Static in the Fields

Past the Unknown Sector, past the last working streetlight, there's a field where the city dumps its televisions. Decades of them — rabbit-ear antiques, hotel flatscreens, one enormous stadium jumbotron lying on its side like a beached whale. The official name is Municipal Disposal Site 12. Nobody calls it that. Everybody calls it the Static Fields, because on quiet nights, the whole field hums. Ten thousand dead screens, and not one of them has actually stopped talking.

Caww found the place first, because Caww finds every place first, and declared it cursed, which from Caww is a five-star review. He took to roosting on the jumbotron and listening to the hum, and he swears — this is the part he tells anyone who'll stand still — that the screens weren't making noise. They were rehearsing.

Then came the storm. Of course it was a storm. It's always a storm, in the good stories.

Lightning walked across the Fields on legs a mile tall, and every dead screen in the valley lit up at once — one frame, all together, like a stadium wave of ghosts. Test pattern. Color bars. That emergency tone that lives in the back of your teeth. And when the thunder cleared, in the middle of the field, sitting upright in a nest of cables, was a small stitched body in a hooded jacket with a boxy CRT television where a head should be — screen glowing soft cyan, two X's and a stitched grin rendered in perfect scan lines.

Caww, who claims he predicted this (he did not; he predicted a flood), flapped down to inspect the newcomer and delivered his greeting: "You're late."

The screen flickered. The face rearranged itself into words: CHANNEL NOTHING. PLEASE STAND BY.

Static walked out of the Fields on his own that night, trailing an eleven-mile extension cord he'd politely refused to let go of, and followed Caww back to the factory. The crew's first attempt at conversation went badly — you can't small-talk a test pattern — until Bones, in a moment of accidental genius, asked what was ON.

The screen blinked. Then it showed them.

Cartoons that had been cancelled before they aired. The weather for next Thursday, correct to the minute. A rerun of the Vat 7 overflow from an angle no camera in the building could have filmed — including, for two frames, a shadow on the catwalk with a spray can. (The tape corrupts every time they replay that part. The crew has stopped asking why. Snotty's business is Snotty's business, even in reruns.)

These days Static runs every drop announcement — his face carries the countdown, and lucky misfits catch it mirrored on dead screens all over the city: bar TVs between innings, airport departure boards at 3 a.m., that one traffic camera on 9th that definitely shouldn't be able to show a smiley face. The city's engineers have opened seventeen tickets about it. The tickets keep closing themselves. The resolution notes just say STAND BY.

And once a week, Static walks back out to the Fields, plugs his cord into nothing at all, and sits with the ten thousand dead screens while they hum. Caww asked him once what he was doing out there. The answer stayed on his face for a long time after, in soft cyan letters:

KEEPING THEM COMPANY. EVERYTHING DESERVES ONE MORE EPISODE.