The Last Broadcast from Vega City
Excerpt: In the city of endless screens, a single broadcast claims that reality itself is unraveling—leaving its reluctant host, Mara, grasping for meaning in the flickering blue glow.
My name is Mara Orlov, and I was the face of “Morning with Vega”—or at least, of the idea that Vega still had mornings. The city spanned six domes. Above, a shroud of perpetual twilight from artificial satellites, below, quiet machines pulling silicon moisture from the spent soil. We lived in layers, each generation chasing the promise of a brighter broadcast—the solace of someone else’s sorrow, or maybe just proof we still existed.
The first sign that something was wrong came at 3:44 AM, while I was still rehearsing the weather monologue in Studio B. Hundreds of the city’s outdoor screens went to static, then black. It wasn’t part of the power-saving cycle. My producer, Sio, ran into the studio, headset askew.
“Mara, the feeds are dropping,” she said, voice quavering beneath forced calm. “All frequencies. But there are—other signals. Not ours.”
I stared at the prompter, where neat lines of weather updates dissolved into scrambled code. Letters bent into unfamiliar shapes, as if halfway through remembering a language.
“Do we still have Studio B?” I asked, not really caring about the answer. My voice sounded pinched, unfamiliar.
“For now, yes.” Sio kept glancing over her shoulder, muttering into her earpiece. “But look—” She tapped her pad, and showed me a short video: the biggest city screen, Vega Central, showing a blank blue field fractured by white lines. A woman’s figure, blurred and doubled—almost a reflection of myself—placed one hand against the inside of the screen, and the image glitched.
“Did we send this?” Sio asked. “Or is it…what is it?”
I couldn’t answer. I barely trusted my sense of the studio’s edges—the lights seemed to flicker and pulse, and the prompter’s scrolling text had started bleeding into the ticker crawl at the bottom, mixing news about crops with half-remembered slogans. In the reflection of the teleprompter’s glass, I thought I saw my own face fragment, like a bad signal.
No one pulled us off the air. No emergency alert chimed. Sio made the call: keep going, feed the calm. In Vega City, people did not see one another anymore except on screen, mediated by a thousand feeds and filters. Eyes hunched over their screens, they watched us to know how to feel—weather, health warnings, anniversaries of minor disasters spun into comforting narrative. The idea was to keep the city together with the right stories.
By the time I started the 4:08 AM segment, I realized I’d lost all memory of the day before. Usually, I kept a little diary segment, lines and sketches on my pad. But now the pages were blank. My own voice, mingled with the buzz through the feed, felt estranged—someone else using my mouth. I forced myself to smile and read the text as it appeared, even as it grew stranger.
“Vega sunrise forecast: Blue. Temperatures stable. The world is awake, citizens. Please remember to wave at your morning reflection.”
I hesitated, and stared into the studio’s main camera, seeing my face doubled and blurred on its tiny monitor. A strange certainty crept in—I couldn’t tell if I was addressing viewers, or just their fading memories of me.
Between segments, I scrawled a message to Sio: “What’s happening outside?”
She hunched over her pad, eyes rimmed red. “It’s not just feeds. People are sending in messages—half don’t remember who they are. Reports of dreams blending into waking life. Some people see doubles of themselves in mirrors. Others say parts of the city are…missing.”
I didn’t want to believe her. In this city, you were only as real as your signal. To be ignored—to flicker out—was to vanish. No wonder people clung to their screens.
At 4:23 AM, the broadcast picked up interference mid-interview. The screens, everywhere, turned to that empty blue. And a voice, familiar and not, came through.
“This is not your world alone. Remember who you are. Look past the glass.”
The message played twice, then the signal snapped back to the studio. Silence lingered like static. I realized I was shaking.
Sio’s eyes pleaded for direction, but I had none.
The rest of the staff grew agitated. The city’s broadcast network burned with desperate chatter—engineers screaming about lost archives, city officials demanding answers, interns weeping over empty contact lists. The outside faded behind rising blue, as if the broadcast world was encroaching on the physical one.
I thought of my grandmother, who’d told me stories of the city’s founding. Before the domes, before permanent screens, before everyone disappeared behind mediated lives. She said, “We built walls of light, thinking it would keep us together. All it did was bind our shadows.”
By dawn—if you could call it that, when all light was blue—Sio came to me with one last request.
“People are scared, Mara. They still trust you. You should speak to them, directly.”
But by then, my own memories felt wrong. I remembered things out of order: the first time I begged for a chance on air—now it seemed to happen after my first broadcast, not before. My mother’s voice—sometimes Sio’s voice—slice through recollections. I saw flashes of the studio, but sometimes it was empty, sometimes full of doubles and echoes of myself.
Still, I sat before the main camera, hands trembling, as Sio counted me in.
“This is Mara Orlov. I know you see blue, and wires, and faces that flicker in and out. Today, the story changes—” My throat caught. I could not read the script—there was no script left. Just my own desperate plea.
“I am not sure who I am anymore, if these memories are mine, or yours, or just assembled for tonight’s show. But I know you’re afraid. I am afraid too.”
The screen behind me bled to blue, and in my periphery I saw the blurred figure—my own, and not—standing with its hand pressed against the glass, pleading.
“We define reality together. If you can remember—anything—hold on to it. Call out for someone. Even if you only find echoes, do not let go. We’re still here as long as we remember to look for each other.”
The feed died mid-sentence, the studio plunged into darkness. For a moment, there were just the backup lights, the gentle hum of systems that no longer mattered.
Sio took my hand. Her touch was real—insistent, human.
“Look,” she whispered, leading me to a window. We stood together and watched as, outside, the screens flickered—one by one—off. The blue faded. The city, silent, slowly revealed its true colors, dim and gray and raw. For the first time in years, I saw people on the streets, reaching for one another, uncertain but visible.
I no longer trusted my memories. I didn’t know if I’d been Mara Orlov for a year or a dream’s span. But I felt Sio’s hand in mine, and heard distant voices, calling names, tentatively, to see who might answer.
In the end, it wasn’t about the stories they told us; it was about the moment the broadcast failed, and we found each other in the static, real at last.
###END###
