POST #002 — “9 MINUTES LATE”
The footage in this report is uncut, direct neural feed. No slo-mo. No dramatic music. If you want theater, check the feeds. If you want the truth—press play.
Heywood’s skyline is cracked and rusted. Tents and desperate people everywhere you look. Plastic sheets serve as walls. But if you walked the Zhirafa Forward Expo last week, you’d think it was all about to change.
Compact housing modules. Automated construction drones. A new dawn for "district revitalization."
Zhirafa's pitch was shiny, smooth, corporate-loud. "Housing for the displaced. Efficiency for the overburdened. Clean tech for a cleaner city." What they didn’t say—what the protest signs spelled out loud and clear—was that tents may be free, but this housing won’t be. No jobs were being created. No subsidized guarantees. No stake in the future they were showcasing. Just another product line.
The Prime-Time Players showed up to say that out loud. They weren’t armed. They weren’t masked. They came in full costume—biosculpted like a family from a bygone world, waving signs that read:
“You can’t automate community.” “Our culture is not debris.” “This isn’t progress—it’s pricing us out.”
They were laughed at. Brushed off. Filmed for the ‘quirky protestor’ B-roll segment.
Then the bomb went off.
The footage attached begins at 03:42—just after the detonation. Panic. Fire. Screaming. A child crawling out from under a collapsed booth. The drone operators froze. Emergency responders were 9 minutes out.
The Players moved in under 3.
One ripped open a crushed scaffold with a powerjack. Another turned a fallen Zhirafa construction drone into a makeshift stretcher. One gave up their own med-injector to stabilize a vendor with a shattered arm.
In the middle of the wreckage, one of them muttered: “This ain’t how the episode ends.”
They didn’t wait for applause. They didn’t stay for interviews. By the time the ambulances arrived, they were gone.
Zhirafa’s official report makes no mention of them. Night City News edited them out entirely. Even the drone footage loops them out with visual noise.
But I was there. I saw them. And now, so can you.
[🔗 BD-Archive-002: “9 Minutes Late”] (Viewer notice: Contains real-time post-detonation visuals, injury, and field triage. Subtitles enabled. No overlays.)
Progress doesn’t always wear a badge or a logo. Sometimes, it wears a fake mustache and a sitcom sweater… and pulls you out of the fire anyway.