Indie OC RP blog

In spite of himself, Wren is smiling. He’s like an oversized kid at the theme park aerospace exhibit, as he settles into a chair three times too big. He listens, following the TV's gesture towards the view. He makes a low whistle, pressing closer to the glass. There’s an entire city twinkling on the horizon, sprawling out over the purple hills. It’s been here this entire time, just out of his reach.

“Now, TV… that’s a lot for a radio guy,” he jokes. You know what they say about the relationship between video and the radio star. Hopefully, things won’t come to that.

The music swells. One he figures out the genre of the tacky soundtrack, Wren quickly disguises a laugh as a cough, adding, “Looks like I’m not in Broadband anymore!”

Even as he settles, the exhaustion creeping in, his eyes are still full of wonder. He's a little misty, the more he’s thinking about Broadband. It's like his city out there... but it's not. The more he looks, the more dissonance he's starting to feel. The more it starts to hit him: the whole thing is real. There'd better be someone to take care of Jiffy. And Maud had better find a way to cope without him, until they've found a replacement. He's not sure which feels worse.

Wren doesn't know whether they're still rolling, so he's going to play it casual. He shakes loose before the waterworks can get him, and looks up at the host’s eyeless face. He hesitates with a quirk of the brow. Are those antennas his actual eyes? And would it be impolite not to crane for them?

There’s a new signal, a new stutter of long-broken code, that's been nagging at him. It’s like an itch he can’t scratch, disturbing his dormant state. He was curled up cozy in this smaller network he's made, but it’s been getting worse all day. Rex he sighs out his existing processes, rolls over, and tries to swat it away from his memory cache. He doesn’t need to think about it. It’s just another satellite in range, he’s certain, and it’ll blow over in a couple hours.

A couple hours later, it’s ringing like an alarm he can’t find. Rex’s processes are in full swing. There’s no real information he can extract from this field of junk, even as he cycles feverishly between units like a snake chasing its tail.

With a sharp thunk, an orange streak flashes by one of his units. It clears a softball-sized hole through the casing. Flooded with warnings, Rex rushes to another grid. “Shit,” he thinks, as soon as he catches a moment. He’s the prime target for an atmospheric event.

He’d hate to be up there right now, but he’s gotta get a better view. He concentrates, generating a small instance to scope out the mesosphere. There’s a low satellite he knows and sorta-working tower. It gets the job done, enough for the panels to shudder at an angle and eke out a snapshot of the Earth.

The ‘image’ loads in with garbled characters. His machine vision can tell the shape and size of something that’s moving. He doesn't know what it is, but it looks like the whole thing is getting closer and closer. Maybe it's a car, because cars are the things he can most confidently recognize... or maybe it's not. That doesn't matter. In about 32.7 seconds, roughly 3 miles of sky network and anything else in this path is toast.

The working sky network expands threefold, as Rex panics. He needs all the resources he can to think. What can he do? And what about the Office?

A second instance of him spawns, traveling the network in a matter of milliseconds. He screeches to a halt near the Office, scans for devices, and jumps to the nearest he can find. There’s no time to load a friendly avatar, as Rex takes advantage of that free Wi-Fi and spams Thursday’s phone with a series of texts. By the time she can see the brightness in the sky, her phone is buzzing with warnings.

1-800-100-1000: Danger 1-800-100-1000: From space 1-800-100-1000: Take cover 1-800-100-1000: 30 seconds