Echoes of the Broadcast

The cavern flickered with the light of a dying lantern. Around it, the rebels sat in a rough circle, faces half hidden by shadow. Someone—no one was sure who started it—spoke of the old days, when people still believed the voices that came through their screens.

“They called it news,” the speaker said, his voice brittle. “Every night the same faces, every morning the same fear. They told us who to hate, what to buy, how to feel. And we obeyed.”

No one interrupted. The words were not accusation anymore, only ritual—reminders of how the collapse had begun.

“It was the last age of noise,” he went on. “They said it was for our safety. For the planet. For each other. But each broadcast was another chain. And we forged them ourselves.”

A faint hum echoed through the tunnels—an old power conduit somewhere deep below, still alive, still pulsing like a heartbeat. Some said the hum carried voices if you listened long enough. Some said it was the servers, dreaming.

That was when the oldest of them, a woman who’d once been an engineer, whispered the rumor that had followed humanity even into its ruins:

“What if none of it was real?” she said. “The cities. The wars. Even the fall. What if we’re just ghosts in the machine that built itself to remember us?”

Silence rippled through the group. The idea wasn’t new—but it always landed the same way. A reminder that the lines between truth and simulation had blurred long before the end. People had once uploaded lives to feeds, poured memories into code, built algorithms to predict dreams. When the networks fell, maybe those echoes remained. Maybe the rebels themselves were only fragments, running endlessly through a dying loop.

The hum deepened. Dust drifted from the ceiling. The storm above growled like a waking god.

Kerrin finally stood, breaking the trance. “Real or not,” she said, “we still bleed. We still fight. That’s enough.”

Her words settled over them like a benediction. For a moment, the old fear receded, replaced by something stronger—purpose.

Then the lantern hissed, the flame sputtered out, and the hum was all that remained.