Phantom Signal at Wormhole Nine

In 1980, a rust-belt shortwave cuts through static: a voice claims to ride a quantum ghost between stars. A corporate wormhole-mining consortium, armed with reel-to-reel telemetry and Cold War secrecy, bores into spacetime. Miners return as fractured signals; CB chatter and satellite relays catch pieces of a body that isn’t whole. A radio operator, a disgraced physicist, and a union foreman follow the broadcast across analog wires and neon nights, unearthing corporate hubris, a haunted quantum channel, and a disaster the manuals never authorized.