Thursday 5 January 2017

Maxwell's Demon - Flash Fiction

He had locked on. He now possessed full control over the satellite. Mattered not whether it was media or military propelled. It made no odds, both were death-dealing hawkers of lies. In a post-truth world, only data counted. Noughts and ones. In his case, the vengefulness of the noughts. He started recoding. He would bring it tumbling down back to earth. Recast it into a fireball. Put on a scintillating show as it burned up in the atmosphere. The planet’s safety net for catching Icarian plunges back to earth. The hubris each satellite represented, taking its place in the firmament, only for the likes of him to puncture its aggrandised gravity. Mere fleas on a dog. These devices weren’t ever meant to return to earth, so they didn’t bother designing them with blunted contours to lessen the murderous friction on re-entry. There was too much space junk littering space already, time to clean house. They were all at it, hackers around the world trying to outdo one another, plucking the petals from the Kevlar coronal garland around the earth. No that was too poetic, too grandiose. More like applying a flea collar to the mutt. Kids who in previous generations would have been bullied by those who fired air rifles at birds in trees, or set fires. But all that paled into insignificance with the power they now held in their keyboards. If his hacking peers were anything like him, they too played out imaginary revenge fantasies, always aiming over an exact city full of bullies to bring the satellite crashing down on to, were it somehow to defy the purging heat of dragging against our humble air. Those selfsame bullies who now occupied the highest offices of state. For they hadn't stood still in their metamorphosis either. His only response to a world turned upside down, was to bring the sky crashing in to right it again. 


1 comment:

Cindy Vaskova said...

Representation of the rotten 2016 blending into 2017 done perfectly. I recently wrote a paper on post-truth in media and politics and this is a beautifully written piece that summarizes the problem. I wouldn't mind seeing the sky ablaze and tumbling down tbh. Everyone would Instagram it, that's for sure.