"I'm not understanding what I'm seeing," Mauly Pepper said into her collar mic. The producer continued his furious babbling. The monitors showed smoke and fire. Fifteen locations sent live feeds, digital video flowed in with angles and other locations. Mauly sniffed and flipped her hair back. "How long do I have?" she asked.

"Fifteen seconds," her PA said.

"I'm supposed to make sense of this in fifteen seconds?" she asked.

"Just read the prompt, Maul," the producer said. The ground shook.

"What the f-," a camera man said.

"Shut up and do your job," the director said. Footage popped up on monitor twelve. It was an old analogue TV they'd dragged in from a breakroom and wired up to a fixed relay. The feed had switched. Gearge Parks, the senior, had climbed out of bed to run the trucks today. Feed twelve showed a Mosque explode.

"In ten," the director said.

"What just happened?" Mauly asked? "You're dropping me in a pit here. Someone give me a direction for Christ's sake."

"Read the prompt," the director said. "It's another broadcast, Maul. Just another broadcast. In five." The lights came up. Five monitors showed the cut in. Breaking News, it read.

The red light went on.

"Good afternoon, I'm Mauly Pepper and this is a Channel Seven Breaking News Update," she said. Viewers across the Tri-State Area saw her, heard her.

"CNN is picking up the feed, Maul," the producer said, "Go get it." He keyed off his studio mic. "Leave it ti Dick to take a week when this happens. If she f-s this up..."

"Multiple explosions have rocked building in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Kansas City, Portland Oregon, Portland Maine, Houston, Austin, New Orleans and multiple cities across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, most notably Jeruselem, Mecca, Medina and Beirut."

The switchboard locked up, as did the website. Massive DNS outages shut down the major news sites. Even Wikipedia ground to a halt. Severs and switboards across the world shut down to save the hardware. Satlites and relays switched to emergency government protocols. Phone lines went dead. Satelite phones lost service. Businesses closed. The FAA sent out an 'all down' signal. Jet fighters srcambled across the globe.

"Keep going," the director said.

"While there is no confirmation," Mauly said, "It appears that a well planned, coordinated terrorist attack, a campaign of global destruction, is underway. As information comes in, it is impossible to tell the scope of this worldwide assault on the major cities of the world. We take you live to footage from the scenes of the attacks," she said.

"Who wrote this?" the producer asked.

"Kim," the senior copy said. "Kim Nugyen."

"Get him a fucking cigar, a pot of coffee and a bottle of whatever," the producer said.

"She," Kim said from her keyboard.

"Yeah," the producer said, "How much rope do you have?"

"About thirty words," Kim answered. "Let her fly solo over the feed for two minutes, I'll get us Murrow."

"Talk to the people, Maul," the director said.

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