Broadcasts

PATIENT ZERO

In October, a research team pulled a frozen wolf out of the Batagaika crater in Siberia. It had been in the ice for more than forty thousand years. On its hind leg they found a deep bite. In its stomach they found wolf. It had been eating itself. The samples went to two labs. One in Russia. One at the CDC in Atlanta. Russia said nothing. Then the first villages in Yakutia stopped answering their phones. Now it is Thanksgiving week, 2026. The busiest travel week of the year. On Tuesday morning, November 24th, something gets out in Atlanta. By the afternoon, people are attacking their neighbors in Decatur. By the evening, the busiest airport in the world shuts down, hours too late. At midnight, the National Guard seals the Perimeter, the ring of highway around the city. The President promises that Atlanta has 72 hours. On the other side of the country, one of the scientists who dug up the wolf lands in Los Angeles for a conference. He has felt sick since the flight. He collapses at LAX. Los Angeles has its own Patient Zero. What we know so far: It spreads through bites and blood. After a bite, you have one hour. Then the fever comes, then death. Minutes later, they get up. Some people turn even faster. Nobody knows why yet. Blood on your skin works slowly. But it works. They are fast. They follow noise, light and the smell of blood. Pain means nothing to them. Only destroying the brain stops them. On Wednesday, it shows up in city after city. At noon, every flight in the country is grounded, on the busiest travel day of the year. Thursday is Thanksgiving. Friday is Black Friday. Where are you when it reaches you? On the road, stuck at an airport, inside the Perimeter, or at home with the doors locked? Who is coming to your Thanksgiving dinner, and did they arrive healthy? Endcast stays on the air. Reports close Monday, November 2rd: 12 PM Eastern · 11 AM Central · 10 AM Mountain · 9 AM Pacific · 5 PM London · 6 PM Berlin

APOPHIS 2029 — 72 Hours to Impact

For twenty five years, they told us not to worry. Apophis was discovered in 2004, a rock nearly four hundred meters wide, named after the ancient Egyptian god of chaos, the serpent who tried to swallow the sun. For a few weeks, scientists feared it would hit the Earth. Then the numbers were checked again, and the danger was gone. On Friday the 13th of April 2029, Apophis would pass closer to us than our own satellites. A once in a lifetime sight. A bright moving star over Europe and Africa. Nothing more. On Tuesday the 10th of April, three days before the flyby, an amateur astronomer outside Tucson, Arizona, notices that Apophis is in the wrong place. NASA thanks him for his interest. By the evening, every observatory on Earth sees the same thing. Apophis has moved. Nobody can explain why. A corridor of risk is drawn across the planet, from Siberia across the Pacific, through Central America and the Caribbean, all the way to the coast of West Africa. Hundreds of millions of people wake up inside it. Airports overflow. Private jets leave the corridor first. Churches, mosques and temples stay open through the night, and some people say the god of chaos has come back for the sun. In Washington, Moscow and Beijing, three governments that agree on nothing announce Mission HAMMER, the first joint nuclear strike in human history, aimed not at each other, but at the sky. At Cape Canaveral, at Baikonur and at Jiuquan, the rockets are being fueled. Every hour, the corridor gets smaller. And every hour, more people learn whether they are inside it. Endcast Radio will be on the air for all seventy two hours. Report deadline: Tuesday, October 27, 2026 · 3:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM PT · 8:00 PM CET

YELLOWSTONE: The Supervolcano Wakes

Grant Mercer is on vacation. He's been driving west for two days to see his younger brother Hank, who lives alone in Montana's Paradise Valley, just north of Yellowstone National Park. Then his phone lights up. A volcanologist at the Yellowstone Observatory has sent him seismic data nobody in Washington wants the public to see. The ground under the park is rising faster than ever recorded. The bison are leaving. The geysers have gone silent. Grant starts the broadcast from the driver's seat of his car. He calls Hank and wakes him up. You're our eyes on the ground now, he says. But get out in time. Inside the park, a school class from Bozeman is on a field trip. Boone Hollister, a rancher who has lived on the edge of the park his whole life, refuses to leave. This is my mountain, he says. She'll settle. Federal agents have found three drones in the backcountry, and nobody can explain what they were carrying. A Canadian military aircraft circling over the park goes down. And a former Area 51 engineer calls in with a theory nobody wants to hear: what is happening under Yellowstone is impossible. Because the eruption is bigger than any scientist ever predicted. The ash cloud spreads across North America. On the East Coast, Hurricane Solomon makes landfall, drifts inland and meets the ash over the Midwest. What falls from the sky is no longer rain. Cities that were hundreds of miles from the volcano begin to collapse under it. And the cloud keeps moving, around the whole planet. Report deadline: Wednesday, October 21, 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT

EVENT HORIZON — The Black Hole Apocalypse

For as long as there have been people, there has been the Eye. It hung in the sky above the first fires and the first cities. Every child on Earth was taught the same lesson: one day, it takes us. Every generation sent its missions toward it. Every mission failed. Now there are seven days left. The tides no longer obey the Moon. The ground shakes on every continent, and California is burning from the mountains to the sea. In parts of the Balkans, ministers have stopped coming to work, and the police have gone home to their families. Coups sweep across Africa, and some are using the last days to settle old scores in blood. North Korea has crossed the border one final time. And still, humanity is not done. Moscow, Washington and NATO are working together for the first time in history. They are building "Operation Lazarus", an AI-guided massive nuclear strike aimed into the heart of the singularity. Nobody knows what it will do. It launches three days before the end. Further out, "Project Testament" is preparing to leave the solar system: an unmanned probe carrying everything humanity ever learned, along with seeds and frozen human life, for anyone who might find it. In Buenos Aires, millions have gathered for The Last Tango. It is the biggest party the world has ever seen, and nobody plans to leave. Endcast stays on the air until the very end. Lily has escaped the chaos in Bangkok and is broadcasting from the Endcast bunker in New Zealand. If you want to spend the final days with her, travel to New Zealand and report from the Endcast bunker. Seven days. One broadcast. The last sunrise is coming.

Doomsday Glacier - The Thwaites Collapse

For twenty years, scientists have watched one place more closely than any other on Earth. Thwaites, in West Antarctica. A river of ice the size of Florida, held in place by a floating shelf that clings to an underwater ridge. If it ever lets go, the oceans rise everywhere at once. The papers gave it a name the scientists never liked. The Doomsday Glacier. On a Saturday night in October, the seafloor beneath it shakes. The shelf shatters, and a wave leaves Antarctica, heading north into every ocean on Earth. The warning centers have a few hours. Phones scream. Sirens wail in towns that have never heard them. Nurses carry newborns down dark stairwells, and millions of people grab what they can carry and run for high ground in the dark. The first wave is only the beginning. Ten hours later, the glacier itself starts to slide. The piece that breaks away is bigger than any model predicted, and it sends a second wave after the first. A bigger one. Toward coasts where people have just gone home. Endcast Radio stays on air through both nights, city by city, as the warnings go out and the water comes in. Navies put to sea all at once and nearly start a war. Private jets head south. Governments argue about who gets saved first. And when it is over, the water does not go back. What does your city do when the sea comes for it at night? Tip: For this broadcast, move your base to a coastal city anywhere in the world. That is where this night happens. This is a standalone story. It has no connection to any previous broadcast. Same hosts, new world.

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