The GONG-Show 3
The legend concluded, leaving the audience with a final, warm image of a simple teacup, a symbol of a quiet, personal ritual that had somehow become the cultural cornerstone of a new galactic era. The broadcast returned to the live party on Nova Arcis. The energy had reached a fever pitch. The final moments of the old, fractured time were ticking away.
A massive, beautiful GBB clock now dominated the main 3D-media stream, its centi-Beeps counting down with a steady, relentless rhythm. minus GONG 1. Bell 0. Beep 0. centi-Beep 92... 91... 90...
Cokas and LYRA were now on the main stage, their faces alight with pure, unadulterated joy. Around them, in dozens of 3D-media stream windows, the faces of other hosts from a hundred different worlds appeared, all watching the same clock, all ready for the same moment.
“This is it, everyone!” Cokas’s voice boomed, filled with an almost overwhelming sense of history and hope. “From every corner of our shared home, from the eight billion souls in the Sol system to the brave pioneers on the furthest Outskirts! Are you ready?”
A single, galaxy-spanning roar of affirmation was the answer.
Cokas and LYRA, their voices joined by the hundred other hosts, by the billions of souls watching, began the final, universal countdown.
“Ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one…”
The clock hit GONG 0, Bell 0, Beep 0.
For a single, silent, heart-breaking instant, the music stopped. The cheering stopped. The entire galaxy held its breath. And then, a single, deep, resonant GONG echoed through the studio and across the entire QNetwork, a sound that was both the end of an era and the birth of a new one.
The eruption of pure, unadulterated joy that followed was a supernova of sound and light. The crowd in the D1.LoG broadcast garden roared, a single, unified wave of celebration. The hundred 3D-media streams from across the galaxy exploded into a chaotic, beautiful collage of humanity celebrating. On Amara, they were setting off fireworks that painted the crimson sky in bursts of impossible blue and green. In the elegant, high-gravity halls of a RIM station, traders were popping bottles of synth-champagne, its foam arcing gracefully towards the ceiling. In a rugged communal hall in the Wolf-Pack, settlers were stomping their feet in a thunderous, rhythmic dance. For the first time in history, every human being was experiencing the exact same moment of pure, unscripted joy.
The GONG-Show was no longer a broadcast; it was the party at the centre of the universe, and Cokas and LYRA were no longer just its hosts; they were at its heart.
“GONG ZERO, GALAXY!” Cokas bellowed, his professional demeanour completely gone, replaced by the giddy energy of a man witnessing history. He grabbed LYRA’s hand, a gesture of pure, spontaneous friendship, and pulled her from the stage, down into the swirling, dancing crowd. The camera drones, now in their automated “celebration” mode, swooped and dived around them, capturing the scene not as detached observers, but as joyful participants.
“Can you feel that, LYRA?” Cokas shouted over the joyous noise, his face alight with a grin that was a thousand years in the making. “That’s the sound of a billion different clocks all striking midnight at once!”
LYRA, for her part, was no longer the calm AIE. She was laughing, a genuine, unrestrained sound of pure delight, her perfect features crinkled in a way that was beautifully, authentically human. A group of cheering university students pulled her into a spontaneous, spinning dance, and for a moment, she was just another citizen of Nova Arcis, lost in the celebration.
Then, a new sound began to build, cutting through the celebratory chaos. It started with a single, clear note from a cello, played by a musician on a quiet balcony on Luna. Then a violin joined in from a concert hall on Mars. A flute from a biodome on a Wolf-Pack station. A horn from a bustling plaza on Barnard’s Star. The 3D-media streams shifted, their chaotic party scenes resolving into a hundred different windows, each showing a single, focused musician.
A hundred musicians, on a hundred different worlds, all perfectly synchronized by the new GBB time, began to play. The opening, iconic notes of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” swelled, a melody that had survived for over a millennium, a timeless anthem of hope and unity.
And then, the voices joined in. A hundred different choirs, from a hundred other worlds. A thousand, a million voices, from the deep baritones of a Jovian miners’ chorus to the clear, high sopranos of a children’s choir on a distant Outskirts colony, all singing the same ancient words of Schiller’s poem, their different accents and dialects blending into a single, breathtakingly beautiful harmony.
Cokas and LYRA stood in the centre of their own studio, now quiet, surrounded by the holographic images of the thousand-strong interstellar choir, their own faces, like billions of others across the galaxy, wet with tears. It was a moment of perfect, impossible beauty, a testament to the very thing they had spent their entire broadcast chronicling: the enduring, unbreakable, and now perfectly synchronized spirit of a united humanity.
The final, triumphant chords of the anthem echoed and faded, leaving a sense of profound, shared peace. The GBB clock in the corner of the screen ticked upwards, the first Beep of the new era now almost over. The party was beginning to transition from a wild celebration to a warm, contented glow.
The first Beep was almost over.
Cokas and LYRA found their way back to the main console, their faces still shining with the emotion of the moment. It was time.
“We have journeyed through a thousand years of our past,” Cokas said, his voice now quiet, thick with emotion, a single, happy tear tracing a line down his cheek. “And now, a new millennium, a new story, begins for us all.”
“A story,” LYRA added, her own voice resonating with a profound, almost human sense of wonder, “of a billion different minds, finally sharing a single, unified ‘now’.”
They looked at each other, a final, shared smile of triumph and deep friendship. Then, they turned to the camera, their voices joining together for the last time.
“From Nova Aris, and from a brand new time… good cycle to all.”
The broadcast of “Stars Unbound” was over, its thousand-year story finished. It left the galaxy to celebrate the dawn of a new, perfectly synchronized era of unity, hope, and peace.