The Buzzer

Somewhere in the forests west of Moscow, a machine has been clearing its throat for fifty years. You’re tuned to G Z S, one ninety-seven point seven, and this is Transmissions from the Fringe.

Take a shortwave receiver and tune it to four six two five kilohertz. Any hour. Any season. You will hear a buzz. Short. Flat. Joyless. About twenty-five times a minute, around the clock, going back as far as anyone can prove. The oldest recording anyone kept dates to nineteen eighty-two, and listeners say the signal was already old by then, on the air since the middle of the nineteen seventies. In the early years it was a beep. Around the early nineteen nineties the beep became the buzz, and the buzz never left.

The people who listen call it the Buzzer. The station never called itself anything at all. Then, on December twenty-fourth, nineteen ninety-seven, Christmas Eve, the buzzing stopped. A man’s voice came up out of the static, speaking Russian. He read a call sign the listeners wrote down as U V B seventy-six. They may have heard it wrong. The name stuck anyway. He read numbers. He read names. Boris. Roman. Olga. Mikhail. Anna. Larisa. Then he was gone, and the buzz came back as if nothing had happened.

That has been the pattern ever since. Years of buzz. Then a voice. Names and number groups, read flat and slow, never explained, never repeated for stragglers. In two thousand ten the call sign changed and the transmitter moved north, up near Saint Petersburg. The buzz barely blinked.

No government has ever explained it. The standing theory from the people who chart these things is that the buzz is a channel marker. A placeholder. A way of holding a frequency so no one else can use it. Holding it for what, the theory does not say.

Here is the detail to take to bed with you. More than once, listeners have caught other sounds underneath the buzz. A far-off conversation. Movement in a room. Which means there may be no tape at all. Just a machine buzzing in front of a live, open microphone, in a real room, somewhere, right now. A room someone sweeps. A machine someone maintains.

So sit with the arithmetic, alone at this hour with the radio on. The voice comes when it comes, never on schedule. The buzz comes twenty-five times a minute. And every buzz says the same thing. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Somewhere a man is paid to keep you hearing it. No one will tell you what happens on the night you don’t.

This has been Transmissions from the Fringe. The dial stays warm. G Z S.