They probably thought it was a phone mast

I feel, despite myself, some pity for the anti-5G conspiracy theorists who tried to set fire to it last night. It was not their first mistake in life but it was very definitely their last. I saw the glow as the clouds fluoresced from backscattered UV as the defences activated late last night, smelt the strange metallic smell of ionized air and, later, saw the slowly dimming and reddening glow behind the trees as the blackened craters where they had stood slowly cooled from white heat. The defence systems, I am told, can pour several gigajoules into a target in a few seconds, and can do this for a number of targets simultaneously: exactly how many my informant would not tell me.

I approached, cautiously and with approval, this afternoon to see if there were recognisable remains. There were remains but they were not recognisable, not even chemically: the UV lasers had burnt through to the bedrock and left only three curiously melted and angled craters. I wondered at the lack of ejecta, but soon realised that most of it would have been immediately turned to vapour: some of the ionized air I smelt must have been ionized human.

The tower showed no trace that anything had happened: it continues to wait, impassively and with inhuman patience for the next intruder.