The Refreshing, Post 4...

4.

The papers admitted that the media could have handled the events of the first day better, and should have reported all the facts they had. Jimmy Scott, aged 22, from Atlanta, Georgia would testify to that…if he still had his head. If the news had reported the story of the sticks, and more specifically the hand in Chicago, Jimmy Scott most likely would not have gone to the roof of his high rise apartment block with his ladder, climbed to the top rung and popped his head through the cloud to try and see what was up there. And most likely, he would not have felt the tug after three seconds, and his friend Ray Connors, aged 23, most likely would not have had to let go of the bottom of the ladder where he was stood keeping it steady, to catch the body of his friend as it fell, minus the head, neck and top of the shoulders, with the top of his torso level with his collarbone looking exactly like the arm of the guy in Chicago.
All of this, the papers said, was why it had taken so long to decide on sending cameras up. Stories had to be researched and verified, to ensure they all added up, which they did. Then, the news companies had to get their collective brains in gear to work out a strategy. They tried to send cameras up for a second, and pull them back down before the “three second tug” (as it had, being a tug that comes after three seconds, become creatively known), but could not get any useable footage due to exposure, focus and motion issues, or some technical crap. Of course, when they tried to leave them up there long enough for decent footage to be obtained, the tug occurred after three seconds and the cameras disappeared. So, they connected some cameras to some monitors that would stay below the cloud and sent the cameras up again, recording what was shown on the monitors. Screenshots of these recordings were shown in the paper, but weren’t very clear, so I turned on the television to see if any of the news bulletins were showing the video clips. The screenshots the papers had shown had been leaked, and were not meant to have been seen by the general public yet. The news companies had wanted to wait until their next plan had been carried out to show the footage, and so they were still holding off on showing it, even with the leaked pictures (they felt the quality was so poor, and that they showed so little, that they didn’t jeopardise their footage) now in circulation. The next plan was the next logical step on from what they had been doing. They had managed to get shots of what was above the cloud (and that in itself was, according to the whispers, huge news) before the cameras disappeared. All they needed now was to see what was happening up there to make the cameras, poles, rods and, of course, the hand in Chicago and Jimmy Scott’s head and shoulders in Atlanta disappear. The decision was made, sensibly, to send something above the cloud, wait for a second and a half, then send up a camera to record what happened a second and a half later. The camera would be focussed on the object before going above the cloud so as not to waste unnecessary time that was going to be crucial to establishing what the hell was going on just the other side of this bizarre cloud. The object was to be something large and easily visible to the camera so that it was more obvious when it disappeared. They were to film in Chicago, due to the larger presence of news teams from the earliest reports (even the team that had shot the hand incident had remained), and with more experience of the cloud’s capabilities than most places (although Atlanta had experienced the most serious incident, Jimmy Scott’s head had been the only thing put above the cloud there). Since people had been sticking things up into the cloud for almost a day, there were a lot of objects which had been left laying around by over-enthusiastic crowds wanting to get a piece of the cloud prodding action before they were ushered off the roof when things had turned ugly with the hand. They picked a large metal “STOP” sign that one particularly over-zealous person had apparently knocked clean out of the ground on the street below, leading to several near collisions, much horn honking, and amazingly only one actual (fortunately minor) smash. With the plan in place, along with the important elements of the plan (news team, equipment, large piece of metal with big white letters spelling “STOP” on a red background…you know, the usual), they just had to announce a time for the experimental broadcast.