Talon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
talonkarrde) wrote2010-12-18 05:00 pm
talonkarrde) wrote2010-12-18 05:00 pm
Entry tags:
Brouhaha
It’s studied in school nowadays, you know. They make the psych students sign a release, informing them that they know the images will be highly disturbing, and then they show them everything.
The projector flashes through a timeline, showing the students the cell phone and DSLR pictures from shortly before it happened, the three videos that recorded everything and weren’t destroyed, and then a composite sequence with a death toll in the corner rising as each minute ticks by, based on what the investigators were able to reconstruct.
Many of the students vomit.
The projector flashes through a timeline, showing the students the cell phone and DSLR pictures from shortly before it happened, the three videos that recorded everything and weren’t destroyed, and then a composite sequence with a death toll in the corner rising as each minute ticks by, based on what the investigators were able to reconstruct.
Many of the students vomit.
-
It starts at 7:22 p.m., and the Knights have just scored a touchdown. Out of the fifty thousand spectators, some thirty-eight thousand of them are local and rise out of their seats, a human wave; the noise is immense and can be heard across the river, downtown. The ESPN cameras pan and follow the wide receiver that caught the pass, number 37, and follow his joyful victory dance and salute to the crowd. The band starts to play their touchdown theme, and the camera zooms back out, to encompass the entire section of the stadium.
There’s a hundred foot screen up there, in clear view of just about everyone, and it displays the score, showing the home team up by 3 now; and below the score, there are occasional twitter messages that give congrats and shoutouts.
At 7:24, there’s a message that says the following: @vendetta: the bombs are set. goodnight, fuckers.
On the two spectator feeds, you can hear a couple people wonder how that made it in there, but someone comments that idea that someone was just smart enough to get a stupid message past the censors, or maybe they selected the wrong message to post. Most of the crowd doesn’t even pay attention to it, as the QB’s setting up to start the next play.
At 7:25, the power flickers in the entire stadium; and when they come back on, the floodlights that illuminate the field start going out — except for the sign, the only brightness left, the only thing the eye’s drawn to. And now it starts flashing between two messages, the first one and this one:
@vendetta: and in the light you will behold the glory - not of the lord, no. but look for the poison gas.
There’s confusion at this point, wondering what’s going on; the crowd is a bit more tense but not panicky yet, and you can hear people urging calm and peace, that the lights will be back on soon. In one of the cameras, the one recovered from the right side, about thirty rows up, you hear a male voice crack a joke and then ask the concessions employee for a hot dog as he waits.
At 7:29, the lights come back on. Exactly twelve seconds after that, as the announcer is saying that the game will continue despite unfortunate ‘technical interruptions’, there is a greenish gas that is spraying out of every single section, spaced out to be every ten rows down.
The death toll counter increments almost immediately - a John Doe, never identified, has a 9mm glock handgun on him, and though he is three seats from the exit he begins firing immediately, shooting six and climbing over their bodies to get to the exit; it is later found that he runs to the bathroom and proceeds to commit suicide.
Across the stadium, there are more people trying to fit through the exits that can possibly fit, and injuries and fatalities rise as any sense of humanity is lost. Even without the video feed, as tears slip pass closed eyes, the sounds persist, an unnatural, horrifying racket.
At 7:32, on the ESPN video, you hear a voice saying ‘cut the feed, cut the fucking feed’, and someone in the studio does so; there’s no one manning the camera anymore.
There’s a hundred foot screen up there, in clear view of just about everyone, and it displays the score, showing the home team up by 3 now; and below the score, there are occasional twitter messages that give congrats and shoutouts.
At 7:24, there’s a message that says the following: @vendetta: the bombs are set. goodnight, fuckers.
On the two spectator feeds, you can hear a couple people wonder how that made it in there, but someone comments that idea that someone was just smart enough to get a stupid message past the censors, or maybe they selected the wrong message to post. Most of the crowd doesn’t even pay attention to it, as the QB’s setting up to start the next play.
At 7:25, the power flickers in the entire stadium; and when they come back on, the floodlights that illuminate the field start going out — except for the sign, the only brightness left, the only thing the eye’s drawn to. And now it starts flashing between two messages, the first one and this one:
@vendetta: and in the light you will behold the glory - not of the lord, no. but look for the poison gas.
There’s confusion at this point, wondering what’s going on; the crowd is a bit more tense but not panicky yet, and you can hear people urging calm and peace, that the lights will be back on soon. In one of the cameras, the one recovered from the right side, about thirty rows up, you hear a male voice crack a joke and then ask the concessions employee for a hot dog as he waits.
At 7:29, the lights come back on. Exactly twelve seconds after that, as the announcer is saying that the game will continue despite unfortunate ‘technical interruptions’, there is a greenish gas that is spraying out of every single section, spaced out to be every ten rows down.
The death toll counter increments almost immediately - a John Doe, never identified, has a 9mm glock handgun on him, and though he is three seats from the exit he begins firing immediately, shooting six and climbing over their bodies to get to the exit; it is later found that he runs to the bathroom and proceeds to commit suicide.
Across the stadium, there are more people trying to fit through the exits that can possibly fit, and injuries and fatalities rise as any sense of humanity is lost. Even without the video feed, as tears slip pass closed eyes, the sounds persist, an unnatural, horrifying racket.
At 7:32, on the ESPN video, you hear a voice saying ‘cut the feed, cut the fucking feed’, and someone in the studio does so; there’s no one manning the camera anymore.
-
At 8:09, two thousand, four hundred forty-five people are dead. One of the cameras has been dropped and stepped on but you can still see the horror of an exit through the broken lens; the other one is rolling, pointed at the field, where people jumped to escape.
Broken glasses. A bloody trumpet. A phone showing a failed call to 911.
At 8:14, the unmanned ESPN camera shows a team of EMTs and paramedics come into the declared hazmat zone, ignoring the prohibition, and start triaging and treating. By the end of the triage, they run out of tags, and start marking with markers on foreheads. One of the dead is player #37.
At 8:25, the hazmat team comes in and finds out the bitter, terrible truth.
-
The congressional investigation ended with this line: “This attack took the lives of more than two thousand civilians and was accomplished with the use of a twitter account and thirty cans of colored, compressed air. There were no bombs, no weapons of mass destruction, and no motive. We have no recommendations at this time.”
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-Allie.
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You are a horror-master in your own right (aka write)
Have you happened to read Stephen King's CELL?
It's a goody!
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And I don't like horror! Sometimes, though, it seems like I can't avoid it ;)
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There is nothing to fear but fear itself! Brilliant post. This was amazing, and I feel like the part at the beginning, about psychology students, should be a tip off. But it's not, not until the end, and then you sit back and think, oh, shit.
That is what terrorism is.
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and then, if pulled off, what would happen to other sporting events? would they keep going?
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if you're curious, the two pseudo references that came to mind while writing this were this insight talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMdOT8YJgY) and this NPR article (http://www.npr.org/2010/11/23/131535263/cambodia-s-death-toll-rises-to-378-in-water-festival-stampede).
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And I agree with you. Actually, I was expecting the boat of "innocents" would blow up the boat of "criminals." Because they would decide they had a right to live and the criminals didn't.
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Awesome job on this. (Though that is no surprise, since I've loved everything of yours so far, lol.)
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Though if you don't go to those things, the terrorists win! Less facetiously, there's a lot to be said about maintaining a way of life and not being afraid and what is security theatre and entirely too much to post on here.
Erm, what I mean to say is thank you! :)
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Amazing, amazing writing!
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and thank you!
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though I think the investigation would have some token observations — be more careful, ban compressed air, have more searches — but essentially, the point remains — how do you stop someone that causes fear, panic, and death without using any weapons?
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