This is a test of the emergency alert system.
This is only a test.
In the case of a real emergency, this alert would be followed by emergency information, news, or instructions from local, state, or national authorities.
These instructions would be assuring, calm in tone and demeanor, in word choice and diction. Specifically general and generally specific. Intentional.
They would be referenced from a curated database, generated many years ago. Committees of serious people with serious-sounding but blatantly vague titles collaborated on just how to communicate this message, at this time, to this audience. How best to make clear what to do, what was to be done in this form of an imagined now. Preparation, along with the appearance of preparation. Ease as an undertone, caution in the undertow.
In some folder, in some file drawer, in some warehouse, their dusty records will have been amended to note their participation in the committee. Solid marks provided all around for their efforts. Their imagined prophecies of terrible futures and their contributions to The Plans.
Their messages would be simple, memorable, and clear. Brief and unmistakeable. And yet you will have barely heard them over the dull ringing panic in your mind’s ear.
You would sit for a moment, attempting to come to terms with what these words meant, what this alert meant. What any of it meant. Lost in the diction of the artificial orator, or the voice of some long gone stranger, one person who knew the punchline to the joke decades before it was ever told.
You would pause for a moment, thinking this must be some sort of farce, some elaborate prank, playing out in panic. Orson’s ghost come to haunt once more, his rumbling chuckle echoing down through time.
You would cycle through channels, pressing buttons or turning dials, to find the reassuring normalcy a frequency or two away. You would instead find the same message, in the same solemn, solitary tone, continuing to repeat its somber instructions.
Your mind would start to splinter, to fragment, thoughts racing, grasping to surface from the prosaic depths of fractured normalcy from which they’d just been loosed. Finding undiscovered countries of possibility amid a metamorphic now.
You would count those around you, tally those not. You would ask yourself about your family, your friends, their statuses, would you see them soon. Would you see them again. Would they be there to see? Would they continue to be?
Would you? How? Why?
What does this mean, what does it augur?
What did we do to deserve this? What fait has made it so?
Was it your fault, somehow? Should you have been kinder to people on the bus? At the store? The foreign faces on the corner, who teemed to our shore, who were another’s wretched refuse which you in turn refused?
Did you disagree too forcefully, too fearfully, too frightened of difference to find some common thread? Too worried about the tapestry it would weave? That it would muddy your pattern? Your memory? Your belief in what rightfully is and what must always continue to be?
Was it some madman? Some lunatic, unaided and left to fend, who found in fending a frenzy to be feasted upon the world? Could they have been reasoned with? Listened to? Assured or assuaged or otherwise made normal enough to not have taken the only action they saw through a cloud of rage and fear?
Was it ignorance and inaction? Opportunities to collective task not taken by individual wills?
Could something have been done? Had we only listened to those who demanded something different, not seen them as inconvenient, annoying, other. Had we heeded them, heard them, treated their concerns as potential truths, asked for answers to their, in immediate and ringing retrospect, reasonable questions. Had we not kept along a convenient course that required nothing of us but to acquiesce, to trust in those who assured us of their trustworthiness. Their righteousness.
Was it coming for millennia, unseen until unmistakeable, a force beyond reckoning or recognition? Is it the same blazing joke the sauropods laughed at? Is it the slow choke of the Silurian? The raining Permian permanence? Was it sent from afar, jostled by fate, to resound a final greeting to a fearful people and an indifferent planet? Will any hear the pealing of the echo of this bell, or will all pass with its chime thrumming through them, a union of vibration into oblivion? Does the Earth glee at a renewal, shudder at a loss, or see nothing but another brief moment in a time that stretches beyond our small comprehension?
Will what comes after remember us? Mourn us? Study our choices, our mistakes, our triumphs and our tragic self-defeating tendencies? Add us all en masse to the history of subtractions, our many multiplications driving our divisions, to an end that equaled nothing? Know we were at all?
Does it matter?
Once calamity arrives, does fault for faults still resonate? Is blame anything but easing the mental guilt amassed for inescapable consequence? Does it do us any favors? Is it a kindness or a curse?
Should you have prepared? Could you have, for this? Could anyone truly have? Is there preparation that would make this better? Can it be measured in gallons, in ounces, in the gross weight of a packed away, labeled, sorted and catalogued, nervously awaited world?
Was anyone who prepared for anything like this, in some way, willing it to have happened? Are those who did happy? Grateful, to themselves, but also to those who justified their choices? And do they feel guilt for it? Or glee? Will they reconsider once they’ve been made to consider? Will their children thank them or wonder at their mindsets? Would we recognize what they become? Would they recognize what we were?
Is the fate thrust upon you both your just reward? Is it the cool calculation of chance in a cold, black universe? Will it matter? Will you spend the thin thread left on the spool to contemplate such unwoven tapestries?
How will you live until living’s end? How should you? How can you? How must?
But it’s ok.
You’re alright. Everything is alright. Will continue to be alright, alight, upright, intact, maintained.
The voice continues as it did once more, concluding its repeated message before the two-part tone returns, echoes, concludes.
This was a test.
This was only a test.