Broadcasts

Project Gamora - Ranks of the Insane

In the winter of 2005, American forces searching the cave systems of eastern Afghanistan for the most wanted man on the planet found something else. In an unmarked valley, soldiers encountered a small group of psychics capable of influencing the human mind through sound alone. Certain frequencies, patterns of stress, and sequences hidden inside ordinary speech could make people comply without realizing why. Three of them were taken. For more than twenty years, what was learned from them was studied, refined, and turned into a procedure. MK Ultra never ended. It evolved. The question was no longer how to break a mind with chemicals. It became: What if you only needed a sound? That is Project Gamora. Not control of one person. Control of an audience. Several weeks ago, after eight million people emerged from beneath American cities, the President ordered Project Gamora activated. Then came New Orleans. During the disaster, selected evacuees never reached shelters or military bases. They were diverted to a classified Gamora facility because they were influential voices in their communities—dispatchers, pastors, emergency workers, reporters, and people others already trusted. Among them were five members of this network: Chris Corra of Phoenix, Vivian Knightly, Wyatt “Buckeye,” Kim Adams, and Lionheart. Now the missing are coming back. They appear normal. They remember being evacuated. They do not know what was done to them. And some of ours may call in tonight. Once the first Gamora transmissions begin, the country starts coming apart. Trusted voices spread commands nobody can identify. Emergency systems turn against the people they were built to protect. Millions begin moving. NATO deploys onto American soil but cannot tell who is affected, who is resisting, or who is carrying Gamora. Then they discover something worse. Their own radios are not safe. Behind it all is a small circle of billionaires and powerful figures who spent years waiting for a catastrophe large enough to justify activating Gamora. They knew it would turn national instability into mass chaos, millions of casualties, and the collapse they needed to rebuild the United States according to their own agenda.

Pod Zero

The Caesars Superdome in New Orleans has been booked for one night. Sixty thousand seats, rented by Endcast Radio for a single virtual gathering to mark the beginning of Continuum Two. Every host. Every correspondent. Every operator who has ever called into this frequency, finally in one place. Every listener with a Pod has a seat. That is what it was meant to be. A celebration. Two of us will not make it there in time. Rick Trent is in Cuba with his family, flying in the morning after. Anderson Keeves is stranded at Miami International, his connection out of Lagos delayed by hours. Both of them will spend this night watching from the outside. This is a TRIPLE CASCADE. Not one disaster. Three, in sequence, each one making the next one worse. It starts underground. The petrochemical corridor upriver from New Orleans sits on top of hollowed-out salt caverns, decades of extraction leaving voids under the surface. One of them gives way. A sinkhole opens beneath a plant that was never engineered to lose its own foundation, and the storage tanks go before the storm has even made landfall. Then the storm arrives. A hurricane that was forecast to weaken and did the opposite, driving straight into a burning industrial corridor and pushing everything it releases inland, into the city, into the water. Then the levees fail. New Orleans sits below sea level behind a wall that has broken before. When it breaks again, the water that comes in is not water. It is everything the plants were holding, carried through the streets, with two million alligators and every bull shark in the Mississippi delta moving through it. Three events. Each one alone would be a catastrophe. Together, they take the entire Gulf coast apart. We wanted one night together. One night to celebrate what we built and what comes next. We are going to get it. Just not the way anyone planned.

The Big Rip

The models were never wrong. Only the clock was. For twenty years, cosmologists have known how the universe most likely ends. Dark energy, the force driving everything apart, was thought to be constant. If it ever grew stronger, the expansion would eventually overwhelm every bond holding anything together. Galaxies. Stars. Planets. Atoms. They gave it twenty billion years and moved on. Four days ago, the observatories found that dark energy is not constant. It is accelerating. And the twenty billion years they had promised us collapsed, in a single afternoon of recalculation, into something closer to two days. It has already begun. The distant galaxies are gone, faded out of every instrument on Earth. The Milky Way is thinning overhead, visibly, hour by hour, and for the first time in human history every person on this planet can look up and watch the sky come apart. The outer planets have left their orbits. The Moon is measurably further away tonight than it was this morning. And the Sun, our Sun, has begun to unbind at the edges. But the true horror is not in the sky. It is here. It is in the ground, in the water, in the walls, in the body. The expansion does not arrive all at once. It works inward through matter itself, bond by bond, and it has reached the surface of the Earth. It is taking things apart piece by piece, and it does not take them in any order that makes sense. A bridge stands untouched while the river beneath it comes apart into a rising mist. An aircraft loses one wing to nothing at all and holds together long enough to be filmed. Mountains are shedding into the air like sand off a cliff. The atmosphere is drifting off the top of the world, and where it thins, the sky is turning black at noon and the stars are coming out over open cities in the middle of the day. And it is taking people. The panic is worldwide and it is total. People are going underground into bunkers and mine shafts and subway tunnels, as if depth were protection, as if there were a direction to run when the thing coming apart is the ground itself. Others are going to churches, to mountaintops, to the sea, to their families, to strangers..not always with good intentions. Aircraft are in the air with nowhere to land. The grids are failing. There is no shelter from this. There is no engineering answer, no bunker (not even ours in New Zealand) deep enough, no material strong enough, because the thing being pulled apart is not the building. It is the atoms the building is made of. The last hours are ahead of us. The ground. The oceans. The air. The body. And then matter itself, everywhere, all at once, forever. Welcome to the Big Rip.

Sleepwalkers

It began over Scandinavia. A light in the night sky, mistaken at first for the aurora. Beautiful. Harmless. Nobody looked twice. It was not the aurora. It was Voltarus. A passing asteroid that astronomers had already flagged as behaving unlike anything they had ever tracked. It should have crossed the sky in a single night and been gone. Instead it slowed. It hung there, holding its place long enough for the whole turning Earth to pass beneath it, two full nights when the physics allowed for only one. Asteroids do not slow down. This one did. And as the light lingered, so did the night. And everyone the night touched, everyone who was asleep, stood up. They walk. All of them. Every sleeping person on Earth, the moment darkness falls over them. Some wander into traffic. Some sit calmly on trains going nowhere. Some never wake up. And some do terrible things to the people sleeping beside them, and remember none of it in the morning. There are two nights of this. Two nights as Voltarus hangs impossibly in the sky and the darkness rolls around the world, region by region, country by country. And as each part of the world turns toward night, it has only hours to prepare. People are handcuffing themselves to their beds. Emptying their homes of anything sharp. Fighting to stay awake. And in the dark, something worse than the sleepwalkers is starting to move among them. A movement that hunts sleepwalkers for fun. Our hosts are going to try to stay awake and hold the broadcast together. All of them. For two nights. Whatever you do tonight, wherever you are when the dark reaches you...do not fall asleep.

The Beneath

Golem

The Void