After a looong break, here's another Flash Fiction story. It's a tad dystopian, but I've been in a mood.  

The challenge was as follows - 

It's 3 AM. An official phone alert wakes you up. It says "DO NOT LOOK AT THE MOON". You have hundreds of notifications. Hundreds of random numbers are sending, "It's a beautiful night tonight. Look outside."  No more than 1000 words - mine is 745.

Do Not Look At The Moon

It had come as an official WorldGov alert, popping up on my phone. 3 a.m. my time, but supposedly it was worldwide. I'd checked my messages, and there were hundreds of them, from friends and strangers, dismissive of the alert.

"It's a beautiful night tonight. Look outside."

No arguing with that. The last few full moons had all been beautiful, even since the Clear Air project. Pollution in the atmosphere had been just getting worse and worse, for decades. Corporations had been thriving, of course, but not people, with respiratory ailments on the rise. There seemed to be no simple solution either, until WorldGov came up with Operation Clean Air. Technology to the rescue, with a new chemical compound that would precipitate all those harmful chemicals and particles from the air. It would be launched quickly, as a new public-private worldwide initiative, an added payload in a massive expansion in the Starlink satellite program.