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.
