections. It is building at Visakhapatnam precisely because it will not.

The protections that should exist are the ones that already exist elsewhere: a statutory right to be heard before the earth is cut, audited disclosure of what will be consumed, consent obligations that follow the electricity to its source, and a share of the equity rather than a plaque on a wall. There is nothing in that list Google could not accept tomorrow and still make money, and nothing Andhra Pradesh lacks the power to require.

Work on the hillside above Mudasarlova continues. The terraces are cut, the red earth is exposed, and the monsoon runoff that used to feed the reservoir now finds a different path down. The High Court's hearing is listed for this week, the matter live before it as this goes to press. Whatever it decides, and whenever, the more consequential question was settled by default in nine days in April, by a form that classified a gigawatt of artificial intelligence as a building. The water will follow the law. The only thing still undecided is whose law it is.

Sources and References

1. Reuters, “Google's $15 billion India data centre project battles water, wildlife concerns”, 6 August 2026, syndicated by The Kathmandu Post. https://kathmandupost.com/world/2026/08/06/google-s-15-billion-india-data-centre-project-battles-water-wildlife-concerns
2. edie, “Google's $15bn India data centre project faces water and environmental challenges”, August 2026. https://www.edie.net/googles-15bn-india-data-centre-project-faces-water-and-environmental-challenges/
3. Google, “Our first AI hub in India, powered by a $15 billion investment”, Google India Blog, 14 October 2025. https://blog.google/intl/en-in/company-news/our-first-ai-hub-in-india-powered-by-a-15-billion-investment/
4. The Tribune (India), “Andhra govt allots 480 acres for Adani-Google AI data Centre in Visakhapatnam”. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/business/andhra-govt-allots-480-acres-for-adani-google-ai-data-centre-in-visakhapatnam/
5. Data Center Dynamics, “Google confirms $15bn data center project in Andhra Pradesh, India”. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-confirms-15bn-data-center-project-in-andhra-pradesh-india/
6. The News Minute, “Inside the subsidies for Google's Vizag data centre amid Andhra-Karnataka spar”. https://www.thenewsminute.com/andhra-pradesh/inside-the-subsidies-for-googles-vizag-data-centre-amid-andhra-karnataka-spar
7. The News Minute, “Vizag Google Adani AI data centre: State govt rushed environmental clearance, activists allege”. https://www.thenewsminute.com/andhra-pradesh/vizag-google-adani-ai-data-centre-state-govt-rushed-environmental-clearance-activists-allege
8. The News Minute, “HRF challenges legality of Adani-Google Vizag data centre, demands immediate stop”. https://www.thenewsminute.com/andhra-pradesh/hrf-challenges-legality-of-adani-google-vizag-data-centre-demands-immediate-stop
9. Mongabay India, “India bets on data centres even as water, energy-use concerns mount”, May 2026. https://india.mongabay.com/2026/05/india-bets-on-data-centres-even-as-water-energy-use-concerns-mount/
10. Mongabay, “Indigenous advocates push for rights protections around AI data centers”, July 2026. https://news.mongabay.com/2026/07/indigenous-advocates-push-for-rights-protections-around-ai-data-centers/
11. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, “Global: Indigenous leaders call for data centres projects to comply with their right to free, prior and informed consent during UN meeting”, July 2026. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/global-indigenous-leaders-call-for-data-centres-projects-to-comply-with-their-right-to-free-prior-and-informed-consent-during-un-meeting/
12. Raja Rama Mohan Roy, “The Hidden Environmental Cost of AI: Can Visakhapatnam Afford Giant Data Centres?“, Countercurrents, July 2026. https://countercurrents.org/2026/07/the-hidden-environmental-cost-of-ai-can-visakhapatnam-afford-giant-data-centres/
13. Countercurrents, “AI Data Centres and Environmental Justice: E.A.S. Sarma Urges Scrutiny of Projects Amid Ecological and Human Rights Concerns”, June 2026. https://countercurrents.org/2026/06/ai-data-centres-and-environmental-justice-e-a-s-sarma-urges-scrutiny-of-projects-amid-ecological-and-human-rights-concerns/
14. Countercurrents, “HRF Demands Halt to Vizag Hyperscale Data Center Over Alleged Environmental Violations”, May 2026. https://countercurrents.org/2026/05/hrf-demands-halt-to-vizag-hyperscale-data-center-over-alleged-environmental-violations/
15. Deccan Chronicle, “High Court Advances Hearing Over Data Centres Near Kambalakonda Sanctuary”. https://www.deccanchronicle.com/southern-states/andhra-pradesh/high-court-advances-hearing-over-data-centres-near-kambalakonda-sanctuary-1976576
16. Muntaser Syed, Marius C. Silaghi, Sheikh Abujar, Sharun Akter Khushbu and Amal El Ahmad, “The Environmental Cost of Digital Sovereignty: Water, Energy, and Emissions Impacts of Sovereign AI Infrastructure in the Global South”, arXiv:2607.13443, 15 July 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13443
17. Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Mohammad A. Islam and Shaolei Ren, “Making AI Less 'Thirsty': Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models”, arXiv:2304.03271. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271
18. Pedram Bakhtiarifard, Pınar Tözün, Christian Igel and Raghavendra Selvan, “Position: Neglecting the Sustainability of AI is Fuelling a Global AI Arms Race”, arXiv:2502.20016, accepted at ICML 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20016
19. World Resources Institute, “25 Countries, Housing One-quarter of the Population, Face Extremely High Water Stress”, Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas. https://www.wri.org/insights/highest-water-stressed-countries
20. Google, “Google's water stewardship commitments for local communities”, 3 June 2026. https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/sustainability/new-water-stewardship-commitments/
21. Google, “Read Google's 2026 Environmental Report”, 30 June 2026. https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/sustainability/2026-environmental-report/
22. Down To Earth, “As told to Parliament (April 2, 2026): Centre acknowledges AI's energy and water footprint while key facilities remain beyond EIA mandate”. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/as-told-to-parliament-april-2-2026-centre-acknowledges-ais-energy-and-water-footprint-while-key-facilities-remain-beyond-eia-mandate
23. The Print, “AI data centres do not need environment clearance, Centre tells Parliament”, August 2026. https://theprint.in/environment/ai-data-centres-environment-clearance-centre-parliament/3007640/
24. The Wire, “Andhra Pradesh: Pumped Storage Projects Spark Concerns over Tribal Displacement and Environmental Harm”, 6 December 2024. https://m.thewire.in/article/environment/andhra-pradesh-pumped-storage-projects-spark-concerns-over-tribal-displacement-and-environmental-harm
25. Dany Bahar and Greg Wright, “New evidence on data center employment effects”, Brookings Institution, published 4 May 2026, updated 10 August 2026. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-on-data-center-employment-effects/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

My wife has been interested in Russian literature for a long time now. She’s also been interested in their language. Recently she just read a book called “Dead Souls” by Gogol. She’s been interested in the serf life in Russia so just started reading “Four Russian Serf Narratives” compiled by John MacKay.

We’ve talked on and off through many years about slavery, serfdom, freemen, lords, and more. What I believe is that as history looks back at this time they will not think it much superior to the past ages. Most think of themselves as free people. I don’t think we are anything close. Maybe close to what people called freemen or “free tenant” (see here, here, and here for the basics) were but maybe not even as free as many of them were.

I haven’t heard of people asking for reparations for serfdom or indentured servitude, but it’s not all that much better than slavery. In my view serfdom is a sort of slavery tied to an area of land. There is a lord or master over that area and a lot of your labors are funneled away with the head of that property selling that effort or paying their dues to keep the land in the master’s possession. With slavery you could sell the person and it isn’t associated with the land, the person (slave) and the property are separate entities. With serfdom the person (serf) is tied to the land. In Russia they seemed to blend the two to an extend. And they were late to the game, it seems they were just copying Europe. So it came and went quickly in Russia where in Europe it built up very slowly and stuck around a lot longer before emancipation of serfs and later slaves.

Today people are in a state of freeman or lord over their own life and possessions. But that doesn’t mean they are truly free or a sovereign over their life. Above them they have masters called mayors, governors, congressmen, senators, vice presidents, presidents, and countless agency members and law enforcement agents pressing their rules and regulations upon their subjects. The musical chair game makes it more palatable because those rulers seem to be in a temporary position and the most naive people seem to think they could even gain such a position – which gives the illusion of equality of sorts.

But seriously. What would it be to be truly free? In the past the idea was that you could keep the fruits of your labor. So what percentage of your earnings do you keep? Consider what goes out to your basic living conditions. For most people much less than 35% of the earnings stay at home (see here). The rest goes out to food, mortgage, cars, car insurance, healthcare, life insurance, clothes, other odds and ends. And people want those things, but isn’t that a form of servitude? You are a servant to the food industry, housing industry, car industry, insurance industry, healthcare industry, clothing/textile industry, and other odds-and-ends industries. And after all of that you are very lucky to keep even close to 30%. And what do people do with that… Well most invest it so they are servants to the banking industry, investing industry, and many markets that they think worthwhile to dump excess into.

So are we free? Perhaps we are just “freemen” or maybe just mobile serfs. Maybe nothing has really changed. Maybe things are just as bad, worse, or slightly better but the rulers have become much better at pulling the wool over our eyes. Maybe we are better at deluding ourselves and feeding on the lies. Maybe we want to be free so badly, that we just have become masters at pretending that we don’t have masters.

Sometimes, the only person you need to escape from, is yourself.

The day unfolded as a restless, rain-flecked wander through Porto—beginning with an early escape to the tide pools and a spellbinding conversation about octopuses and the ocean, followed by an impulsive train ride into the city in search of reclaimed tiles and small treasures that mostly stayed just out of reach. It became a long, uphill ramble marked by coughing fits, missed shops, narrow alleys, sudden beauty, and the quiet pleasure of getting lost, ducking into galleries, weighing gifts, and thinking of everyone back home. As evening settled in, rain returned, wine waited at home, health worries hovered, and the city glowed with holiday lights—leaving the day feeling like Porto itself: generous, disorienting, a little exhausting. A place full of moments of feeling more than for what was accomplished.

[waves crashing] Oh, my God. This is a beautiful place. I escaped my captors.

Most everyone was still asleep, though L was wide awake. She’d fallen in love with the ocean here, and it was easy to see why. She’s intelligent, curious, and loves to talk, especially about the tide pools. She showed videos for nearly twenty minutes of the octopuses she finds there — strange, beautiful little creatures shifting color and texture as they move.

I went out that morning around 8:30 because the tide was low, hoping to see some for myself, but I didn’t find any. Laurie had seen one that was apparently enormous, though she said most of them are tiny, only a couple of inches long. Even secondhand, it was fascinating. Inches? I don’t know. There’s, uh... It’s hard for me to tell, ‘cause I didn’t take the video. I don’t know what the scale of these things is, but they were just incredible. Watching... watching them change, uh, change colors, you know, and textures. They change textures. Ah, just incredible. Portuguese octopuses are amazing. So these sea slugs and she had all this stuff about the... I mean, this lady is right in anyone’s wheelhouse who craves going deep on subjects. I was fascinated. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Uh, she loves Jehovah. She loves the truth. She loves people. She’s so broken up about her friends in India. The Germans. They get to go home. But her friends, her Indian friends, because they are gonna go to jail for a long time.

I jumped on the train and rushed into the city, trying to reach a shop I’d heard about. It specializes in reclaimed materials from old buildings — tiles, bricks, textiles, furniture, and other architectural pieces that would otherwise be thrown away. Instead, they clean and resell them, which makes the place useful for anyone restoring an old property or trying to match missing details from an existing building.

I was especially interested in the tiles. In a city like Porto, where so many buildings are covered in beautiful tilework, the idea of a place preserving those fragments felt worth seeing.

Unfortunately, I got there just before closing, and they had already locked up early. This VERY Europe. 'There was no getting in. No amount of wanting it was going to change that.

There were a few charming little things tucked into the shopfronts, enough to make me stop and look more closely. I paused to take a picture, thinking I might have found a treasure, but after a second look it didn’t quite feel right.

I kept walking, half-following the route and half-letting the city choose for me. At one point I had to decide whether to turn left or keep going straight, and I went straight. The street opened into one of those scenes that makes you want to stop everything, pull out a sketchbook, and paint it before the light changes.

I lost my train of thought for a moment, probably because I was still running on the energy of the city. I had jumped on the train and hurried down to reach the place before it closed at five, but even though I arrived around 4:30, it was already locked up tight. I had thought it was a shop, but from the outside it looked more like a museum, so it may not have worked out anyway.

The whole walk from Bento Station had been uphill, and I had pushed harder than I should have. By the time I got there, my lungs were reminding me that running two and a half kilometers uphill is not exactly ideal for sport-induced asthma. So I turned around and started the slower walk back down, coughing a little and laughing at the fact that my next best option was apparently right back near the train station where I started.

I turned and found this gorgeous picturesque street. THIS is a European street: narrow, old, and full of texture.

I tried to take a picture, but I didn’t like the way it was coming out. So I turned around and, lo and behold, there they were: beautiful tiny little shops. The street wasn’t even eight feet wide. It was basically an alley.

Blurry. Of course.

So I tried again. Maybe that one worked. But then I looked at it and thought, oh, that looks fake. Wild. It looked like a composite — It was so well lit and the alley behind me was so dark.

Then it started raining again. Someone had loaned me a raincoat, which was exactly what I should have had to begin with. It didn’t breathe at all, so I got warm pretty fast. I checked my route again, trying to figure out whether I was still headed the right way.

I was still on the right route. Good.

I just needed to get to the bottom of the hill, and then I probably needed to buy an umbrella. Honestly, I should have bought one right then. I should have brought one with me in the first place, but I didn’t.

I figured I’d be out in the open soon enough and could buy one for probably twenty euros.

On a sunny day, it would have cost me two.

Supply and demand, baby. Supply and demand.

Anyway, it was Saturday night, our last night in Porto. Tomorrow night would be somewhere else, and I still had three bottles of wine to either drink or give away. Robert and Lauri were probably going to inherit them.

We thought we’d drink more during the week, but we didn’t. Mostly because I was working and Angie had been getting sick. Which was a shame, because the sparkling brut was delicious. Delicious. And it was only five euros a bottle.

I still couldn’t get over how cheap the wine was there. Even the bottle of red we bought — delivered through Uber Eats, no less — was only about eleven dollars. Pretty crazy. Back in the States, that easily would have felt like a hundred dollars worth of wine.

So it’s not the end of the world, you know, if you don’t get to drink it, other than I would really have enjoyed drinking it, especially that brut. It’s so good. I think I’m gonna drink a bottle of that tonight.

I kept thinking I should buy an umbrella. Why wasn’t I buying an umbrella? I had already walked past two umbrella stands and somehow managed not to buy one at either.

Don’t be a fool!

So I decided I’d go to the little store first and then decide about the umbrella. I crossed the street and worked my way past the tourist area, where everything started to look vaguely familiar and completely confusing at the same time. I was pretty sure I’d been to most of those places already. We had covered a lot of ground.

Then I got lost again, naturally.

The recording kept stopping every time I checked the map, so whole chunks of my wandering disappeared. One of the missing bits was a small diatribe on gold. I had stopped at a little gold shop and just marveled at the prices. Beautiful stuff, incredible craftsmanship, but everything seemed to start around two thousand euros and climb from there. They say filigree is a uniquely Portuguese gift, and I could see why. It was delicate, intricate, and gorgeous.

Also at 2500 euros, wildly out of budget.

That was the thing about gold: beautiful, but not exactly built for broke poets. If I had been a wealthier man, I probably wouldn’t have stayed one for long. I would have blown it all on pretty things, because that is apparently what I do.

Then I came across an art store — or maybe a gallery. It had these beautiful black-and-white prints in the window, the kind of thing that makes you stop even when you’re supposed to be going somewhere else. The store name was bold, to put it mildly: “I’m The F’ing Artist,” except they were considerably more frank about the word “F.”

I laughed when I realized they signed everything, “I’m The F*&#@g Artist.” It was a bold statement, and definitely not something anyone would forget.

The gallery had sketchbooks too, including one with that same brash artist name printed on the front. It would have been funny, maybe even useful, except not exactly ideal for carrying around with my particular crowd. They were fifteen euros, which felt suspiciously like thirty dollars once my brain got involved. Besides, I had already bought a sketchbook, so I passed.

Then I saw the scarves.

Ooh. Scarves.

Pintura paintings. Pintura original acrylic paint on canvas, €1,000. Scarves, €23. Hm, textiles are a good gift. Maybe a scarf.

Hm, they have such pretty ones. They have orange, orange. And blue. And Pink!

I should just get a magnet.

I’ve already stopped twice. I seem unable to reach my destination.

Ooh, there was a great sticker. I wanted to see if I could get that one.

Nope. It had already been peeled and failed. But I’m a professional sticker remover, so I wanted to see if I could succeed where others had failed.

Could the artist succeed?

He was succeeding so far.

When peeling stickers off round cylinders, it could be tough because the angles were strange. You had to get a straight side peeled off vertically and then peel across, because if you tried to peel from top to bottom, it tore every single time.

I was totally lost there. I think I was supposed to turn back there.

I got my mom a rock from the sidewalk, so she’d really like that. Too bad it will be stuck with our luggage in Germany for months and month and months!

And then I was going home, which was by Marino. I smelled marijuana.

They smoked marijuana there?

Mm.

Those kids.

[sniffs] [sighs]

Back at Robert and Laurie’s place, there was a huge painting in the guest room where we were staying. I hadn’t looked at it closely, but it was all gray-blue and oceanic, a massive moody thing that probably cost five or eight thousand dollars. Laurie told me the story of how they got it, which seemed to involve the natural social orbit of expats. They run around together, these little crews of transplanted people, finding each other in foreign cities and collecting stories along the way.

It’s funny because I don’t think Laurie wants us to leave, I think Angie wants to leave. I think she wants to go relax in a hotel, have her own space and sleep until noon, which I don’t blame her. We’ll see. They’ll work it out.

That was the thing about not having an opinion: I was fine either way. Angie had an opinion, so I let the girls work it out.

I didn’t know. He had a stomach bug, and Angie had sinus trouble. I didn’t think they were related. I thought she was just worried he was going to catch her sinus infection. I hoped we didn’t end up having to cut the trip short.

Traffic was light that night. There weren’t a ton of people out over there. The trees were still wrapped for the holidays. Obviously Christmas wasn’t until—what was it? Wednesday or Thursday or something.

It was just very beautiful. Lots of lights.

It had rained a little bit, but I was wearing someone’s raincoat that they had loaned me, so I stayed dry that time, except for my hair, which was extremely absorbent.

I didn’t know if you’ve been to Portugal reader, or France, or London, or Switzerland, or Italy. but you should DEF go to Portugal.

As I’m reflecting on my advice, good readers, I notice I have been lazy and ignored the crosswalk. it occurred to me what a scofflaw I am/was. A bad man.

I hoped the trip would give me an opportunity to see enough of Europe to adjust my viewpoint. Joy Division had talked about choosing self-preservation against people who were really only worried about themselves, and I could identify with that. I could identify with a lot of what was in those songs.

Music and travel have an effect on the soul. It’s uncomfortable in the best possible way.

In Summary: * Have hust tuned into 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, ready to hear tonight's Rangers Pregame Show, then the radio call of tonight's MLB game between the Rangers and the A's. Go Rangers!

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 224.87 lbs. * bp= 152/66 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:25 – 1 banana * 06:20 – 1 slice of lemon meringue pie * 07:40 – cottage cheese * 12:10 – 1 barbacoa taco, steak, 1 tangerine

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to musc, nap * 12:10 to 13:20 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:30 – following news reports from various sources

Chess: * 14:00 – moved in all pending CC games

September 1st. The year has flown by. I suppose that is what happens as we get older. My birthday is a little over a month away. I always get reflective around this time of year. Who am I? Where am I going? What have I learned in the past year? Add a few dozen other questions at bare minimum, and that pretty much sums things up, I guess.

I wonder how many people can actually answer the question of who they are honestly. Perhaps in a generalization type scenario, but does that really get to the essence of who we are? Someone once confidently stated, and meant it as a compliment, that I become whoever the person in the room needs me to be. That has stuck with me for obvious reasons. My immediate gut reaction was that that was not true at all. Then I thought deeper about it.

I don't think it is so much that I become whoever the persons in the room need me to be as it is we are very multifaceted people, or at least I am. And different situations require different facets. I do like to make people comfortable because if a person is more comfortable with themselves they become more brave in pursuing their goals. I believe in lifting people up, but also being firm in my perspective of the truth. I believe in being buoyant and adaptable while standing firm. I'm pretty opinionated, but I do listen as well. I think that is more the key. Listening.

I no longer create as much as I have most of my adult life. Most of my life, really. It isn't that I don't want to, it is more that the state of the world and the expression of persons in my vicinity cause a deep lack of inspiration. That isn't exactly right either. I think that in some ways I find it pointless. Which I know isn't exactly true. Also, where I used to inspire others, I thought I just don't want to. Does this mean I have lost myself, or that I have evolved?

Perhaps, it means there are just too damn many hurdles these days and I no longer want to jump them. Or that I no longer have the energy to be jumping them. Maybe it means I just find the hurdle jumping completely ridiculous and I want no part of it. That is probably a big part of many things.

A conversation and a movie recently had me looking at when my grandparents passed away. As well as when one of my parents passed away. All five died of natural causes. One died slightly older than me. Two died younger than me. Two died about 15 years older than me, give or take. That has really got me to thinking.

The average life expectancy for a woman in the United States is 81.4 years old. That is roughly 26 years from now. 26 years passes in the blink of an eye. I want my golden years to be filled with joy and laughter. I want the type of communication that appears to be quite rare. Sometimes, I think I want the impossible. Other times, I think it's out there, but unavailable. Other times, I think I have such a mix of contradictions and likes that I'm a bit too complex for most people. Complex, yet extraordinarily simple.

I'm talking in circles without saying a lot. I'm working on a leap of faith, but I'm not sure that I have much faith in anything anymore. I'm not even sure what I think about faith in this moment. I'm certainly not talking in a religious sense. I respect people's right to have religious faith. I think it's a total crock of delusional shit, but stranger things have happened, I suppose. Faith in my fellow man, perhaps? Not really. Look at the world. Plus everybody's being groomed to be selfish as fuck, and I just find that very off-putting.

I guess I've circled back around to my dislike of people. I think dislike is a strong word there. It's doing too much work. Perhaps I should say I am unenamured. It is strange. Isn't it? To not really enjoy most people's company. It's not a lack of enjoyment exactly. It's boredom. Absolute boredom. Not that I'm particularly exciting. I am most certainly not. There's just a lack of inquisitiveness that crushes everything.

Am I changing because I'm changing, or am I changing because my environment is absolutely suffocating? At this point, I no longer know. I'm not completely sure I care. Perhaps I am just flummoxed with the doldrums, and it will eventually pass.

-— Before I could post this, I heard a kitten crying in the deep midnight hours. Upon opening the front door of my second story apartment, I was rushed by a tiny purrball. I've spent the last thirteen hours with her. Clearly abandoned, I'm very annoyed with whoever decided it a good idea to take a six week or so kitten, clearly raised indoors, whose eyes are still blue, and abandon her on a second floor in Summer heat that's over 100° each day. I would gladly introduce them to my claws for placing such innocence in harms way.

My landlord doesn't allow pets. I've been given until the weekend to find her a good home. I'm very glad he agreed. I swiftly acquired everything I needed even before asking. She's litter-trained, etc. She is stunning, both in personality, intelligence, and visuals. I am absolutely smitten. She could easily be my familiar's daughter. It is going to be rough to say goodbye, but I'm very happy to be blessed to keep her safe, and well-loved in the interim. I really can't stand to see kittens taken from their mothers when so young.

She is currently sound asleep, smiling, flopped over on her back and curled into the crook of my arm. She has completely claimed me as hers. I must admit to finding a long-missed peace in her presence. Perhaps, we needed each other in this moment. She needs me for safety and an abundance of love and transitional education and security, and I need her to remind me of what has been absent in my life. What will one day be again, and the absolute beauty of a trusting heart.

I do not yet know where her forever home may be, but I'm going to make damn sure she's placed in hands that will do all they can to ensure she goes to a caring, responsible home, and not just the home of someone who finds a long-haired, calico powderpuff the perfect want.

My familiar was a rescue who had to learn to survive before our paths crossed. My heart breaks as I imagine what that had to take while I observe this innocent cutie. She had to have been abandoned by one of my upstairs neighbors. It would behoove them for me not to find out which one.

Her little heart patters strong against my own as she holds my hand against her. I regret that she is also going to know the loss of me. I hate my landlord and manager a bit for the unnecessary pain their intolerant rules cause, but I will make sure she knows love and confidence, and I will hope she finds a forever home worthy of her magnificence.

I am truly blessed to know her. She is Phoebe GlimmerSoul — radiant, magical, and destined to share in the love of a home who will value her for the priceless gift of life that she is.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

The full moon has been shining big on the sky all week, infusing me with Lupine radiance. Today, however, the moon was only 80% full. Ironically its shine was the strongest one of all.

That’s a comforting thought, I think

I can’t believe how lucky I am with all of these things I have got going for me, how loved I am and what a meaningful (by my own measure) life I live

And yet at the same time, I’m really struggling

It doesn’t make no sense

To say I’m not clever enough to grasp it all may be true, but I’m not going to use that as an excuse not to try

Sometimes I think it’s cowardice standing in my way of making sense of this life, you know

How uncomfortable it can be to look into the mirror and

And sometimes other people too

Sometimes they aren’t what you think

Sometimes you know this I know this, and at the same time not

But also have some self compassion

Where is my self compassion

Where did I put it

I’m confused now, because I just discovered it and I’m still not sure

How to use it

#poetry

The A's vs the Rangers at 7:05 PM CDT tonight will send me off to sleep. Their MLB game last night at the same time worked just fine. I started with the Rangers pregame show about half an hour before the opening pitch and lasted through the 4th inning before I had to put head to pillow. I slept well, and the Rangers won their game. Hoping for a repeat performance tonight on both fronts..

And the adventure continues.

The first time I wrote about this dragon I described it like this: the snarling little face on the tail, the missing hind legs, the human eye set among the plumage. I want to come back to it, because since then the cipher has told us something the picture alone cannot. The book's first sentence does not merely show a dragon: it names it.

Deciphered, that sentence reads: La Magie Sainte, révélée à Moyse, retrouvée dans un monument Egyptien & précieusement conservée en Asie sous la devise d'un dragon ailé — “Holy Magic, revealed to Moses, found in an Egyptian monument, and carefully preserved in Asia under the device of a winged dragon.” The word is devise: a device, an emblem, a badge. The creature on the front is the book's own coat of arms.

Where would a French author of the period get the idea of an Asian magic kept “under the device of a winged dragon”? He would get it in print. In 1735 the Jesuit Du Halde, in the standard French account of China, calls the imperial Chinese dragon la devise de la Chine (“the device of China”) and explains that only the emperor may draw it with five claws; everyone below him is held to four, on pain of punishment. Two years later a French flag-book, La Connoissance des pavillons (1737), pictures the emperor's own banner and blazons the beast on it:

Il est jaune, chargé d'un Dragon de sable, à la queuë de Basilic de même, à cinq Griffes à chaque patte, & la tête tournée en dehors — “It is yellow, charged with a dragon sable, with a basilisk's tail, five claws on each foot, and its head turned outward.”

Now read that caption with our dragon in front of you. It carries five claws on each foot (in the finer of the two copies), its head is turned outward, and the whole thing is offered, in the book's own word, as a devise. The banner even gives its dragon “a basilisk's tail,” and ours ends in that strange second little face. The vocabulary of the emperor's dragon is sitting on the title page of a French grimoire.

And then you look at the flag itself... and the comparison spell breaks. The engraved dragon on the banner is a plain four-legged creature with a single curled tail. It looks little like ours, which has no hind legs at all, bat wings, and a body built to a European heraldic pattern. So the book did not copy the picture. But it copied the words. Its author drew an ordinary European wyvern and dressed it in the Chinese emperor's blazon: the five claws, the turned head, the devise of Asia, lifted off the page and painted onto a creature that was never Chinese to begin with.

That leaves one unexplained feature. Among the coloured feathers sits a human eye, modelled like a portrait miniature. Another animal on the same leaf was given an ordinary round eye, so this was no accident. French heraldry even has a name for the type, a dragon à face humaine (“a dragon with a human face”). The badge is borrowed. The eye looking out of it is the painter's own.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.

Daisy, Daisy and her Misty green light—
 Fog drifting with

The current of time,
 Slick upon the dock,
 Boots wet with dew and delusion.

As moth to verdant flame,
 Pulses and throbs
 At the speed of the board.

Not a beacon,
 Not a promise— 
It is a dream,

Made in seven moves,
 For love of an idea, 
A perfect vision.

A green window, 
Pierced and gazed through
 To see a soul.

Or maybe just The shape of his own Reflected back.

On Thursday a vinyl copy of All Night Session! Vol. 1 by the Hampton Hawes Quartet arrived in the post. I’d happened to find copies of Vol. 3 and Vol. 2 about fifty yards and six months apart at different shops in Chepstow. A few years have elapsed since then, without any sighting of Vol. 1 in the wild, so I resorted to ordering a copy from a Discogs seller to complete my set. The All Night Session itself took place in Los Angeles on November 12th-13th 1956. It was an unconventional recording date for its time: a nocturnal affair with no second takes and with all tracks ultimately appearing on the records in the order in which they were recorded. Nearly two hours of music were captured and pressed on to three LPs, which were first issued in 1958.

Pianist Hampton Hawes led the proceedings, accompanied by Jim Hall on guitar, Red Mitchell on bass and Bruz Freeman on drums. It was clearly a relaxed and freewheeling affair, with all concerned sounding like they had a great time. Hawes was quoted in 1958 as saying:

It’s hard to put into words how good it feels to play jazz when it's really swinging... I’ve reached a point where the music fills you up so much emotionally that you feel like shouting hallelujah — like people do in church when they’re converted to God. That’s the way I was feeling the night we recorded All Night Session!

The material is a mix of be-bop numbers, ballads, and extended blues-based improvisations summoned out of thin air that night. ‘Hampton’s Pulpit’, for instance, which closes Vol. 1, is one of the best of the album's spontaneous compositions.

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I had no plan to buy any more wax seal stamps, but then I saw (on ebay) a Victorian stamp with a monogram comprising my initials, which seemed too good an opportunity to let pass. Over the weekend I used it in earnest for the first time (Fig. 36). The letters in the monogram are stylized with elaborated serifs in a way I’d seen before in Victorian lettering. The ebay seller suggested that the stamp may date as far back as the 1860s, and associated its style with the Gothic Revival. Unconvinced as to its Gothic-ness, I did a bit of on-line searching & learned that Tuscan was the usual descriptor for typefaces with ornamental bifurcated (or trifurcated) serifs. I think an 1860s origin is still a possibility, but it could equally well be later. See for example a page (Fig. 37) of decidedly florid Tuscan monogram designs from an 1890s sample book in my possession.

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On Wednesday I finished reading Makenna Goodman’s novel Helen of Nowhere. I could say it’s my favourite of the current batch of Booker Prize longlist nominees, but that would only mean I liked it better than M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything: I’ve not read any of the others. It’s a striking and unusual tale, somewhat in the shape of a play, with a list of personae up-front and then six ‘scenes’ largely comprising dialogue and/or internal monologue. I had to work to stay interested in the university office politics which set up the scenario of a disgraced academic seeking an off-grid life in the country. The stranger turn taken in the book’s second half intrigued me rather more. It didn’t quite score as a direct hit, but I enjoyed it overall: a favourable impression consolidated by an ending that struck me as both satisfying & amusing.

Inbetweeners Part 11- The Shadow of Torm

Initially, the Alltemple door, a purple hued door attached to the Grey Room would take the players to the god or religion of whichever holy symbol they held up to it. I left it open ended intentionally... the idea was that players could decide which gods they wanted to interact with and I would let the narrative involve from there. After the Desecrated Temple battle, they went to the Temple of Torm (or possibly before, I can't remember for sure it has been a few years). Once they were regularly interacting with the followers of Torm, I had the purple door just go directly to that temple. The followers of Torm had a dilemma though... the player characters were by no means “good” or aligned with the principals of their church. Torm is the Faerûnian patron deity of paladins and the god of duty, loyalty, righteousness, obedience, law and valor. The players didn't really represent any of these virtues. By traveling between disparate locations, they were insulated from the consequences of their actions and acted in a far more opportunistic manner. Think like Time Bandits but mercenaries. Still, they had done a great good by liberating the desecrated temple, and the followers of Torm had bought their ruse regarding the knight they gave over to the Interloper. So ultimately, what was the authority in Torm supposed to do with the group. They certainly couldn't anoint them as paladins, but the groups ability to travel non-linearly and aptitude for killing fiends made them too good not to work for. Enter, the Shadow of Torm.

Centuries ago, a splinter faction among the followers of Torm emerged. Certain zealots felt that the church had lost its way, and that it focused too much on righteousness and duty to the point where they were allowing fiends to run rampant on the Material Plane. They felt that it was necessary to act within certain grey areas to achieve success, that always acting with moral surety within a strict framework tied their hands against the fiends. They been using more extreme measures to track down devils, yugoloths, demons, undead and their servants throughout the material. Threats, “advanced interrogation”, and execution of those working with fiends rather than fiends themselves were all on the table. Trials and the due process of criminal justice took too long, and that time allowed more evil to spread, so they instead became judge, jury and executioner. Of course, this did not go over well with leadership. The rift grew, as some paladins and clerics agreed a more aggressive approach needed to be taken, while others said it made them no better than the fiends. The conflict came to a head and ultimately these splinter faction members were exiled from the church of Torm. They became known as the “Shadow of Torm.” Officially, leadership had no connection with this group, but over the coming decades they developed backchannels and would contact the shadow to deal with particularly dangerous opponents or threats that required expedience. This backchanneling intensified as infernal activity increased on the material plane. The members of the Shadow of Torm saw themselves as making the ultimate sacrifice, living in exile in order to keep the world safe. And this implicit arrangement held.

Enter the players. Initially they were arriving in Temple of Everlasting Justice, the premier temple of Torm on the material. I created a few characters there but not sure if I ever took notes on them. The leaders decided the players' talents could best be used by the Shadow of Torm, and said they would send them along to a faction that shared a more similiar... moral outlook. The issue here is that the way traveling by the doors worked, the players couldn't simply go to the headquarters of the Shadow of Torm. The Shadow was forbidden from entering any normal Temple of Torm. What they could do, however, was force a door to a new location. Using their most competent wizards, they rigged up a portal, lined with potent magical crystals and arcane devices, such that when the players went through the purple door, they ended up in the headquarters of the Shadow of Torm—a secret underground meeting room. Here was the description of the new room:

“The chamber is vast, hewn from ancient stone with walls lined by torches that do not seem to flicker, emit smoke or generate heat. The floor is worn smooth from countless years of tread, with intricate symbols carved into the rock. Towering along the walls are racks and displays of gleaming weapons—swords, axes, spears, and hammers—each meticulously crafted and inscribed with prunes. The weapons range from simple, sturdy iron blades to gilded, rune-covered relics that hum with latent divine power.

Against one wall stands a collection of shimmering shields and breastplates emblazoned with sacred iconography: radiant suns, crossed swords, and the symbols of various crusader orders. Nearby, smaller alcoves contain specialized gear, such as silver-tipped arrows, vials of holy water, relics said to repel the undead, and crystals pulsing with holy light.

In the center of the chamber is a massive stone table where paladins gather planning their crusade in hushed, fervent tones. Maps of the realms, marked with hotspots of evil activity, lie spread across it. A older man of average size with a large scar across his face regards the group, seemingly expecting them.”

The man they met was Taric Hellbane. The leader of the shadow of Torm, he was “ gruff, tired, cynical, but competent, devoted and deadly.” A veteran of many conflicts, his kill count and resume fighting fiends and undead put him near the top of mortals on the Material. The way I envisioned Taric is absolutely fixated on the mission. Everyone was a potential asset, and every asset should be leveraged to destroy fiends, the more powerful the better. The players' ability to travel non-linearly piqued his interest. The players could access locations inaccessible to the shadow, and as a result ambush fiends that were otherwise completely insulated. Their means of travel did not appear limited to the Material, so there was no reason the players could facilitate the Shadow striking directly into the lower planes. The players liberation of the desecrated Temple plus their later slaying of a vrock engaged in mass murder upon the material (more on that in a later post) demonstrated their value to Taric. They were officially labeled “atypical adjuncts” because their was nothing in the organization that fit their role. The relationship would be transactional, Taric would give them weapons, armor, magical equipment, gold or favors in return for killing fiends or information that enabled the Shadow to take out fiends. The bigger the fish, the bigger the prize. He even offered resurrection spells if the players delivered.

From the players perspective, this was the first reliable faction they could get quests and bounties from that would provide rewards. Mobius Torrent provided a quest, but that was a singular long term target. These guys they just needed to bring some demon heads. Unlike the Interloper, these rewards lacked drawbacks. They were normal magical weapons and equipment from the 5e standard rules. This was a relief for them, because while the Interloper's items and spells were incredibly powerful and rule breaking, they came with unanticipated and substantial drawbacks. Also, it gave them an alternate means of resurrection since the Interloper sometimes brought things back... wrong. Not intentionally, but he was still refining his understanding of 3 dimensional beings. So the players had mixed feelings morally about the Shadow of Torm, but they couldn't deny it was nice to have another place to pick up goodies. I think Uzo the Hobgoblin referred to them as the “cops” and didn't trust their motives, something that became more apparent as Zariel entered the plot.

On that note, as soon as Taric discovered that the group had been in contact with Zariel he immediately dropped all other projects and became obsessed with capturing/killing her. The headquarters was immediately evacuated except for barebones staff and materials needed to keep working with the players, in case Zariel found her way there. His plan was to have the players lure Zariel to a location where she would be ambushed by the full force of the Shadow of Torm. Killing an archdevil, the leader of one of the nine hells, would eclipse anything the Shadow had ever achieved before. It would be such a phenomenal triumph that they may be reintegrated into the church of Torm in a leadership role. Taric was aware of how dangerous this gambit was, Zariel was a god tier combatant, but this did not deter him. He would gladly give his life to bring her down. I'll get into the ambush of Zariel in another post, there are a few more pieces I have to place on the board for context, but Taric's fixation on defeating Zariel ultimately plants the seeds for his downfall. In a way, she became his white whale.

Later, we will get into the transformation of the Shadow Torm into the Judgement of Torm, and eventually the Judgement of Lurian. The faction became more important, not less, as the story unfolded. But for now, I think that gives enough background on the “Shadow” phase.

Most of my days are spent thinking about, investigating, researching, and journaling the various aspects of my ongoing atopic experiences and the underlying circumstances. I once thought the experiences themselves were the hardest part. They're not — though that's not to say they're getting any easier either.

No, not hardly.

And I’m now finding the silence that follows a vision or encounter to often be more difficult than the experience itself.

How do you tell the people around you about something you can barely find words for, let alone fully explain, when it keeps happening?

I really don’t know.

For nearly nine months now, I’ve been struggling with that very question. I’m not seeking attention, but I do need a way to release the pressure that builds from being unable to speak about my experiences.

How do you say, “I’ve seen some very strange things,” without slipping into rationalizing, defending, and defining something that you haven’t found the definitions to describe accurately?

How do you say, “Oh, I’m just an average guy with an average life, until I randomly and uncontrollably slip into a liminality that defies conventional wisdom and explanation.” That’s one hell of an icebreaker line for a networking party, but I won’t be using it anytime soon.

Even among people who better understand it or have had similar experiences, I find it hard to fully share. And that’s because, even among the experienced, there can be predispositions and misunderstandings. Everyone expects my experiences to align with their own. Some want my encounters to fit their own cosmologies. Others want my encounters to match their own. Even my own enthusiasm often works against me; I get ahead of myself and impose too much on those kind enough to listen and share in kind.

There’s no guidebook or roadmap for this juggling of realities, which is really a single reality, but I’ll deal with that another day. Today I’m just trying to remain functional at work while turning the deeper questions over and over in my mind: What is her true nature? What will it mean? What will be the implications? That last question gives me chills and fills me with trepidation.

But I don’t know what I don’t know.

I’m just writing my own guidebook as I go.

Not ideal—though it could be far, far worse.