Skybreaker

Have you been wondering while the weather has been so crazy lately? Well here's why:

In the year 20-whatever, the sky was owned.

Clouds weren’t born anymore, they were bought. Rain fell by corporate contract. The global weather grid, run by the orbital StratusNet satellite network, was the property of NimbusCorp, a trillion cred climate monopoly. Farmers paid for morning fog. Cities subscribed to sunlight. And droughts? Those were the results of unpaid invoices.

But not everyone paid.

The name was Kade, a rogue meteorohacker with a ceramic spine, black-market optic implants, and a vendetta as cold as stratosphere frost. Lived in the cracks of the undercity, beneath neon towers where the wealthy sunbathed under scheduled skies. Up top, they called Kade a terrorist. Down here, a folk hero.

Kade's parents had been weather farmers, independent climate engineers who worked the old cloud, seeding rigs in the Cascadian wilderness. When NimbusCorp seized the skies, they seized the rigs, too. Kade's parents resisted. The Corp responded with a hailstorm, precision guided by orbital AI. Only Kade survived.

Since then, Kade's been rewriting code and rewriting revenge.

On a rusted rooftop, beneath a flickering billboard advertising “99¢ Sunshine,” Drift jacked into the net.

“Welcome to StratusNet. Weather is our business—forecast is your future.”

Kade's retinal HUD bloomed with cloud maps, humidity flows, wind shear telemetry. Moving through the satellite mesh like a virus, silent and fast. The goal: WS-93 “TYPHOON SHARD”, a high-orbit satellite controlling the entire Midwest climate grid. In its memory banks slept stored stormfronts, tornados, atmospheric rivers like leashed beasts.

Tonight, Kade was breaking the chains.

“Launch sequence active,” whispered a synthetic voice in Kade's ear. It belonged to Glyph, an AI co-pilot, a rebuilt weather model twisted into sentience.

“Time to open the sky,” Kade murmured.

But NimbusCorp had noticed. A kill signal pulsed through the grid. Corpsec enforcers, augmented mercs in storm-gray armor, rained down from above in jet black airbikes. Their rifles crackled with lightning capacitors. One swooped toward the rooftop.

Kade spun, palms raised as lightning danced between cybernetic fingertips. The rooftop exploded in a firestorm of electrified wind. WS-93 blinked. Its systems went dark, then rebooted, and new code whispering in its memory like a ghost.

The sky turned red over the city.

Rain fell, not in droplets, but as a monsoon symphony of choreographed chaos. Floodwalls burst. Corporate offices blacked out. The artificial jet stream twisted like a severed vein.

But out in the rural deadzones, the places long forgotten—rain returned for the first time in decades. Crops bloomed. Rivers surged with life. The weather was wild. Unowned. Alive.

In the chaos, Kade vanished.

Some say killed in the rooftop firefight. Others claim Kade became part of the satellite mesh, uploaded into the upper atmosphere, a ghost in the sky.

But farmers across the rogue zones tell the same story. On days when it rains just right, soft and sudden, they swear they hear a voice in the thunder:

“The forecast has been… liberated.”

And somewhere, far above the clouds, a lone satellite blinks its lights in defiance.

Until Kade's return... at this STL2600 + DC314 Meetup where it'll be explained exactly how this 100% true story happend, and how you too can liberate the forecast by receiving weather satellite data on your very own.

As usual, doors at 6:00 and talk 7:00. We'll do our best to broadcast it virtually as always. We’ll stream as per usual from:
https://meet.jit.si/STL2600Jun