The Broadcast Loop
“We return to the story after the Event, reporting live from the city center where the fabric of time seems to unravel before our eyes. Stay tuned for eyewitness testimonies.”
This is Transmission 23A, City News Multicast, broadcasting to the survivors. I’m Alia Chen, your consistent signal in a world where the clocks no longer agree on what moment it is, nor which day. If you’re out there listening, hold tight. Our time is fractured, but our voices are real.
At 14:37—at least, that’s when my watch stopped and never started again—the city pulse faltered. Buildings stretched and contracted like slow breath. Streetlamps flickered, casting shadows that replayed yesterday’s news. Some saw the sunrise three times before lunch. Reports flooded in: people vanishing from one coffee shop to materialize across the river, or exchanging names and faces without meaning to. I pictured a handful of sand, every grain falling out of order.
They called it the Loop Event. Experts, if such still existed, phoned in with fragmented theories: a systems failure, a quantum rupture, even divine boredom. Our phone lines glowed white-hot with fear and confusion. Each call was a sliver of what had broken. I listened and did my job: made sense of the noise, strung chaos into narrative—a lifeline for a listener, somewhere.
Four hours after the initial glitch, a new element arrived. Between static, lost signals, and stuttering power cycles, a child’s voice cut through every frequency: “Does anyone remember how to get home?” It broadcast in bursts, echoing in the background between traffic updates and pleas for help. No matter which channel, no matter the time of day, it asked the same question. Every hour, on the hour. My producer bound us by oath: Do not mention the child’s voice live on air. Listeners needed facts, not ghost stories.
But in the empty hush after each segment, when the city grew still, I replayed the message, searching it for a sign of my little brother, missing since the clocks first faltered. Ben was seven. Maybe the voice was him. Maybe it was any one of us.
Staying on air became my anchor. People called in with memories out of order: a grandmother recalling her wedding day with the face of a stranger beside her; a police officer insistent he was born twice, died once, and now existed somewhere in between. One night, a pale, breathless executive gasped, “I’m reading tomorrow’s newspaper, and the disaster gets worse.” I let him speak. His prediction came true: food riots circled the next block before sunrise.
Days, or perhaps weeks, passed in cycles. My watch said it was always the hour after. The city news desk looked like it belonged in two decades ago—a half-broken clock, stacks of yellowed scripts, emergency candles for power failures. Our station’s glass wall, once overlooking downtown, now reflected a rupture—sometimes day, sometimes murky midnight, always flickering.
I tried to be the voice people clung to. But even I—especially I—was losing the plotline. Vertigo spun me when I realized that the transmission logs were repeating. Segment intros stuttered from my lips, but I didn’t remember saying them. Co-workers flickered in and out, sometimes older, sometimes missing scars or wedding rings. My producer, Lena, looked up one long dusk and said, “Have you noticed? The calls, the voices—they’re always the same stories, just with different endings.”
The city outside—if there was still an outside—began to fracture. Wind brought the scent of burnt ozone and distant sea, then the next breath was the bakery’s warm yeast. Sometimes a car alarm sounded in reverse, as if un-happening. Each day, the child’s voice grew sharper, pleading, “Does anyone remember how to get home?” Sometimes, I could almost answer.
One loop, Lena motioned for me to follow her. She had found something. In the server room, among tangled cables, she’d rigged three radios and a weathered tape recorder. “Listen,” she urged, pressing play. I heard the child’s message, but then, faintly layered beneath, a fragment from my own first news broadcast—my voice, announcing hope after the storm, years ago. Lena handed me a battered notebook. “I think the universe is looking for a narrator. Someone to piece it together and close the loop.”
A confusion of timelines ran under my skin. I didn’t know anymore if I was the storyteller or the story. But I remembered my brother’s sun-warmed hand, the one thing never quite rewritten. My eyes closed, I tried to answer the child’s voice as it played one more time. “Does anyone remember how to get home?”
I spoke on air, breaking protocol. “If you’re listening—and I am, too—we’re out here. Your story matters. I remember your laugh, Ben. I remember our way home, the smell of mom’s jacket, the path under the streetlamp. Home exists—because we keep telling it exists, together.”
Feedback spilled through the radio. The cracked glass wall shimmered, and outside, for the first time, the city resolved into one single sunrise. The voices on all frequencies synchronized—realizing, remembering. It was far from perfect. But in a single, linear dawn, memories began to align. Name by name, face by face, radio by radio, the shape of home reassembled.
My watch started ticking again. Not backward, nor sideways, but forward. I checked the logs. No more looping. I signed off the broadcast with a single word, heavy with the full weight of memory: “Welcome.”
###END###
