I am stirred from my musings as I notice the metal object I picked up outside is rubbing painfully against my sore leg. I fish the object out of my pocket and it is indeed an old cassette player...not a Sony Walkman, but a cheap Radio Shack player made in South Korea. Before President Bush signed an emergency order censoring and then later shutting down the internet, most people like me were getting news updates from fast streaming shadow sites that moved constantly but kept us informed about what was really going on in our government and around the world. Just before the censorship, most Americans didn't even know we had formed a shadowy alliance with the Russians and joint-nuked the Middle East, dividing the oil reserves between ourselves and the hell with Europe or anybody else. In one day the entire Sharia-Islamic-fascist threat we'd been spoon fed for decades was wiped off the map along with millions of innocent people who happened to be sitting on top of the world's most valuable commodity. After the internet was shut down, people who wanted to remain informed switched to Ham radios and cassette players, anything that was portable, didn't require a computer and was hard to track down became a valuable commodity. For a cassette player, even of this quality to fall into my hands a high-ranking journalist for the American Resistance Forces must have been very close to my home. In my opinion, they must have been in danger of getting captured and tossed it near my garden, hoping to pick it up later.
Curious as to what information the device might contain, I click the play button.
Immediately a frantic feminine voice began to speak,
"There's been constant shelling in the city,"
"... It's chaos here."
"Every house on this street has been hit," she continued.
"This is a very poor neighborhood on the city's East side.
The top floor of the building I'm in has been hit, in fact, totally destroyed. There are no military targets here. There is a citizen based Michigan Militia. They are heavily outnumbered and out-gunned, but they have retreated into the woods far north of the city.
"It's a complete and utter lie they're only going after terrorists.
The American Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians." Bombers and Fighter jets are launching endless salvos. Ford Field, Cobo Hall, are an inferno!
Forget about Detroit going bankrupt, it has simply been reduced to rubble. God help us! God help us all"!
The player clicks off. I rewind it and listen to the message several more times until the batteries die.