THE LAST BROADCAST
He heard his own voice reporting a disaster that hasn't happened yet.
The microphone felt cold against Leo's lips, a familiar comfort in the sterile silence of the broadcasting booth. Outside, the city of Aethelburg hummed with life, but in here, time seemed to bend around the glow of the console's green lights. Leo adjusted his headphones, the familiar weight a second skin. "This is Leo Voss on the Aethelburg Evening Broadcast," he said, his voice smooth as polished glass. "We begin tonight with clear skies over the metropolitan district, though meteorologists are predicting unusual atmospheric disturbances by morning." He glanced at the teleprompter, displaying the prepared script about the upcoming city festival. Nothing unusual. Just another night in the life of a man who delivered the news to millions.
But then came the sound. Not from his microphone, but from the speakers behind him—a voice, his voice, but layered with a static that made his blood run cold. It was a fragment, barely audible at first, then growing in clarity. "...unconfirmed reports of catastrophic failure at the Aethelburg Spire... structural integrity compromised... casualties expected to be in the thousands..." Leo froze, his fingers hovering above the controls. The broadcast was live, but this voice was from the future. His future. He recognized the cadence, the slight tremor in his own tone that only came when reporting something truly devastating. The teleprompter remained stubbornly fixed on the festival script, oblivious to the horror echoing through the booth.
He fumbled with the console, trying to isolate the source of the broadcast. It wasn't coming from any of the external feeds. It was internal, bleeding through the system itself. The voice continued, each word a hammer blow to his reality. "Emergency services overwhelmed... city-wide evacuation recommended... this is not a drill..." Leo's reflection in the darkened glass of the booth showed a pale man with wide eyes, a stranger to the confident broadcaster he was supposed to be. The voice grew clearer, more urgent, until it filled the entire space, overlapping his own panicked breathing. "The Spire has fallen. I repeat, the Aethelburg Spire has collapsed."
Suddenly, the booth lights flickered, plunging him into darkness for a split second. When they returned, the ghostly voice was gone. The teleprompter still showed the festival script. The console lights blinked normally. But Leo knew what he'd heard. He'd heard his own voice, reporting his own city's destruction. As he stared at the console, a single red light began to blink on a previously dormant panel— a direct, unsecured line to the Spire's control tower. Before he could process this impossibility, the line connected, and a voice, strained and terrified, filled the booth. "Broadcast tower? Can you hear me? This is Elena at Spire Control. We're losing structural integrity—something's happening, the tower is shaking—" The line went dead, followed by a sound that would haunt Leo's nightmares for the rest of his life: the deafening, final roar of collapsing steel and concrete.