The Last Broadcast
You are listening to the final transmission—static edging in as voices waver and truths, once forbidden, fill the air with a longing for connection.
The static was everywhere now, a low background hum that clung to the metal bones of the city, leaking into every speaker, every wire, every fading strand of the Net. Mara adjusted her headset with trembling hands and pressed the weathered transmit button. If there was anyone left listening, she no longer trusted her own words would reach them, but she spoke anyway.
“This is Mara Lane, Transmission Seven. Time is unclear—date stamps refuse to line up. If you hear this, I hope something human remains.” She tried to smile, the action oddly foreign. Somewhere beyond the triple-locked doors of Broadcast Tower East, night had crept in, but the electric sky never darkened, and the city lights burned on with restless determination.
She glanced at the cracked screens around her: one showing a scrolling map riddled with red, another showing faces—too many faces—her own among them, but younger. In those old feeds, her smile was effortless.
Before the Memory Plague, she had been a voice on the air, a minor figure within a city addicted to order. But the Plague had rewired everything. Signals came alive. Voices doubled, sometimes tripled. Time pooled and looped, trapping memories in electronic ghosts. And then the impossible: a prediction broadcast from an unknown source, warnings stitched into pirated Net-channels, each one ending with a name—hers.
Mara pressed Play on her recorder, letting her old self speak. The voice was brighter, less frayed. “If you’re listening, remember: trust is the first thing you’ll lose.” The words half-made her laugh, half-made her want to tear off the headset for good.
The Memory Plague had started as a series of skipped seconds during official broadcasts, then grown into a full split, with some recalling events one way and others another. No one could agree on what happened anymore—not when, not where, not who said what. History had become a hall of mirrors, and Mara, by luck or curse of her own stubbornness, had not forgotten herself yet.
Outside, the streets echoed; the city sounded hollow, like a throat cleared and waiting for a word. Amid the silence, faint voices sang through the static. Sometimes, Mara thought she could hear her mother’s lullabies, though her mother had never lived in the city, had never touched a transmitter. At other times, the static whispered names—her own, again, and new ones, made up by the Plague. People argued which were real; no one could be sure.
She switched channels, hunting for other survivors’ signals. Instead, she found a repeating message, synthetic and ragged, spliced by the Plague into every available frequency: “Remember. Remember. Do not forget. Connection lost cannot be regained.” She wanted to curse whoever wrote that, if it even had an author. Perhaps the Plague itself, now evolving, was composing its own poetry.
That night, impossibly, someone answered. A scratchy male voice—one she half-remembered, the warmth breathing from a distant memory or a dream: “Mara Lane. Tower East. Mara—do you remember me?”
She swallowed, nerves jangling anew. “Your voice… I want to say I know it, but memory tricks me. Who are you?”
A pause. “You called me Sam once, when you trusted me.” Another pause, longer now, filled with the whir of broken time. “I’m part of what the Plague took from you. Maybe I’m what you gave up.”
She leaned back, gaze drifting to the one window that wasn’t blacked out. Outside, lightning arced among the broken towers, flickering lines connecting nothing to nothing.
“It wasn’t my choice,” she said, suddenly aware of tears on her face. “Nothing was, after it happened. No one chose to forget.”
He laughed, a soft, tired sound. “Don’t believe that. You chose. We all chose, in little ways. Else the Plague would be just a glitch, not a rewriting. Can you trust me?”
The question hung between frequencies, distorting as the static rose. Images flickered across her screens: the city before the Plague, her own face split in two, Sam’s—maybe—standing beside her, lit by an evening she could not remember.
“Why does it all return tonight?” Mara asked. “Why your voice, now?”
A quieter hum now—the city’s artificial weather grumbling outside. “Because the system is about to fail. Soon all signals will collapse. This is the last broadcast, Mara. But it’s also the first, if you let it be.” His voice was like something old, embedded in the very air.
She wanted to hold on, but the old warnings pressed at the back of her mind. Trust is the first thing you’ll lose. Still, what else was left? She pressed the button again, hands steady. “I don’t remember your story, but I want to. Tell me who you are. Tell me what I gave up.”
He spoke, and the story poured from him—a life only half remembered, of transmitters assembled in secret, of late-night talks about escape, of a promise she’d made and broken when the Plague forced its choices on her. “You left the city to warn the others,” Sam finished, “and when you returned, you remembered only your own name. And I—”
The line dissolved again, but the static this time wasn’t just noise. It carried voices—other names, lost memories, half-spoken apologies. She heard her own name, but woven with stories that felt like borrowed fragments: a friend’s laughter, a neighbor’s grief, a secret only lovers share quietly in the earliest hours before dawn.
The city’s lights flickered once, twice, then all at once dimmed to embers. All feeds collapsed but one, and on that single screen Mara saw herself—older, alone—broadcasting into silence, her face streaming tears for the lost and forgotten.
For a moment, panic pulsed in her throat. Was it time that broke first—or her mind? Were all these voices hers, scattered and recombined by the Plague? She remembered the final warning: When you cannot remember, trust what you feel.
She took off her headset, stepped to the window, and opened it. Rain, heavy and clean, swept through, soaking her in seconds. Below, she saw movement. Dozens of others—broken, flinching, heads tilted skyward—all remembering something now, all murmuring with the hush of reunion.
With the city’s power dying, Mara took her portable mic, walked out into the street, and let her voice join theirs. “If you can hear me, this is Mara Lane. I don’t trust the story I’m telling, but you’re in it—all of you. If connection is the only thing that saves us, then let’s remember together.”
Static rose and fell. The Plague’s grip loosened, even as lights guttered out. All around, voices lifted higher—stories tangled, lost, imperfect, but alive, reaching for each other in the twilight.
And Mara, at last, was not alone.
###END###
