The Sky

I’m sorry, it’s just a story. A short story, indeed, but it looks like it’s the last one for me, the air is leaving my lungs, my sight is getting clouded.

I was behind that short concrete building, probably just a warehouse with spare components in case the Tower got damaged or malfunctioned. Alone in the night, me and my device, its cold metal cover pressed against my still warm skin under my jacket. Indeed, it was cold, but soon the place was going to be lit up in flames so why worry about the cold?

Hesitation.

Yes, hesitation makes everything worse, just like the cold, and the two were joining efforts against me. And the silence too, so deep and looming, it was disturbing. I could hear the echo of my own heartbeat hammering against my eardrums, maybe the manifestation of my own resisting thoughts. 
At any point I could put down the device and just leave, leave the place silent, a concrete and metal sanctuary to heresy, pure in its own lies. But I hadn’t come here to go back home colder than before, no.

A tool conceived to propagate the maximum amount of information, the Broadcast Towers were used to keep the population under control through distraction, flooding them with apparently crucial but actually useless and dissonant information at all times. Their minds were constantly engaged in sifting through bullshit, occupied in the constant task of telling truth from fiction, whose spread was enhanced by the Towers.

That’s what I came here to boycott, and I wasn’t going to accept any other outcome than that.

My finger clenched against the metal case, I pulled up my mask and started to run towards the Tower, through all the fences around its basement blocks, they were electrified too, I wish I had known that in advance. The menacing snaps as the air behind me moved the metal nets suggested that the voltage was several times higher than what a human could joke about, and the ozone smell made my thin mask irrelevant. Luckily I was on the right side of that fence, the one that led to the Tower elevator. From afar, the Tower looked short and harmless, but only at its feet you could see it in its true height.

Twenty meters, almost fifteen times me, I’m a short girl, or at least I was. That’s all the airspace humans had left, everything in the atmosphere was polluted and saturated with carbon gases centuries ago. Humans had managed to reclaim some of their past breathing room thanks to oxy-graphene converters and the carbonifugous field, but twenty meters was all they could manage at current capacity. That’s why every structure, including the Broadcast Towers, were exactly that tall, not a centimeter more. And that’s also why they put the broadcasting core devices right at the top: guaranteed death for all potential disruptors. Except those reckless enough to put their life on the line for a cause, like me.

I was aware I could die at any time: if not to the Life Repellers at the entrance, if not to the supercharged fence, if not to a misstep on the Tower’s metal pillars, as I was climbing on its side, then how could I be afraid of some carbon dioxide?

Honest to God, I didn’t believe climbing a tower could be this hard. I fell once, I broke a leg and bled. I fell again, this time not to the ground, the rope kept me alive at the price of some cuts on my hand and my device, the metal case inevitably falling to its loud crash on the concrete meters down below will haunt me forever, where forever is the few minutes I have ahead of me.

I got to the top of the Tower eventually. My body was at its limit, but my mind was as sharp as it had never been. Despite losing the crucial device, put together to hijack and jam the broadcasting cores, I had a backup. It was a small superbattery with Geiger electrolytes, a little toy I had initially made when I was in high school years ago. It could convert radiations to electricity and amplify it, albeit to small voltages. I upgraded it through the years so that a tiny neutron emitter could connect to any kind of matter and form isotopes, thus forcing it to become radioactive. I had planned to use the carbonosphere’s natural radioactivity, beyond the carbonifugous field there was plenty of radiation, but when I was that close to the glowing blue curtain that kept the dark clouds out, I couldn’t stand.

I had no other choice than to use my own body as a catalyst and supercharge the core.

And so I did.

I connected it to the core, I plugged the neutron emitter and the Geiger electrodes deep into my open leg wound and I turned it on. It was slow, slow and painful, I couldn’t feel anything but I knew I was being silently poisoned, I was crossing the line, I felt dizzy.

The superbattery started to buzz, accumulating the electricity generously sapped from my tiny body. As expected, the energy wasn’t going to be enough to jam it permanently, but just a few hours were more than enough. And so I released.

A loud snap hit the core, it went through it like a thunder, prompting a loud beep from the control program. The self-repair had initiated, but it would take hours to fix the damage. Meanwhile I could only watch, laying there, the superbattery half-melted on top of my seared, radioactive, torn broken leg. The ozone smell again surrounded me, it probably acted as a painkiller, because I didn’t feel anything.

I don’t feel anything now either.

As I was about to pass out, the Broadcast Tower hummed. 
The lights around the top turned off.
The carbonifugous field blinked once, then blinked again, then it dimmed out until it vanished.

The dark clouds started creeping in, engulfing everything they found on their path, and there I was.

Only then it hit me.

The Tower wasn’t broadcasting anything.

I jammed the field.

I was aware I could die at any time: not to the Life Repellers at the entrance, not to the supercharged fence, not to a misstep on the Tower’s metal pillars, not to the blood loss or to the radiation.

I died to my own ideas.