The Hollow Crown

Participants:

marlowe_icon.gif

Scene Title The Hollow Crown
Synopsis "Being smart will count for nothing, if you don't make the world better."
Date July 11, 2021

Yamagato Building

Fourth Floor - Research & Development

Technology Director Marlowe Terrell’s Office

Time: 11:56 PM EST


Marlowe hasn’t gone home.

The technology director’s office is bathed in blue, light and shadows alike playing off the woman’s hair, makeup, and white button down shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

She is hunched over her glass desktop, not staring at a lit screen but at a simple graphing paper notepad, glue-bound at the top and several sheets already gone. She has penned countless drafts by hand, some of the writing sounding fevered, some of it sounding nonsensical, all discarded in a bin to be sent to a shredder later in one of the sub-level workshops. She looks up, staring blankly to the hovering, slowly refreshing, rasterizing model of the Project Agartha structure being built out in Vashon Island, Washington state.

She looks down again to the words she has scrawled on the page, reading and rereading the material, her eyes like a screed moving back and forth, attempting to smooth the layers of meaning into something solid, something structured.

A foundation.

CROWN - Principles of Resilience
A framework for consistent approach to community and structural resilience of Project: Agartha that can be broadly integrated in planning and development.

The goal is to provide guidance and assistance to the community, advance progressive systems use solutions, focus community-based development, and improve building standards and codes. This goal relies on partnerships within Project: Agartha, with other agencies, local government, community-based organizations, academia, non-profits, and other stakeholders.

The CROWN Principles of Resilience are five points:

C - Capacity to Adapt, Compassion in Decision

  • Consider different scenarios of future conditions and be prepared to change course if necessary. Anticipated climate stressors, solar, water, and weather development patterns, and planning timeframes for these possible scenario variables should be calculated with caution.
  • With every decision, the people must consider all who fall within the scope of the effective change.

King Richard II. Act III, scene ii.

No matter where - of comfort no man speak:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.


R - Risks Are Necessary; Avoid Excess and Reduce Cost

  • Utilize hazard mitigation plans, risk viewers, guide maps to learn about risks to an area, with the express goal of planning concepts of space use that place development and community assets out of hazardous areas.
  • Explore options to manage the risks, implement a full range of measures to include structural and non-structural approaches.

Let's choose executors and talk of wills;

And yet not so, for what can we bequeath

Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's,

And nothing can we call our own but death,

And that small model of the barren earth

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.


O - One Measure Stacks Multiple Benefits

  • Seek solutions that provide multiple benefits and address multiple goals. Aim to identify resilience measures that are win-win solutions.
  • Reliance on one measure can prove catastrophic. Vary the types of measures and policies, and have backups in place.

For God's sake let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings:

How some have been depos'd, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill'd,


W - Work With Each Other, Not Against

  • Accountability, Inclusivity, and Transparency will lead to better decisions and reduce conflicts. Develop equitable public outreach and engagement plans, and clearly outline the community roles in planning and decision-making processes.
  • Building trust requires identifying the impact on existing inequities and the potential costs to future generations. Consider long-term impacts to avoid transferring or deferring risks to others and improve the resilience of vulnerable or marginalized populations.

All murdered - for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks,

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh which walls about our life

Were brass impregnable; and humor'd thus,

Comes at the last and with a little pin

Bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king!


N - Nature Will Do Its Work

  • Conserve, enhance, and restore naturally resilient features and systems.
  • Left alone or supported through restoration actions, many natural features maintain or improve in their risk reduction benefits over time.

Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood

With solemn reverence, throw away respect,

Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while.


Above all, center the CROWN principles upon this philosophy: Our humanity is our most precious resource.

Let these principles be a guide for us and for our future.


I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,

How can you say to me I am a king?


The tip of the pencil pauses beneath the principles listed in English acronym before moving below to the very bottom of the page. With swift strokes and precise, practiced movement she writes one more phrase of her own, native tongue.

玉砕主義1

Marlowe lays her pencil down beside the pad, and stares down silently at the words upon the page. Her hand moves to the notepad’s cardboard cover and slowly flips it closed.

She stands from her desk, gathers her things, and walks towards the door, leaving the paper pad behind.

The automated sensors, sensing her exit from the room, turn off the lights.


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