The Soviet Union's Buran, a piece of living palimpsest, was a cultural artifact before it rolled off the assembly line. It completed just one unmanned space flight before the program was canceled. That same vehicle was later destroyed when it's hangar collapsed at the Baikonur cosmodrome. However, several original full-scale mock-ups remain. This film is a fictionalized account of the origin of the Buran.

Photo, video, text, voice over: Michael Eckels
Archive footage: Energia
Music: Maurice Ravel "Valses Nobles et Sentimentales"
Sound effects: freesound.org

Below is the complete original voive over text that proved too long upon recording:

Colourwall awoke fondled by doubts. The previous evening had begun in a karaoke bar with a group of Dutch tourists. Van der Hooeten, Femke, Gijs. Their incomprehensible names like magic words cast a nightingale spell. Colourwall doing his juvenile best to impress by inserting them into pauses of stardust crooner b-sides. How you tonight Meintje? Winking at one of the better-looking milk-weaned giantesses. Her giggle in reply egging him on. Only he must have said the words in the wrong order because when he sat down at their table the Dutch were gone, evaporated it seemed. Checked out of the fake motel they had given him. It was just one of the several mysteries, or lapses, he couldn’t entirely make sense of this morning.

He found he had conquered their pronunciation. “Sjaak, Roos,” he said clearly and robustly. But no one appeared from a desk drawer and the porcelain bust of Churchill smirked in mocking taciturn.
“Up the Dutch,” he thought reaching for his bathrobe. They weren’t important. It was that other thing disquieting the settled phlegm of his bosom. His lifetime rival, knowledge, was once again taunting him like a playground bully. He could feel it.

Knowledge never would play fair. In 5th grade it had been fractions and the civil war. Knowledge spent way more time with the other kids from the richer families. Ricky Colourwall could never get his attention no matter what. Even when he snapped Mrs. Whittleton’s bra and the entire class guffawed, Knowledge just stayed focused on Timmy Buskin. Jerk.

And here he was once more with his back turned to Colourwall. “What the hell was I was I supposed to remember?” Colourwall thought, squinting at himself in the mirror. “Who gave me this hickey?” he grinned, “it’s still a little sore.” He enjoyed wavering attribution between the bar’s regular hussies Rachel and Kayla while making coffee. “Either would be wicked,” he thought – and wrong. The second taser zap clarified nothing.

A secret-service smelling thug placed him on his rump came round front and handed him his coffee. “Who are you? How did you get in?” Colourwall asked perplexed. “Coffee?”

“I” the intruder began, “am here to check the vault for fissures.” Fissures. Colourwall felt certain he wasn’t sure he understood. Knowledge was definitely organizing a subterfuge. Colourwall shriveled upon himself and waited politely for it all to finish. Whatever it would be, however long it may last, he knew he was no match for it. The prudent thing was to capitulate immediately, as years of ineptitude had shown him. He answered with a nod of comprehension. “The vault’s all in order. Don’t worry.”

“Good,” toothed the thug, “that’s exactly what I wanted to hear.” Colourwall smiled back. “Because if anything should ever get out, leak, slip, escape – anything at all, even the slightest wisp of your charge from last evening – you’ll unfurl a brutal vector of inhospitality whose primary aim will not be your destruction, but you’ll get crushed before your spindly goblin legs can carry you to safety. As a side effect. Count on it. So hold your tongue, runt.”

“Ok”, Colourwall answered somewhat exasperated. The thug tasered him again and swirled out in a twist of fine cologne from his underworld petticoats. “Asshole” yelled Colourwall when he was sure the thug was long gone. He rubbed his throbbing neck and sat to thinking again and again some times muttering aloud, “What the hell am I supposed to remember to keep quiet about?”

He lingered over the question like a monkey cognizant of being shunned by evolution, but lacking the faculties to grasp the mechanics involved. The first being plate tectonics, by edict of Supersymmetry. Millennia ago, the earth when split into Gondwana and Laurasia triggered a course of one-upsmanship that ingratiated itself snugly within the genome, to be secreted in perpetuity as human behavior. The earth groaned as it grew, sweating out rivalries and trysts. Clans warred. Newton copied Leibniz or vice-versa, brands clashed, and nearly everything found itself in deadlock competition with a hackneyed doppelganger for the claim to legitimacy. Supersymmetry drove the antagonism of the Cold War, peaking ironically enough with the hole race which saw the Soviet’s Kola Superdeep Borehole triumph over team USA’s Project Mohole. The next most commendable ooze: the Shuttle Program and its unmanned enemy the Buran.

CAESURA

One, an overweight effigy of the people’s will -- a wizened funnyhouse. The other canceled, on its last run, to be replaced by nothing. The superpartners now exhausted careen toward their joint holiday in oblivion to be re-plaited into the continuum, for eventual reissue. The Shuttle-Buran super-meme remix, Ricky Colourwall would get mildly rich producing the album never understanding why or how. Rich enough to buy a third-rate club for draft-dodgers and wannabe hookers that kept the record spinning. It’s boom boom activating something maternal in him that made him uncomfortable. Meanwhile youth wriggled to the beat on the dance floor kicking out droplets of perspiration, sachets of instructions, molecular communication through the salts of random casual contact. Secondary Supersweat. Orders, strategy and tactics, in the form of pheromones, positively or negatively charged, designed but not compelled to unite with a counterpart; dispersed via the subtle brushes and bumps of spontaneous accidental contact. Accidental, that was the key. Sex and handshakes were too hygienic.

Only rarely when looking at his chief of security, that same sly scently thug that had wapped him around in a previous life, would Colourwall dwell on the provenance of his station. It had been the only condition of his buying the place, to keep the prick on. “Forgive and forget,” he thought in eerie opposition to his daily bread of nag and punish.

The secret was still AWOL. But why was he to blame? How good could information be if it’s so easily forgettable? In one night. Less than that, a few hours! It was their fault for not giving him something so classy he couldn’t forget it.

The upside: he could never spit it out accidentally, no matter how much he bragged while under the influence. That made him safe, for now. But he could never own up or ask for a reminder. Not to his wife or any man of spirits. Thuggie if he met Colourwall’s glance on such an occasion would flicker his eyebrows patronizingly. Two furry antennae oscillating with the anxiety of potential discovery. It was too easy to make any number of unknown people, of unknown rank livid to an unknown degree. Three unknowns producing a diminished chord he would play flat in some imminent future.