The Refreshing, Post 7...

7.

At around nine that night, long after the experts had been taken off the air due to their ineptitude, and TV schedules had, for the most part, returned to normal (leading me to the conclusion that they were really trying to keep the hysteria levels to a minimum), all stations cut to another news report. I tried to switch channels to see if there was another report on anywhere else, as the guy who came on the channel I was watching really bugs me, but unfortunately his arrogant and usually smug (but pallid and subdued in this instance) face was on every channel. The reason for this, he proceeded to tell us, was that the world leaders had appointed one reporter from each country to speak live on air to their nation, uninterrupted, on every station. The only way you could avoid what the bulletin was going to say would be to turn off the TV, and I couldn’t see too many people wanting to do that. This had the whole country, the whole world gripped. It affected everyone. There had been exhaustive studying of the initial footage, research into any reports from around the globe of things disappearing above the cloud, or of animals coming out of tall buildings they shouldn’t have been coming out of, and the people who should have been.
Following the stop sign experiment, more recordings of similar experiments had been made, increasing the number of things being put above the cloud and filming them each time, and each time yielding the same result. Objects go up, three seconds later they glow brightly and burst into a ball of white light, out of which a bird appears and flies off. All except for the metal pipe hanging off the crane. They showed clips of all the experiments, and they were all beginning to segue into one another. Object replaced by bird, next, object replaced by bird, next, and so on until it was in danger of not meaning anything any more. That is, until they ran out of objects to put up there in one place (Atlanta I think, where they were still extra spooked from the Jimmy Scott incident, and were more determined to get to the bottom of the phenomenon) and, caught in the moment, decided to utilise a nearby crane which was being used to lift large sections of metal pipes for some kind of pipeline (I really didn’t care enough about the insignificant details to pay attention to them). This led to a turn of events even more peculiar and most crucially, enlightening, than everything else that had preceded it. On camera above the cloud, the rest of the objects had turned into birds and flown off, one by one in order of insertion into the cloud, but when it came to the crane’s three seconds being up, it glowed brightly as all the others had, burst into a ball of light as all the others had, but instead of a bird taking its place, the top of the crane became the topmost branches of a tree, and the pipe hanging off it was replaced by a monkey, dangling from one of the boughs by its tail. Before the camera disappeared, the monkey scurried down the top of the tree, through the cloud, down part of the crane and back up above the cloud again when it set eyes on the crowd of people watching it. When they tried to lower the crane it wouldn’t budge, apparently rooted to the spot, like the tree that had appeared in its place. This went a very long way toward explaining what had happened to the skyscrapers and towers around the world, and the correlation between those incidents and the mountains and trees above the cloud in the Chicago footage. Returning to that footage, and comparing it to the shots from below the cloud, the conclusion was drawn that the summits of the mountains and the tops of the trees led directly on from the skyscrapers and towers below the cloud. Therefore, the experts deduced, while objects seemed to be changing into birds, animals and the like, buildings and other structures that were in contact with the ground were becoming mountains, hills, trees and other natural structures that were in contact with, or grew from the ground.
Sadly, the news was broken that the people who had gone into work in the buildings which had been the scenes of the mysterious appearances of animals now actually were, almost certainly, those animals.