The colonel stood before the vast, sun-bleached expanse, squinting into the distance. The desert stretched on forever, flat as a dinner plate. In his hand, he held a rolled-up blueprint, its edges curling from the dry wind. Behind him, a gathering of officers waited—silent, sweating in their khaki uniforms. A half-mile away, the airstrip shimmered in the heat, a single runway cutting through the endless nothingness.

“More,” the colonel muttered. His voice was dry, too, like dust, but it carried. “We need more.”

The general, silver-haired and hard-eyed, approached. “More what?”

“Runway. It’s not long enough.” The colonel unrolled the blueprint, slapping it against his knee as he pointed to the sketched-out plans. “If we extend this strip another five miles, we could launch fighters further. Drop payloads deeper into the interior. It’s the difference between grazing the enemy’s beard and cleaving their throat.”

The general considered the horizon, his face carved in shadows. He wasn’t a man of quick words, but he understood what the colonel was getting at. It was a strategy, the kind of thinking he liked—distance was safety. Bomb them, break them, but don’t get close enough to see the white of their eyes. Hell, don’t even get close enough to hear the screams.

“More runway,” the colonel repeated, his voice gaining strength as the idea caught fire. “We can push the war further out, way beyond our borders. Beyond any borders.”

The general grunted. He folded his arms across his chest, the brass on his uniform catching the sunlight. “What’s the risk?”

“Risk?” The colonel almost laughed. “There is none. We’ll be so far out of range, they won’t even know who hit them. Brave new war, fought from the sky, miles above it all. All we need is more runway.”

The general turned, looking back at the men under his command. Some of them had been in combat, seen the blood and grit, but most were just like the colonel—clean, untouched by the realities of the battlefield. Safe in their towers, pushing the war further out into the horizon, where the people who lived in cities of smoke and rubble would never even see the faces of the men who ended them.

“Five miles more?” the general asked.

The colonel nodded eagerly. “Five, maybe ten. We could level half the continent before they even knew it was us. All without leaving the ground.”

The general took the blueprint, staring at the lines as if they were roads to glory. “Five more miles, huh?”

He folded the paper and handed it back. “Make it twenty.”

The colonel’s eyes lit up like the flare of jet fuel. “Yes, sir.”

Behind them, the desert was already swallowing the old world whole. It didn’t care how far the runway reached, or what lay beyond it. But the men cared. They cared because, as long as they were brave out of range, they were never really in the fight at all.

<>

The expansion of the runway began in earnest the next morning. Men worked tirelessly, sunburnt faces furrowed with focus, laying mile after mile of smooth concrete into the sand. The engineers marveled at the efficiency—this was progress, they said, and each additional foot of runway promised new power, new dominion.

But as the weeks passed, something peculiar occurred.

One afternoon, the spotters stationed on a nearby hill called in a report. It was brief, unassuming, yet troubling. South of the airfield, they saw construction—another runway, identical to the one stretching north. The colonel dismissed it at first, a mirage, or perhaps a trick of light. The desert played those games often. But the next day, more spotters confirmed the sighting. A second runway, mirroring theirs exactly.

By the end of the week, the reports grew impossible to ignore. The twin runway extended as far south as theirs did to the north, paralleling every twist, every turn. Engineers consulted their maps, their instruments, but found no discrepancy in the original plans. This second runway was not theirs. It did not belong to them.

“An enemy operation,” the general growled, pacing the command tent. His fists were clenched, the knuckles white against his tan skin. “They’re mocking us, building under our noses. Bomb them. Now.”

The colonel hesitated but gave the order.

Planes soared into the sky, cutting through the heat haze with the promise of swift destruction. They dropped their payloads on the shadowy runway below, explosions rippling across the sand. But as the smoke cleared, a strange silence descended over the base. Spotters began reporting back with stammering voices—confused, frantic.

“Sir, the bombs—there’s…there’s no impact. The runway is still there.”

More planes were launched, more bombs fell, each strike seemingly hitting its mark, but the reports were the same: no damage, no destruction. And then, another call came in—this time from the northern end of the airfield. Planes that had launched from the original runway had been hit. The very airstrip they had tried to protect was now pocked with craters, smoldering wreckage strewn across the tarmac. It was as if they had bombed themselves.

“Impossible,” the colonel muttered, his voice barely a whisper. “We’re bombing the enemy. We saw it.”

But the more they tried to strike the southern runway, the more damage appeared on their own. No matter how precise, how calculated the assault, the bombs always returned to them, as if caught in some invisible loop, some impossible trick of space.

The general, face ashen, stood at the edge of the runway, staring into the endless desert. The more they built, the longer the runway seemed to grow. Not just forward, but backward, inward, twisting into something beyond comprehension. The desert, it seemed, had swallowed their intentions and bent them back upon themselves.

It was then that the colonel, sleepless and stricken, recalled a phrase from a book he once read—a concept of geometry, of objects that defied ordinary understanding. A Klein bottle, he thought, the shape that turned in on itself, where inside and outside were indistinguishable. Had they been constructing not a runway, but a paradox? A loop that had no beginning, no end?

But the men knew nothing of this. The planes still flew. The bombs still fell. The war continued, fought from the sky, far from the men who gave the orders. Yet the destruction they sought to inflict circled back upon them, unseen, unheard, and unheeded.

Only we, the readers, could glimpse the truth. We could see the invisible lines, the twisted geometry of war. The colonel and the general, oblivious to their own entrapment, still believed they were the masters of the desert, while all along, the desert had been playing a much longer game.