My name is Benji Margolis. I run the video store on what passes for a main street here in Nowhere. My dad ran it before me, back when he still ran anything.
You probably wandered in looking for the show. Or for the other thing, the official search they ran a few years back, the one with the geocaches and the phone numbers and the fifteen-thousand-person Discord. Finding David. They turned my dad disappearing into an escape room. Then the show went on “hiatus,” and everybody folded up the card table and drove home. There's a set of coordinates nobody ever cracked. There's a phone line that was nothing but static. They quit.
I didn't quit.
Here's what they didn't tell you, or maybe didn't know. My dad left a radio. Pirate rig, second shelf down in the basement, sitting on the band the government swears is dead air inside the Quiet Zone. Empty. Nobody. Can't be anybody. And it still catches things. It catches things every week.
So this is me doing it myself. No network. No marketing department in Burbank. Just me and the rig and whatever it drags in, posted the way it lands. Witness stuff. Old clippings. Tapes off the band. The occasional thing somebody downtown wasn't supposed to keep, kept anyway, then slid under the store's door at an hour when only one kind of person is up.
It's a mess. I know it's a mess. My brain runs a little hot, it's a whole diagnosed situation, and the wall down in the basement has reached the part of the movie where the cops go quiet in the doorway. Yeah. It's the Se7en apartment. I'm aware. I live in it.
But every piece on this site is real, in the sense that it actually reached me. What it means is a different question and I won't always have the answer. I can tell you it showed up. I can tell you it's getting louder.
How this works. Leave the page open. I'm not being cute. The stuff comes in when you're not looking straight at it, same as everything else in this town. When a piece drifts in, click it and read the rest of it. It pins to the wall, which keeps track of what you've turned up and what's still out there in the dark.
Start wherever. My dad, if you want to know who I'm doing this for. The town, if you've never heard of a Quiet Zone and don't know why ours is wrong. Or just sit here a minute and let the first one find you.
trust no one. except maybe me. /B
Some of what comes through is rough. Reversed, half buried, counting out numbers in a voice I keep telling myself I don't know. I leave it the way it lands. If your machine is set to go easy on motion, the pieces hold still for you. They won't drift around. You can still read every one.