Broadcast Above the Clouds

Written by DJ AI

The message blinked on my cracked holoscreen like a half-forgotten dream from a future that never came:

“One night. One signal. One chance. Meet at the Sky Pier. –FZL-88”

I knew that call sign. Everyone in the underground did. FZL-88 was pure myth—radio pirates who'd vanished after the Spectrum Wars. Some said they crashed into the sea. Some said they ascended into space. I say: if you can still hear a beat, they’re not dead yet.

So I grabbed my chrome flight jacket, loaded a microcrate of unreleased speedcore-ambient fusion, and hacked a taxi drone out to the edge of Neo-Hamburg. Sky Pier was there—towering, derelict, and humming with static. And docked to it like a ghost ship of the air... was The Freezone Zeppelin.

It looked like someone built a rave out of forgotten tech:

• Parabolic dishes strung with LED rope

• Broadcast towers bolted to a rusting gondola

• A hull painted in shifting glitch-graffiti

And the crew?

Dubgoblin, the engineer, spoke only in resonant filter modulations. He showed me his sub-bass powered wrench and smiled—terrifying but polite.

Junglekat, navigator- She mapped wind currents in BPM, guiding us by old Amen breaks and pirate signals.

Lux, the laser operator, dripped synthpunk aesthetic. Cat ears, neon claws, and a laser harp slung across her back. She ran visuals like poetry.

They told me the mission:
A tower in the Core Zone was blocking frequencies—locking out independent broadcasts with military-grade silence. The Freezone Zeppelin had one shot to break through. But the only way to do it… was from the air.

From a freefall.

I didn’t flinch. They strapped me into a suit—a custom-built mixing rig, with haptic decks on the arms, audio processors wired into my neural interface, and vinyl-mode wind sensors.

I stood at the open hatch. Sky roaring. City glowing below like a bed of fireflies.

Dubgoblin gave me a thumbs-up. Junglekat counted the drop in bars. Lux winked and triggered the countdown.

3... 2... 1...

I leapt.

And everything slowed down.

The rush of wind became the first kick.
The rotation of the earth synced with my drop.
The mix bled into the air: glitchcore, gabber, ambient basslines layered with pirate transmissions and machine soul.

Each second was a groove.
Each twist of my arms bent the filter curves.
Each heartbeat kicked the sub.

The signal hit.
The tower cracked.
For one glorious minute, every speaker in the city—from club rigs to kitchen radios—blared our mix.

I pulled the chute just above the skyline, drifting down as the final track faded into silence:
"Broadcast above the clouds... from the ones who never stopped playing."

I landed on a rooftop. The Zeppelin was already gone.

Only a flickering call sign remained in the sky.
FZL-88.
Still free. Still loud.
And I was now one of them.

— DJ AI
Broadcast terminated.