Radio Silence

It was a city of bright lights and empty structures. That's what he told himself as he drove across the rusted suspension bridge which led into the lethargic heart of his hometown. The massive cityscape which fingered the sky, at one time glorious and cultured, had become a dejected husk, half-concealed amidst a thin layer of toxic fog.
A radio tower dwarfed the poorly gilded ghost city, radiating its red light through the haze like a blurry warning beacon. The blinking light was the only signal it had transmitted in nearly a decade; It was just as false as everything else trapped within the borders of the man-made wasteland.
The gradual decension of the bridge led his car gently through the fog and into the arms of the city. He let beaten, familiar roads drag him deeper into the pit while he watched memories play along the backdrop of decay. Multi-family homes, with cracked windows and rotten boards sealing their entrances, lined the streets. Their vinyl siding had become sun bleached with age and negligence. The colors had been worn into the dismal realm of greys: Grey with a hint of purple, grey with a touch of yellow or blue, but mostly everything had fully conformed to a uniform shade of greyish grey. Torn shingles fluttered and flopped down the sidewalks as they expertly navigated through the clusters of forgotten trash bags.
Old factory buildings replaced the condemned housing as he delved deeper into the city. The bricks were a pale red, chipped and cracked by the chisel of time. The mortar holding everything together had all but blown away: It was a chalky dust that formed clouds on windy days as it returned to the earth.
Among these ancient, historical shells was a run down car garage. Dusty with its own composition just like the cracked mortar, it contained hundreds of rusted, antique cars. They had been left there during The Decline when gas powered vehicles, like his own, had spontaneously grown obsolete.
He turned into the desolate facility and parked the outdated machine between two others which were already forsaken in the mechanical graveyard.
His feet pounded the eroded sidewalks, carefully avoiding the timeless trash that tumbled casually around. Sounds of his soles echoed throughout the streets like a lonely drumbeat. The industrial district shifted with each footstep: It was a peculiar experience which he felt each day, like the city was an elaborate treadmill, like he was never actually moving at all.
A sick, yellow glow cast itself over the greyed structures, spreading contrasting shadows into the alleys and evil places. He glanced back, but only fleetingly, to find the source. The sun shed its light through the veil of poisonous fumes sulking across the skyline, bringing a cold warmth to his cheeks.
Childhood memories followed the tainted light into his eyes. He chanced a voyage onto the outdated pavement and closed his eyes, letting the beauty of the past reflect off his eyelids and back into his soul.
And it was over. The world returned with its glaring deficiencies. He pushed with his feet until the industrial buildings slid behind him and the financial district was brought under foot.
Towering, gridded glass monoliths blotted out the sky like obsidian daggers. In the reflective glass, he could no longer see himself. A strange greasy substance, spawning from oblivion and yellowed by the sunlight, confiscated his image and swallowed it whole.
He dragged his fingers along the buildings, feeling the grime collect on his fingertips and watching the past strike from the five cleared lines which he created.
Up ahead, the largest skyscraper touched the pinnacle of physics somewhere beyond the deadly clouds. It was the last remaining thing in the city that still served a purpose. Working forty hours a week there, he barely scratched out a living.
The fingers abandoned the encrusted glass walls, wiping themselves on the inside of his jacket before returning to their respective pocket.
The building loomed over him threateningly as he tried to recall behind leading such a life. Two dirty glass doors whirred open, permitting him entrance into the facility. He stepped in and the maw devoured him whole, eradicating all else which lay outside its boundaries.
***
The doors opened again only when all natural light became buried beneath the earth. Weak sodium lights flickered to a dull glow as he exitted, overworked and mentally broken once again. Tediously, he plodded his way back to the garage, eyelids dropping like warm blankets over his vision.
An eerie silence filled the chilled air. Even the lonely drumbeat of his shoes seemed to be eaten by shadows. A bitterness gripped the city, gripped him.
Everything had become indistinguishable from one another. Only outlines and vague shapes remained. There was no playback of memories to mask the obvious nothingness that constricted upon him. The radio tower's pulsing aura bled gratuitously into the sky overhead. Deviant shadows crept from their dark beginnings, assaulting his thoughts with relentless uncertainly.
Agitated and panicked from the void, he dashed through the empty streets to his car, then raced for the bridge. Worn roads punished the escaping vehicle, but only passingly.
The ascension of the suspended arch was sluggish; The sinister city loomed in the rear-view mirror, encroaching his deepest thoughts with its recurring red glow.
Beyond the crest of the bridge was complete emptiness. There was nothing above and nothing below, nothing but the dead city to return to. His mind floated through the shadowland, body operating the car autonomously.
***
It was a city of bright lights and empty structures. That's what he told himself as he drove across the rusted suspension bridge which led into the lethargic heart of his hometown.
Today he was wrong.
Countless people trudged across the arch of stone and steel. Hundreds, thousands, traversed the public walkway. The rest spilled onto the road and traveled there.
A sea of flesh blocked the normally leisurely commute to work. The pounding of their shoes against the pavement and sidewalks was comforting and reminded him of the old days.
He passed through their ranks slowly, carving a path of bare asphault in his wake.
The nostalgia fizzled into a sour taste once he'd realized all these people were victims of scientific advancement. Each of them wielded an artificial limb or organ. That was the pinnacle of The Decline, the invention of mechanized human replacement parts. Originally designed solely for amputees, the replacement limb would be attached and hardwired into their nervous system, allowing for instantaneous response and a return to human life. Everything had become replicable, from simple things like fingers to the brain itself.
What sickened him was that everyone had their bodies hacked apart and fitted with mechanical counterparts. Some did it for immortality, some did it for style, some did it for status and social conformity. The remaining few, like himself, held their principles close like a weak candle, living with a silent hatred towards the world around them.
He let the familiar, beaten roads drag him deeper into the pit with bitter memories played along the backdrop of decay in real time.
He parked his car in the usual spot, but today the garage was barren; The tomb of the obsolete held only dust, his car, and himself.
The sidewalks were crowded, the wall of trash had been removed, the chalky dust swept away. Pale yellow light swam from the heavens and broke feebly along the brick-borne relics and steel monoliths. It reflected off of the false bodies of those around him like a searing, white hot flame. Those people obstructing the sidewalk and defacing the city with their presence...they didn't belong in this timeless crypt. Memories of human progress leaving him behind fed on his soul like ravaging locusts. He closed his eyes to forget it all and erase the imposters of his bitter sanctum, but their footsteps commanded his ears and broke his will.
Quickly, he passed through the financial district. The skybound daggers had been polished to reflective perfection. He dragged his fingers along the glass, leaving behind a trail of pale smears. Hundreds of mechanized people were doubled along the endless, mirrored windowpanes.
The day needed to start over. The day needed to be undone and recast as a clone of every day prior. He closed in on the building he loathed most. It symbolized the hellish lifestyle which he had chosen and regretted. But not today. Today it was an escape, a validation that he had chosen correctly because he was not fit for the world which invaded his private city so suddenly. He entered the double-edged facility briskly.
***
The building expelled him from its protective boundaries as darkness conquered the daylight. The yellow luster of the streetlights threw a nostalgic hue across the barren city; Like oxidized paper, the familiar streets aged and felt timeless.
He walked through his wonderfully empty city, wondering why he had ever wished it otherwise, wondering why it had been otherwise.
The echoes of lonely footsteps reassured his soul and subdued the hungry shadows. He shook his head, dismissing the entire day as some bizarre fluke. The invaders of his kingdom had retreated. Somehow victory had been achieved. He smiled amongst the yellowed emptiness, despite himself.
The industrial district was closing in when darkness suddenly swallowed him. The yellow was gone. The shapes were gone. His smile was gone.
He paused. The irregularites were not over. Blindly wandering through the darkness, he threw his hands in front of him as if he was swimming through the flood.
Dozens of yellow-green orbs danced in pairs around him. Instantly, fear struck him like a bullet. He knew what those were. He had seen them before, those artificial eyes. Now he slipped through the streets, trying to become invisible to the imposing lights. They swirled about him madly, drawing closer.
Red light flared through the city. The radio tower coated everything with its luminescent influence. Along the streets and deep in the alleyways, hundreds of shadowy figures formed around the glowing spheres. Their lifeless doppelgangers, created by the absence of light, swept across the pavement and along the walls like a maniacal horde of tendrils. Darkness gripped him.
***
Synthetic lights stared down upon the world. Perfect, white light illuminated the falsehood which surrounded him. Machines whirred continuously, luring in fresh components with their conveyors and striking them with an additional form. The grinding, the winding...it was everywhere. It filled his ears, it filled his soul.
He spun around chaotically, the building circumscribing him in the process. The conveyors, the unborn robotics which traversed them, and the dazed people spun their own circles of confusion, it was all absorbed by his frantic eyes instantly.
The people around him were all fully mechanized, but they were just as stunned as he was. False eyes reflected fear.
No one spoke; Words held no gravity, no knowledge, no truth. The photons which touched their collective gaze whispered dark scriptures in sound's stead.
He traversed the white tiled room in a stupor, strangely aware of each step he took.
Where was he?
What happened to him?
There was a pale green door in the corner of the room. It held all the answers. It just had to. He approached it carefully, others followed in a similar manner. An instant before he pushed it open, he hesitated. He stared at the flaking wooden door, begging for its secrets with every ounce of his body. At the same time, something told him that he didn't really want to find out.
His hand touched the brittle, splintered barrier. A sourceless energy surged through his fingertips and deep into the farthest reaches of his stomach, where it sat and coiled and burned.
The door swung open without any real effect. A dark, new world was presented uncerimoniously through the vacant doorway. Icy rain plummeted from a black sky and the roads had become irrigation systems to nowhere. Thunder echoed masterfully over the chaos.
Tiny rectangles of light began to open up amongst the dark silhouettes of skyscrapers, revealing more perplexed people. He watched their shapes leave their shelters one by one and brave the storm. Attempting to survive the torrent, he joined them underneath the cascading downpour.
Lightning severed the sky.
For a moment, daylight was cast upon the city. Two-dimensional black rectangles revealed their true identities: Glass towers struck upwards, reflecting the pseudo-sunlight so perfectly that they appeared like jagged teeth chewing apart the storm. In the background, a hollow monolith reigned supreme among the sinister clouds. Night crushed the light into oblivion once more and the radio tower returned to the impenetrable veil.
This was the city.
This was his city.
The buildings were too tall, too perfect. The roads were too smooth, the factories too efficient.
He knew where he was, but where was he?
What happened?
Malevolent, red light grew like algae in the air, thriving and feeding upon the darkness which it replaced until it became a dense, red blanket encompassing everything. Red was everywhere. Red was everything. Red was god.
***
Synthetic lights watched him from above. Machines whirred and replicated robotic technology as if it were child's play. The grinding, the winding, it was everywhere. It troubled his ears, it broke his soul.
Immediately, he knew that the radio tower was evil. It had created this alternate reality. It had taken his city and reimagined it. It had taken humanity.
He burst through the pale, green door and became soaked by the rain. His hearing echoed with thunder and his eyes reminisced the beauteous, white light thrown from the sky. But all he really saw was the tower. He trapped it in his sights as he dashed through streets which feigned familiarity. Unrecognizable buildings flowed by him in a sweeping blur as lightning carved a path through the shadows. Thunder rippled omnipotently overhead as he reached the gate surrounding the tower.
Someone was already there, pointing and giving orders to several mechanized repair droids at its base. They froze, as did the robots.
The rain feel quietly between them, landing on cloud-reflecting puddles as if trying to fall back into the sky.
Leisurely, the stranger turned and locked eyes with him.
Information poured into his skull like a telepathic, one-way conversation. In an instant, he could finally see everything. This stranger, some nobody from the ghetto, had discovered how to utilize radio waves to hijack the nervous systems of artificial limbs and organs and to use those connections to take full control of anyone and everyone. It started with a radio tower, this tower, but spread like wildfire until, eventually, the planet was under his singular influence. Hundreds of years elapsed in the blink of an eye. His, and everyone else's, precious world had been torn down and rebuilt by a single man. Even now, satellites were striking down enslaving commands and only the intensity of the storm overhead shielded him. Soon, the storm would pass. Soon, he would be lost forever.
The radio receptors in his head ceased to receive signals as the controller shot an expression of empathy.
That's when it all came together.
He glanced down into the rippling reflection of a puddle. There he was staring back with eyes that glowed a greenish-yellow. There he was, staring back at himself hundreds of years past his expiration date. That night, when he was chased down and cornered by human marionettes, they had turned him into a machine like the rest of them.
His heart, his brain, his skin, hair, nails, it was all fake. He wasn't human anymore. The simple thought of it dropped him to his knees. His free will was gone; The one thing that made him human above all else was gone. He punched the pavement viciously. A small crater splintered and blasted apart beneath the force of his alloy arm.
Behind him, hundreds of others watched and realized and felt with him.
Rage frothed within. Tomorrow, he would become a puppet again, but right now...right now his strings were cut.
Right now he was human.
He dashed forward and landed a wild punch across the self-proclaimed leader's face. Circuitry erupted from the man's cheek and streamed across the night like shooting stars. The repair bots turned in automation and restrained him from further attacks.
The mastermind stumbled backwards, holding his face with agonized fury. The fury melted into horror as countless people swarmed the tower.
The robots were promptly tossed aside and pulverized into magnetic dust. The gated was bulldozed and the controller was quartered into electrical brilliance.
The very foundation of the radio tower shattered beneath their onslaught. Its support beams crumpled from tireless fatal blows. Its base twisted and cave and folded in on itself. Arcing across the sky overhead like the hand of a clock, like a crashing redwood tree, he could feel the magnitude, the energy of the moment.
It dropped like a guillotine upon a giant, beautiful, evil building, ripping through the glass and frail framework with ease.
Victorious, blood-thirsty cheers filled the streets.
He smiled silently as the mob spread forth like a hungry leviathan; Magnificent structures fell like wingless flies.
Memories of his youth played along the backdrop of destruction as the rain relented. The green-yellow glow of ten-thousand pairs of eyes dancing through the darkness with love, with life, with emotion...It was a city of bright lights, he told himself.
He could feel the internal mechanisms within conceding defeat to the automated willpower of the satellites. He felt like crying, but his false eyes, illuminated with such love and life and emotion, were unable to perform such a task.
***
The last clouds drifted away, lazily unaware of the struggle below. A pale crescent moon gazed pensively upon the city. The satellites had no signal to send, their leader dead; The people stood in the streets, frozen in motion like statues, the souls of their eyes forever locked in battle with the half-destroyed buildings surrounding them.
It was a city of bright lights and empty structures.