Chapter 6: The Cranks and the Criers

The police station on Pine Street buzzed with the chaotic energy of a crisis barely contained. Officers juggled radio calls reporting everything from traffic accidents caused by dead cell phones to domestic disputes triggered by the sudden communications blackout. Detective Sarah Martinez looked up from her paperwork with the weary expression of someone who'd been fielding crazy calls all morning when Elias approached her desk.

"I need to report a threat to public safety," he said, clutching a manila folder thick with printed screenshots and handwritten notes. "There's going to be an asteroid impact, and people need to be warned."

Martinez glanced at his hollow eyes and unkempt appearance, then at the folder. She'd seen plenty of walk-ins like this—conspiracy theorists and doomsday preppers who crawled out of the woodwork whenever real disasters struck. "Sir, NASA has already issued statements about the asteroid. It's not going to hit Earth."

"They're wrong. The broadcast last night showed—"

"The broadcast?" Martinez's attention sharpened slightly. The communications failure had everyone on edge, and anything related to media anomalies was being flagged for federal attention. "What broadcast?"

Elias opened his folder and pulled out a screenshot of Brenda Vance's transformed face, her eyes completely black and her expression inhuman. "Channel 7 News has been predicting events before they happen. Last night they showed the asteroid changing course, accelerating toward Earth impact."

The detective studied the image, her expression cycling through skepticism, concern, and finally dismissal. "This looks doctored. And even if it wasn't, news anchors don't predict the future, Mr...?"

"Thorne. Elias Thorne. And I have documentation going back four days. The tomato blight in Idaho appeared on my balcony. A gas leak in my building that matched a news story exactly. Stock market predictions that earned me over a hundred thousand dollars." He spread the evidence across her desk like a desperate gambler showing his hand.

Martinez picked up one of his notebook pages, scanning the meticulous handwriting and detailed timestamps. The documentation was obsessive but coherent—not the rambling scrawl typically associated with mental breakdown. But the content was impossible.

"Mr. Thorne, I understand you're concerned, but what you're describing isn't how reality works. Television doesn't control events. The asteroid situation is being handled by people with actual expertise in orbital mechanics."

"Then explain the communications blackout. Explain how Channel 7 reported it twelve hours before it happened."

"Communications systems fail. It's unfortunate timing, but—"

"Perfect timing," Elias interrupted. "Right when people would be trying to verify information about the asteroid. Right when social media would be exploding with questions and analysis. The blackout isn't accidental—it's strategic."

Martinez closed the folder and slid it back across the desk. "Mr. Thorne, I'm going to recommend you speak with someone about stress management. The events of the last day have been traumatic for everyone, and sometimes our minds create patterns to help us feel like we have control over chaotic situations."

The dismissal hit Elias like a physical blow. He'd expected skepticism, but the complete refusal to even consider his evidence felt like a door slamming shut on humanity's last chance. "You're not listening."

"I am listening. But what you're asking me to believe is that a television signal is controlling reality and predicting apocalyptic events. That's not a law enforcement matter—that's a mental health matter."

Elias gathered his papers with shaking hands. The detective's expression had shifted from professional courtesy to the careful concern reserved for potentially unstable individuals. He recognized the look—he'd seen it in Chloe's eyes before she'd witnessed the evidence herself.

"When that asteroid hits," he said quietly, "remember this conversation. Remember that someone tried to warn you."

He left the police station feeling more isolated than ever. The streets of Seattle bustled with their normal rhythms, but everywhere he looked he saw signs of the invisible crisis brewing beneath the surface. People checking their phones obsessively, frustrated by the continued service outage. Worried conversations about family members they couldn't reach. The subtle undercurrent of anxiety that preceded true panic.

But no one was talking about the asteroid. No one seemed to understand that the communications blackout wasn't a technical failure—it was a quarantine, designed to prevent the kind of mass coordination that might interfere with whatever force was orchestrating these events.

Elias tried the FBI field office next, then the local NASA liaison office, then the offices of three different city council members. Each encounter followed the same pattern: initial polite attention, growing skepticism as he presented his evidence, and finally dismissal with suggestions for psychological evaluation.

By afternoon, desperation drove him to the internet cafes and coffee shops that still had working landline connections. He created accounts on conspiracy forums, posted detailed breakdowns of his evidence on Reddit, and sent emails to every journalist and scientist whose contact information he could find.

The responses were swift and uniformly dismissive.

"Classic pattern recognition delusion. Seek professional help."

"TV doesn't control reality, buddy. Time to step away from the screen."

"Another crisis actor trying to spread panic. Reported to admins."

Even the conspiracy communities—people who should have been most receptive to impossible explanations—rejected his evidence as either fabricated or misinterpreted. The few responses that engaged with his data at all focused on picking apart individual details while ignoring the overall pattern.

"Stock markets fluctuate. You got lucky. Doesn't prove psychic TV."

"Plant diseases spread through soil contamination. Basic biology."

"Gas leaks happen in old buildings. Correlation isn't causation."

Each dismissal felt like watching humanity choose blindness over uncomfortable truth. The evidence was there, meticulously documented and internally consistent, but it required people to abandon their fundamental assumptions about how reality worked. It was easier to believe that one isolated man had lost his mind than to accept that the universe itself might be subject to external manipulation.

By evening, Elias sat in his apartment with Chloe, surrounded by printed rejection emails and forum posts calling him everything from delusional to dangerous. His sister had spent the day making her own attempts to contact authorities, using her real estate connections to reach city planners and emergency management officials. Her reception had been marginally better—people knew and trusted her—but the message remained the same.

"They think we're having some kind of shared psychotic episode," she said, scrolling through email responses on her laptop. "Folie à deux. Stress-induced collective delusion brought on by the communications outage."

"What about the money? The stock profits?"

"Lucky guess, they say. Market volatility creates opportunities for anyone willing to take risks." She closed the laptop and rubbed her eyes. "Even the financial evidence isn't enough. They've rationalized it away."

Elias stared at his television, where the evening news was scheduled to begin in twenty minutes. Somewhere in the electronic depths of Channel 7's signal, the force that had been orchestrating reality was preparing its next revelation. But he and Chloe would be the only witnesses who understood what they were seeing.

"We're completely alone in this," he said.

"Maybe that's the point." Chloe's voice carried a new hardness, the tone of someone who'd spent a day having her sanity questioned by people she'd considered rational. "Maybe isolation is part of the strategy. Make the truth so impossible that anyone who recognizes it gets labeled crazy and dismissed."

The insight chilled him. If the phenomenon required witnesses—observers who could document and understand its reality-shaping process—then discrediting those witnesses would be a logical defensive measure. Turn them into pariahs whose warnings would be automatically dismissed, leaving the larger population blind to what was happening until it was too late to respond.

"A prophet with no credibility," Elias murmured, "screaming into a void that refuses to listen."

Outside, Seattle settled into evening routines, its citizens still unable to call their loved ones or access the global information networks that had become as essential as electricity. They adapted to the inconvenience without recognizing it as preparation for something far worse.

But in a small apartment where two people had chosen impossible truth over comfortable delusion, the vigil continued. Channel 7 would broadcast again in fifteen minutes, and whatever revelation awaited them would fall on the only ears left capable of hearing it clearly.

The world had chosen blindness, leaving Elias and Chloe as the sole witnesses to humanity's approaching finale. They were prophets without followers, warning voices lost in a wilderness of willful ignorance.

And somewhere in the darkness between Jupiter and Mars, Charon's Scythe continued its impossible acceleration toward a planet whose inhabitants had collectively decided that the truth was too uncomfortable to believe.