The Dissonants

After decades of propaganda by the legacy media, the nation finally moved to expose the lies and corruption pulled over their eyes like a veil of smoke. Truth didn’t rise in the daylight—it crept in the static between broken signals, buried in leaked documents, offhand confessions, and the tired eyes of whistleblowers too broken to care anymore.

The media wasn’t just biased; it had become the arm of something deeper—corporate syndicates, global councils with no flags, unelected and unknown, whose interests weren’t national but planetary, and whose faces were rarely seen outside black-tie summits and private islands. Elections were theater. Outrage was orchestrated. Even the scandals were scripted.

By the time the public started asking the real questions, it was already too late. Digital IDs, mandatory neural links, and algorithmic loyalty scoring had become normalized. Entire generations had grown up with memories curated by filters and history revised by a thousand quiet edits.

Those who resisted were branded “dissonant”—a term less violent than "traitor" but far more dangerous. Dissonants had their bank accounts frozen, their homes re-zoned for “urban reclamation,” and their children taken under the pretense of “mental health intervention.”

Still, a spark lived on. In underground frequencies and off-grid communes, the dissonants whispered about The Broadcast—a signal said to pierce the global censorship wall for seven minutes and reveal the unedited truth. No one knew if it was real, but hope had long since stopped needing evidence.