Cacophony [ONC 2023]

18

The elevator to the top of the towering dish, and the secondary control room, wasn't working, leaving only the spiralling stairs to climb as fast as Henna's legs could carry her. She hated leaving Cas, as she had hated leaving Carla, but her ex-girlfriend had disappeared among a morass of bodies beyond the door she had closed. She could hear the pounding against the reinforced metal and hoped it would hold. At least long enough for Amy's plan to take effect.

She had only scrambled a few turns around the structure when the first sign of something happening crashed upon her. It started as an itch in her mind. Irritating, as though fingers with long nails scraped across her brain, but soon became something more. Pins began to press into her skull, or that was how it felt. Red hot needles that skewered into her brain, wiggling around, scratching and tearing into her grey matter, rising and falling in magnitudes of pain.

There was nothing in her stomach to vomit, some time since she had last eaten, but she retched anyway as the light within the stairwell became too bright, then too dark. Her vision faded and then came into sharp, painful focus and she fell to her knees on the stairs, the rifle clattering from her hands and bouncing tip to butt, back down and around, falling from view.

Through the pain, however, she forced herself onward. First crawling, then grabbing a handrail, dragging herself back to her feet and forging onward, one step at a time. Her other hand remained clamped tight around the thumb drive. No matter what, she wasn't letting that go. Even were she to succumb to the screeching, violent pain that struck her mind, she could never let that go. Too much depended on it. Carla depended on it, and Cas.

Only after a while, did she notice that the stabbing, piercing pain had stopped, leaving only the remnants to ache within her mind. The cycle that Amy had begun had stopped and now Henna had to see the results. She couldn't tell if she still heard the Screamers below, the pain had ruined her hearing and she still wore her ear plug defenders and the highway patrol helmet. She needed to see the results and that meant reaching the top of the stairs.

More in control once again, she made rapid progress, reaching the top of the tower and falling into the secondary control room. It looked little different from the one below. Smaller, tighter, with all the main components and servers downstairs, but recognisable. At the other side, she saw a door, a normal door, with a window through which she could see the sky, clouds drifting past, leaving her in two minds.

Should she prepare to send the signal out to the world, or check the effects first? If it had worked, she needed to press ahead as fast as possible. People's lives were at stake. Carla's life. Her hand rubbed her forehead, trying to concentrate on the screen before her and she found a slot to place the thumb drive. The steps were easy enough, simplified as much as they could and the contents of the thumb drive, loading automatically, did most of the hard work. She only had to change the setting from 'Local Test' to 'Global' and the button on screen blinked, awaiting her final tap of the mouse button to send the signal out across the world.

At any other time, she would have thought the idea of the government having the ability to commandeer communications around the globe horrific. A seeming benign idea. Have the ability to warn the world's population should a catastrophic event loom, but, in practice, she doubted the government would not have weaponised it. They weaponised everything. In fact, in the early days of the Screamer virus, many had thought it a government creation. A biological weapon that had escaped to wreak havoc upon their own people.

Henna knew different now, though she still didn't know everything. It wasn't a virus, as she had that moment classified it as. Something had rewired peoples' brains. How, even Amy wasn't certain. Not from Earth, though. The implications were astounding, but also made Henna wonder whether this cure would even last. If some intelligence was behind it, could they compensate for the cure?