The last radio broadcast from our universe was a used car commercial in Tulsa. I know because I heard it die, felt it sputter out into the new electromagnetic soup that Earth's atmosphere had become after the Event. These days, old-school radio waves have to compete with quantum frequencies, parallel dimension broadcasts, and whatever the hell that signal from the shadow realm is.

My name's Kwan Park, and I'm what the scientific community calls an "electromagnetic anomaly." The Parallaxer underground calls me The Frequency. I just call myself a glorified radio antenna with anxiety.

It started during the Event, in my radio repair shop in Queens. When the shadows came, I was trying to fix an old Philips set that kept picking up broadcasts from 1954. Then the flash hit, and suddenly I could hear everything – AM, FM, shortwave, HAM, cell signals, satellite feeds, even the quantum noise from people's brain synapses. Imagine having every radio and TV station in the world playing in your head at once, plus your neighbor's phone calls, plus random thoughts from passing strangers.

I threw up for three straight days.

"Fascinating," said my best friend Olivia, the quantum computing researcher who helped me understand what was happening. "Your nervous system has somehow become a living antenna array, capable of receiving and transmitting across the entire electromagnetic spectrum."

"Can you make it stop?" I begged, head pounding from a passing 5G tower.

"Stop? Kwan, do you realize what this means? You're not just picking up normal broadcasts – you're receiving signals from parallel Earths. Those weird frequencies you're hearing? They're radio shows from realities where history went differently."

She was right. Once I learned to filter the noise, to tune the frequencies like stations on a radio dial, I started making sense of it all. There was the universe where the Soviet Union won the space race, broadcasting communist propaganda from their Mars colonies. The one where the Roman Empire never fell, still using ancient Greek in their satellite communications. The reality where Hitler won World War II – I keep that frequency blocked.

But it's not just parallel Earths. Something about the Event cracked reality wide open, and now there are broadcasts leaking in from... elsewhere. Places that aren't parallel worlds so much as perpendicular ones. Realities that operate on completely different physics.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The first time I picked up the shadow frequency, I thought I was having a stroke. It wasn't sound or data – it was pure mathematics, equations that described the fundamental structure of reality itself. When I showed the transcripts to Olivia, she locked them in her lab and wouldn't talk about them for a week.

I opened my repair shop again, but with a new specialty. People bring me devices that pick up impossible signals, that connect to networks that shouldn't exist. A teenager's phone that only receives texts from her dead sister. A GPS that shows routes through time instead of space. A smart speaker that channels voices from the collective unconscious.

I fix them. Or sometimes, I explain why they shouldn't be fixed.

The government found me, of course. Offered me a "consultation position" with their Electromagnetic Surveillance Division. I turned them down. They suggested reconsidering. I broadcasted their classified frequencies on all channels for an hour. They stopped asking.

But it's not all weird signals and quantum static. Sometimes I pick up things that matter. Distress calls from other Parallaxers being hunted by containment teams. Coded messages from the resistance. Transmissions from others like me in different realities, building a network across dimensions.

That's how I learned about the Signal.

It started as a whisper in the quantum frequencies, a pattern repeating across multiple realities. At first, I thought it was just background radiation from the Event. But it's growing stronger. The shadow realm frequencies are responding to it. Even the parallel Earths are starting to notice.

"It's like a beacon," Olivia said, analyzing the waveforms in her lab. "Or a countdown."

"To what?"

"I don't know. But look – the mathematical structure is identical to the equations from your shadow frequency transcripts."

Whatever caused the Event, whatever cracked reality open and gave us these powers, it's not finished. The Signal is calling something. Or something is trying to call through.

Last week, I picked up a transmission from a version of Earth that had its Event three months before ours. The broadcast cut off mid-sentence. When I tuned back to that frequency, there was nothing but quantum static. That Earth's entire electromagnetic spectrum had gone dark.

Two days ago, I started hearing the Signal in my dreams. Not through my power – actually hearing it, like it's bypassing the electromagnetic spectrum altogether. Olivia's worried. She's detected similar patterns in her quantum computing experiments.

This morning, I picked up a new frequency. Not parallel, not perpendicular, but... angular. The transmission was brief, just three words in a language that shouldn't be possible to speak. When I wrote them down, the paper kept trying to fold itself into shapes with too many dimensions.

I've started broadcasting warnings, seeding them through the frequencies. Some in code, some clear and plain: Something's coming. The Event was just the beginning. Reality isn't just leaking between parallels anymore – it's being deliberately breached.

The shadow frequencies are getting louder. The Signal is gaining harmonics. And yesterday, that used car commercial from Tulsa finally stopped broadcasting its endless loop into the quantum void.

In its place: static that sounds like laughter.

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