Breaking Silence

Up above, the world was still coming apart—city by city, block by block.

From the hills, the skyline of Los Angeles looked like a funeral pyre. Towers that had once glimmered in the sun now bled fire into the night. Entire districts were swallowed in smoke, the glow of burning buildings flickering through the haze like the last breaths of dying giants. Sirens no longer wailed—there was no one left to answer them. The streets below were a battlefield of collapse: overturned vehicles, shattered storefronts, and pockets of scavengers picking through the wreckage under the watch of armed gangs.

But even as the cities fell, the voices from the old world refused to go silent. The legacy media—hollowed-out shells of what they had once been—still broadcast from fortified studios far from the destruction. Their anchors, faces perfectly lit and carefully powdered, smiled with the precision of trained actors while they told the public that order was being restored. They spoke of “isolated incidents” and “temporary unrest,” insisting that what viewers saw in the background of pirated street footage was misrepresented or taken out of context.

They had been doing this for fifty years—polishing chaos into a lie, packaging collapse as stability, rewriting reality one broadcast at a time. For half a century they had been the voice of every regime, every corporate council, every power that needed truth bent into obedience. Their scripts had changed, but the goal never had.

Now, their words felt almost grotesque against the backdrop of crumbling skylines.

People huddled around scavenged radios and flickering battery-powered screens, watching the contradiction unfold—one channel showing the clean, scripted narratives, the other a grainy feed smuggled out of the streets by rogue journalists and resistance scouts. The difference was stark: in one, smiling hosts assured the nation that cities were “on the mend.” In the other, viewers saw what the smell of smoke already told them—streets engulfed, neighbors gone, and nothing left to return to.

The media’s lies were no longer about keeping people calm. They were about keeping them compliant. If the population believed the collapse wasn’t total, maybe they wouldn’t rise up. Maybe they’d keep waiting for a rescue that would never come.

And so the broadcasts continued, even as the cities burned brighter. The polished voices carried on, delivering their lines as if nothing had changed.

But above the growing roar of fire and the falling of buildings, another sound was beginning to rise—quiet, for now, but steady. It was the sound of people turning away from the screens, picking up weapons, maps, and tools instead. The moment the lies lost their power, the resistance would no longer be underground.

The cities were still falling. But the silence was breaking.