Six Seconds

Orion Encounter: The First Numbers — Part Four: Arrival

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606409/fan_mail/new] Day forty-one. The approaching vessel resolves from a point of light into a shape — irregular, long along one axis, unmistakably made. The curriculum completes its final layer. And at forty-five minutes from close approach, something arrives that is not mathematics. It is a greeting. Not a mathematical greeting. An actual greeting, using everything built together over forty days, saying in the most precise terms currently available: we are here, you are there, we know you, we are glad of the distance that is no longer between us. Part Four of six. The Midnight Frequency. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606409/support]

The Unanimous

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606409/fan_mail/new] A Midnight Frequency tale, in the Twilight Zone tradition. The town of Halcyon can have anything it wants. A cure, a fortune, a miracle, the dead returned. There is only one condition: the vote must be unanimous. Every adult, every single one, must agree. Which is why, in a hundred and forty years, Halcyon has never used its gift even once. Because Halcyon cannot agree on anything. Until tonight. A boy is dying, and for the first time in the town's history, every heart can say yes to the same wish. Save him. The vote is called. Every hand goes up. Every hand but one. An eighty-one year old woman at the back of the room, the keeper of the town's oldest records, votes no, and will not say why until they make her. And what she knows about the last towns that ever managed to agree is the most frightening thing anyone in Halcyon has ever heard. A story about dissent, consensus, and the most dangerous words a people can ever speak. They are not "I disagree." Full voice cast and original score. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606409/support]

The Quorum

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606409/fan_mail/new] A Midnight Frequency tale, in the Twilight Zone tradition. Adrian Voss spent nine years building a door between worlds. It works. But it has a rule, cruel and elegant. It will only open onto a world where another Adrian Voss has built the very same door. Which means that of all the infinite versions of himself, the only ones he can ever reach are the ones obsessive enough, brilliant enough, and alone enough to have built the machine. He walks into a room full of the most dangerous men he has ever known. Every one of them is him. They call it the Quorum. For eleven days it is the greatest collaboration in the history of any world. On the twelfth day, a node goes dark. Then another. Someone is hunting the network, removing the others one by one, and it can only be one of them, because they are the only ones who can reach each other. One of these men with his face has decided the network should have exactly one survivor. A thriller about identity, trust, and the oldest and worst thing a man can learn: that the most dangerous person in any world is the one who already knows how you think. Full voice cast and original score. Not for sleep. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606409/support]

Six Seconds

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606409/fan_mail/new] A Midnight Frequency tale, in the Twilight Zone tradition. Time travel turned out to be real, but it works in only one way. You can go back, but only to a moment someone recorded. A photograph. A film. A tape. The recording is the address. Everything no one thought to capture is sealed in the dark forever. Daniel Avery restores old sound for a living. He has exactly one recording of his late mother: six seconds on an answering machine. Now those six seconds are a door, and he can stand in her kitchen again, alive, for exactly as long as the tape runs. He goes back once. Then a hundred times. Wearing a groove into the only six seconds he has left of her. Until, on perhaps his three hundredth visit, he finally hears something in the recording he never noticed before. Something in the next room. A story about grief, memory, and the quiet duty we owe the future. What have you recorded lately? And who will come looking for you, in the dark, when you are only a handful of seconds long? Full voice cast and original score. Best heard alone. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606409/support]

The Keeping

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606409/fan_mail/new] A Midnight Frequency tale, in the Twilight Zone tradition. Elias Mercer believes what most of us believe about the dead: that they are simply gone. Then he rents an apartment that is impossibly cheap, with one rule typed on a yellowed card. Every night, at three in the morning, sit in the chair by the window and remember someone who has died. By name. With love. For one minute. Never miss a night. He thinks it is harmless superstition. Until the night he skips it, and wakes to find his late wife's face has begun to thin, like a coal going cold. And the landlady, at last, tells him what the rule has always been holding back, and what kind of work the loneliest people in every city have been doing, unthanked, at three in the morning, since the beginning. A story about grief, memory, and the only afterlife any of us can be sure of. Whose light are you keeping? And when you are gone, who will refuse to let you go? Featuring a full voice cast and an original score. Best heard alone, in the dark. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2606409/support]