Jack Benatyr sat behind a news desk. At his side, a blonde woman sat, her hair big, puffy, and hanging down past her shoulders, comically complemented by an obscene amount of makeup that, upon any kind of close scrutiny, was shoddily applied and made her angular features almost plastic-like. These traits, while almost comical to look at, somehow well complemented the low-profile red dress she wore. This costume stood in stark contrast to Jack's own; simply a three-piece suit, tie, combed, yet styled hair, and ivory-white teeth. To the untrained eye, he looked like some kind of tabulator. Someone who didn't necessarily belong on a TV screen, instead finding their home behind someone's accounting. Simplicity versus complexity, Jack thought. A timeless battle.
Despite the fact that she was the cohost of the show they had both been on for years now, he couldn't remember her name. That was strange. Offputting, almost.
As he sat there, more and more things boiled to the surface of his thoughts. These came slowly at first, but sped up as though somebody was sitting back, slowly cranking a water faucet higher and higher.
He'd combed his hair, skimmed his lines, meticulously pieced together his suit, and brushed his teeth. Hell, he'd even made sure to wear his fancy new King watch to work that day. Nothing was particularly out of the ordinary, and there was no particular cause for alarm. So, what was the problem? Why was he thinking so damn hard about all of this?
And why couldn't he remember her name?
And as the director signaled to start, there was no more time. If it came down to addressing her by name, he'd have to do it by title. Ma'am would suffice.
A big, black camera, screwed into a large, rail-like mechanism, sat several feet in front of him. The cameraman, a black man that was maybe 3 or 4 years his junior, looked almost giddy as he mimed the countdown until they went live with his hands, in sync with a television screen behind him.
Jack reached up, straightening the black tie around his neck. Nervousness wasn't the feeling. He wasn't nervous by any regard, as having this job for this long desensitizes a man to such things.
No, he wasn't nervous. In the last few moments before the countdown ended and the camera went live, Jack pinned it down: He was uneasy. Afraid of some unseen problem, the scale of which he didn't know or understand. Despite the nature of the feeling, it wasn't entirely unfamiliar; He was a news anchor, after all. Over the past 6 or 7 years, he'd covered murders, high profile suicides, robberies, the list went on.
Despite that, he couldn't shake the feeling that this was different. Maybe worse, somehow.
His thoughts, now slowed at ground to a halt abruptly as the cameraman mimed for action. He straightened his back as the camera's roll light blinked red, and the teleprompters began to roll their individual scripts across their transparent screens.
"Good morning, Picon City!" Jack said, his voice croaking out those first few words. He quickly cleared his throat, taking a sip from the coffee cup in front of him as his flamboyant cohost continued, introducing herself as Susan O'Mack. "And we are Picon News! Your chosen source of unbiased, reliable information." Jack seamlessly picked up from his colleague. This exchange continued on, albeit swapping between the two more sporadically. Jack would say something here, and Susan would say something there. Back and forth, seesawing between one another for hours. They covered stories ranging from new, exciting recipes for common foods, to murders in the downtown district of Picon City. They commented on a short, 30 minute speech from Picon City's interim mayor, to car fires in the mega dealerships in the business district.
In the middle of a 5 minute commercial break, Jack's thoughts wandered to his current situation. Where he was. Who he was.
He was 35. His height measured at 6'1 by the older measurements, and some large number by the new ones. He graduated from university a decade prior wanting to be a sportscaster for what was at the time this new, upcoming sport called 'Pyramid'. He even got the job, too. Good money, good benefits, good commentary. A year or two in, though, the viewers stopped viewing, the money dried up, and a terrorist attack at a space transport terminal left him down one newly-married wife, a right hand and upper arm and, to salt the wound, he was then up several thousand credits a month in payments for a cybernetic replacement.
All in the span of a week that he now regarded as the worst week of his life.
7 days full of experiences ranging from unpleasant to hellish. Misery.
He tapped the metal fingers of his left hand on the table, once again feeling bored by the monotony, and now irritated by his review of his own life experiences, choices and direction. He needed stuff to talk about. Stuff to cover. Stuff to keep his mouth constantly running and his mind constantly occupied with script after script, line after line, with the occasional improv sprinkled in to keep things interesting; not just for the viewer, but for the dayshift telecasters working 12 hours a day without any substantial breaks other than for a brief lunch and bathrooms.
He kept tapping, increasing the tempo of his fingers. He couldn't feel them hit the table, but the sound of them making contact with the wood-enameled plastic was all the confirmation he needed. While the sound might have been annoying if it was his first day, he had been there for years, so the people who worked alongside him paid him no mind, and even chuckled at the recurrence of a habit they had grown to nearly live next to.
He stopped for a moment, and looked over at the clock:
One minute until the last stretch of the last news day of the week. Then, three whole days of kicking up, relaxing and not doing anything at all.
He stopped, glancing down at his hand. A fuzzy feeling, seemingly emanating from it, monopolized his attention, compelling him to investigate.
Hand wasn't a good term for it. It took up his hand, wrist, and upper arm, but Jack wasn't creative off the clock, so he called it by its function, and so a hand it was.
And this hand was shaking. It didn't want to work at all, likely jammed somehow.
Thousands of dollars and years of my life... Jack thought hopelessly.
He tried to flex his fingers. Nothing. He tried to close his hand. Nothing. To move the mechanical stubs in any direction one could consider reasonable for a finger to move. Nothing.
He glanced up at the clock again:
Fifteen seconds.
Jack straightened his back. With his good hand, he combed his hair, straightened his tie, and quickly clasped his hands together in front of himself as best he could as to give the impression of some kind of order and tidiness.
As the clock ticked down the final few seconds, he felt the hand shake more intensely now. Almost a loud rumbling.
Before he could mess with it in any kind of attempt to get it to function normally, it malfunctioned.
Where he had his hand placed on the table was within only a few inches of the empty coffee cup he had drained dry hours earlier that morning. It had both his name and that of his late wife written on it in black lettering.
The mechanical hand, ailing from some as-yet-unseen fault, skipped some kind of gear. It bent backward unnaturally at a speed he couldn't even see, and sent the mug flying off of the table, shattering onto the glassy marble floor.
The cup's debris scattered onto the floor, some smaller parts skidding to a stop at the feet of a young, glasses toting intern holding an orange envelope in one hand and a BLT in the other.
The attention of the entire studio quickly migrated from the shattered mug on the ground, to the clean-looking intern, whose pressed, clean appearance stuck out drastically compared to the unkempt, sweaty clothes worn by the dog-tired day crew that crowded the studio that he stood in the middle of.
"Who the hell are you?" Asked the cameraman, who looked at the intern as though he was shouting in a funeral.
"My name is Javin, sir." Javin the intern said, his voice ever-so-slightly shaking with nervousness. "I have a letter from the seventy-second floor." He held out the envelope, inviting the cameraman to do with it as he saw fit. "I have no idea what it says, but apparently this is supposed to be put live ASAP, in place of everything you guys have planned to air."
The cameraman just sat there, staring at him with this kind of diluted, dumb shock.
No programming was ever overrode. It's not like it wasn't supposed to happen, it just simply didn't. There is an entire floor of people simply dedicated to the creation of the schedules people like Jack had to live by. These schedules played hand-in-hand, all accomodating for stories other days would run, and allowing for additional runtime, should programs, for whatever reason, need more time on the air. They never did, though. Those people were too good at their job for that to ever happen.
The cameraman seemed to process what Javin was saying before anyone else, as he took the envelope and handed it to Jack, who took it and immediately began to open it.
"You heard him, I guess." He spoke. "Give it the magic." He returned to his posture, hunched over with his eye in the camera's eyepiece, and his hands on a few of the several dials on the side of the camera.
Jack didn't even hear him, though. He had already begun to read the words on the page.
He couldn't believe it. What he was reading was like hearing that every childhood horror story about the boogeyman was true, and that he was about to go on a terrifying winning streak.
The cameraman had to snap his fingers several times and call his name a few more to get him to snap back to reality. As Jack focused on the world around him, he realized several things all at once:
The camera's roll light was back on. The camera was live. What made things worse, though, was what he had to say to that camera, and by proxy, everybody watching the news.
He cleared his throat, and snapped his attention to the paper in his hand.
He couldn't read the letter word for word. He tried, but his voice faltered as the weight of the words he was trying to squeak out of his mouth slammed his tongue to the floor of his mouth.
Finally, he dropped the paper on the desk, wiped the sweat off of his face with his hands, and looked at the camera directly.
"We have breaking news. Confirmed reports place several dozen large, unidentified ships in orbit of Picon. There are, however, unconfirmed reports that these ships may be Cylon. All citizens of Picon City and the surrounding metropolitan area are now under an advisory to seek shelter in the nuclear bunkers on the outskirts of the city."
He could barely understand the words as they came out of his mouth, but he knew he said them. He didn't want to believe any of the words, but he knew they were true, and there was no changing them.
There wasn't any changing what they meant, either.
"More information will follow as we receive it."