Why Radios Are Creepier Than Phones

A phone is a friendly object. Whatever you think of what it has done to us, the thing itself is built on a warm premise: that a specific person wants to reach a specific person, and here is the machine that closes the distance between them. A phone rings and it is for you. Even a wrong number is a human being who meant to reach a human being and missed. The whole apparatus is directed, intimate, two-way. It connects.

A radio does not connect. A radio receives.

That is the entire difference, and it is the whole of the dread. A radio does not care whether the signal in the air was meant for you. It cannot. It simply pulls whatever is passing through the room out of the ether and lets you listen, and most of what is passing through the room was never addressed to you at all. A phone is a conversation. A radio is eavesdropping on the sky. And if you turn the dial far enough, away from the songs and the traffic reports and the men shouting about hockey, into the strange quiet high-frequency country of the shortwave bands, you will eventually find the thing that proves the point, which is a voice reading numbers.

The voice reading numbers

They are called numbers stations, and they are exactly what they sound like. Somewhere out in the shortwave, on a rigid schedule, a voice — usually flat, usually synthetic, often a woman, sometimes a child — reads out groups of numbers. Three. Seven. Zero. Nine. Two. Then a pause. Then more. It goes on for a set time and stops, and comes back tomorrow, and it has been doing this, in various forms and various languages, since before you were born. In 1997 a record label released four discs of nothing but recordings of these broadcasts, collected by hobbyists, and people who had never touched a shortwave radio bought them and sat in the dark and listened to a stranger’s voice reading numbers to no one, and reported that it was one of the most frightening things they had ever heard.

Here is where the story is supposed to reassure you. Here is where I tell you what they actually are, and the mystery dissolves, and you can go to bed.

Except it doesn’t work that way. Because I can tell you what they are — they are almost certainly spies — and it makes them worse.

The explanation that makes it worse

Numbers stations are, in all likelihood, exactly what the shortwave nerds have said for decades: one-way messages to intelligence officers. An agent in a foreign country needs to receive instructions in a way that cannot be traced to them, and it turns out the most secure method ever devised is also the oldest and the crudest. You give the agent an ordinary radio — the kind anyone can own, the kind that incriminates no one — and a one-time pad, a booklet of random numbers, and at an agreed hour on an agreed frequency, a voice reads a string of numbers, and the agent subtracts the pad, and out comes the message. Done correctly, it is mathematically unbreakable. You cannot crack it, and you cannot prove the housewife with the shortwave set in the spare room is anything but a hobbyist.

This is not a theory. It has been proven in court — a ring of Cuban agents was convicted in part on the numbers they were caught receiving. Governments have admitted it. And still, right now, tonight, the stations are on the air. There is one the listeners call The Buzzer, out of Russia, that has broadcast a monotonous droning tone twenty-four hours a day since the 1970s, occasionally — rarely, chillingly — interrupted by a voice saying a few Russian words and then returning to the drone. There was one for years that opened with a few bars of a music box playing an old melody, and then a little girl’s voice reading numbers in German. It was run, the declassified files now say, by Polish intelligence. A child’s voice and a music box, on a schedule, for the reading of coded murder-and-espionage instructions, and it was real, and it was ordinary, in the way that the truly frightening things are always ordinary underneath.

You see the problem. The explanation was supposed to be the exorcism. Instead it is the worst part. A ghost would be simpler. A ghost has a reason, a story, an unfinished thing. This is a voice reading real numbers to a real person you will never see, carrying real consequences you will never learn, on a machine that should have been switched off when the Cold War ended, and it is still going, patiently, into the dark, addressed to someone who is not you and never will be.

The dead speak on the dial

That is what a radio is, and what a phone can never be: a receiver for voices out of a context that is over.

This is why all dead media is haunted, and haunted by default. A phone is of the present tense — it connects two living people, now. But a radio pulls in whatever the air still carries, and the air carries a great deal that has outlived its moment: the numbers station broadcasting for a spy network that may no longer exist, the automated tone maintained by an institution that may have forgotten why, the whole obsolete architecture of the shortwave still faithfully doing a job the world stopped needing. When you tune a radio you are not calling anyone. You are opening a door and letting in whatever is still walking the hall — and some of what is still walking the hall is a machine reading numbers, forever, to the dead frequencies, for the benefit of listeners who may themselves be long gone.

A phone tells you who is calling. That is its whole mercy: it is for you, from someone, in the present.

A radio just receives. It does not know what year it is. And somewhere on the dial, right now, past the hockey and the hymns, a flat calm voice is reading numbers into the fog — three, seven, zero, nine, two — for a person you will never meet, in a code you will never break, and it will still be reading them long after everyone who knows what they mean is dead. That is not a ghost. It is so much worse than a ghost. It is a real voice, doing a real job, in a room where no one is listening but you.