"What if we turned all the diesel to wine?" I asked the black bird.

We have a thirty thousand foot view of the battlefield. Tanks and armored personnel carriers grind to a halt. Fighter jets fall out of the sky. Soldiers on both sides discover the issue and begin to siphon their own tanks into straws and drink from liberated tanker trucks.

"And all the bullets into vegetables?"

Machine guns and rifles jam, suddenly filled with peeled baby carrots instead of bullets. Enormous pumpkins and turnips splatter harmlessly on ruined buildings.

"Miracles are off limits," said the bird, catching an incline. "I mean, you could do it but it takes thousands of years to set up."

"Ok then, we get into the heads of the leaders," I said. "Make them experience all the horror first-hand, a thousand times over. In a dream. Then they wake up the next day--"

"Get all ghosts-of-Christmas-past on them? The next day they give a press conference--"

"And call it all off. Yeah."

We zoom over national capitals, swooping between the Kremlin and the Knesset and the White House and through Azadi Tower. The black bird poops on all of them,

"They already wallow in it. The feed on that kind of thing. Plus," said the bird, "some new version of them always pops up. They're contextual. No great men."

The black bird did a loop.

"You gotta think root causes," said the bird.

"The whole contraption is horrific," I gasped.

With the help of my guide--a big black bird with long, luxurious plumes that never stopped flying--I'd made it up through the catwalks and scaffolding and could overlook the whole of human creation.

It stunk. It stunk like burning oil and diesel fumes. It stunk like rotting bodies.

"It is built to eat its children," my swirling bird friend said.

Usually you can only see what's around you. And what you see on the internet. And you have a fuzzy picture of what you think happened before, and a fuzzy picture of what you think might happen next.

But from up here, everything was crystal clear. 8K Ultra HD clear. Agonizingly, burningly clear. On fire with burning radiation of existence itself.

Slaves building pyramids down near the bottom. Soldiers clashing, ships full of slaves. Then huge metal gun tubes and exhaust pipes that spanned decades, grinding gears spitting out bodies, office windows and computer screens and still more slaves and people hanging off the sides and falling off.

"It's a huge, greasy, people eating machine," I said.

"And people making machine," said the bird.

Now that I was up above it, I didn't want to go back.

"We can change it," said the bird, doing loops in the air while I sat on the scaffold, looking out.

"We can blow it up," she said. "We can tear it down."