Machines that look like little cars Consume the bones and count the scars

Automobile design in 1930s Mitteleuropa was inordinately fond of beetles:


The convergence is inexplicable!

Perhaps it is a manifestation of some historical calamity, one that wreaked such widespread psychic trauma that the painful memories were nigh-universally suppressed. But the repression bubbled up as a cultural neurosis, and residual engrams seeped through the seams of amnesia like blood through a cheap suitcase. This always happens. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.

"Let us collate these manifestations," I said.

"Along with other data," Another Kiwi vouchsafed -- "such as the rise in the 1930s of interest in insect-collecting as a hobby." tigris wondered whether to include fictional accounts of transformation into insects. Of course, we said.

"Let us feed everything to the Riddled Ktistec Machine, instructing it to find the problem for which this was the solution... to reconstruct the lineaments of the underlying tragedy."

The analysis reveals that Elekton Earth was invaded by malignant lambent-eyed creatures from Gallas, speaking in Rockwell Slab-Serif, whose sonic weapon drove all who heard it into a madness of self-destruction and fratricide!!

Their coleopteric vehicles were nigh-invulnerable to modern energy cannons, and could only be defeated by human muscles and coordination!!

"What if we dredge up this trauma and it is still too painful, even after the passage of time?" This is not the first time that tigris has been concerned for the mental health of Riddled readers.

"Not to worry," I said. "The protective mechanisms will take over, and they will dismiss the whole thing as a joke."