He rewound his modified cassette with a pencil and loaded it into the tape deck. The machine spit out a pained hum and the playback started: “.dnuora evol ruoy worhT elpoep ,elpoep ,dworc eht ni em teeM .gnihgual elpoep yppah ynihS”.

 “Shiny Happy People” by R.E.M. had been played non stop the summer of 1991, but 28 year old Daniel Sampton was convinced of ulterior motives behind the song’s meaning. He insisted that the repetition was the key to decoding the “secrets” behind the song. Daniel gathered that the message was to be used as a form of mind control from the band that was intended for world domination. 

For multiple weeks, Daniel became shut off; his eyes dilated and his breath smelled stale and rotten. He had avoided sleep for at least seven days due to the aggressive sound thumping on the windows of his 8th story NYC apartment. The gentle tapping of rain made the sound of bullets flooding his eardrums. His thoughts had become jumbled due to a lack of human contact. The shrieks of Michael Stipe had been his only companion and almost comforting… then the thumping stopped. A sharp jolt of feedback surging through Daniel’s stereo. 

“WHO’S THERE!” Daniel yelped into the blackness. “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” 

“They don’t get you” whispered the voice through the stereo.

“Who?”

“Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”

“What?” 

The voice dissipated. 

On the morning of September 8th 1991, after not sleeping for a week, Daniel finally woke up in a neatly pressed striped suit covered in blood with no recollection of the previous night. Daniel, not sure of his situation, ran to the phone to call the police, but his landline had been mangled and melted into a clump of burning plastic and wires. His entire apartment had its electronics destroyed and furniture stripped. The only things remaining in his apartment were a Rhapsody TV-670 portable tv, a Fisher Price children’s cassette player, and four cassettes, one of which was simply marked play. He put the cassette into the toy and a metallic voice shrieked at him,   “Good morning! You must now act quickly; there is a bottle of dish soap sitting your bathroom. Fill your bathtub with warm water and the whole bottle of dish soap. That will help you get Mr. Tartikoff’s blood out of your suit.”

After the message ended, the tape off the cassette became unwound and tangled to the point of becoming unusable. Not much later the tv flicked on to a distraught news reporter: “Today the television world gathers together to mourn the loss of beloved NBC President, Brandon Tartikoff. Witnesses say that the assailant was a well dressed man in his late twenties who was clearly schizophrenic.”

Not long after, the tv sputtered and buzzed off. Daniel hobbled over to his bathtub and filled it with water, dish soap and sat in it with his suit on for what felt like two hours until the blood stains were mostly gone. Still soaking wet he walked over to put in the second cassette, which was a copy of Out Of Time by R.E.M, which he assumed was simply for entertainment, along with an audio copy of Kenneth Branagh reading one of Henry V’s monologues. The fourth cassette was quite possibly the strangest one. It consisted of nothing but a low hum that made Daniel nauseous and twitchy. Not long after the tape finished, he bolted to the door as to escape his prison. As his feet screeched to a halt he noticed that the door and windows have been replaced with metal sheets with rivets bolting them on. The vents in the walls started to sputter out a white fog that ended the course of another day.

The next day Daniel woke up to a wall of speakers connected to a three slot tape deck playing all the remaining tapes at once. This sound would continue for nearly 18 hours of painful agony and sleep deprivation. The pain was so unbearable that Daniel started to mutter to himself to drown out the sound of the speakers . After multiple hours of the noise, the intercom buzzed on, “If you want this to stop just take this knife and put on a suit, the door will slide open and you will be put in a black Cadillac DeVille to be driven to the next location.”

Daniel followed the directions given to him by the voice. The door opened with a horrible screeching sound and the view of sunlight scorched his retinas like a blowtorch. His 8th story apartment had been transferred to a waterside, bottom level warehouse. A black 1991 Cadillac DeVille screeched next to the warehouse. 

“In, now!” croaked the driver with the raspy tone of a lifelong smoker. Daniel simply responded with incoherent mumbling, despite understanding the request, and hopped in the backseat. The radio buzzed on with the hum that Daniel heard in his apartment. 

“Wa...w-what’s..th-that...frequency?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know, kid? Boss’s orders.”

“Wa...w-what...is...y...y-your name?”

“My name is none of your business…”

“Kenneth Branagh! T..t-that must be the name!”

“What is your deal, kid?”

“Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

Before Daniel could say anything else, the car came to a stop in a dark alleyway where Daniel exited the car wearing a suit and carrying a knife. His utterance of  “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” continued down the alley. At the end of the alley was a bustling New York street where a news anchor on his way to work bumped into Daniel.

“Excuse me?”

“W...w-what...i...is...y-y-your name?”

“Dan, Dan Rather.”

“M…m-m-my...n-name...is...d-Daniel. Y...y-your’s is Kenneth.”

“My name is Dan.”

“WhatisthefrequencyKenneth!?WhatisthefrequecyKenneth!?WhatisthefrequencyKenneth?!”

“Kenneth” fell to the ground onto a bloody pool after being stabbed in the stomach by Daniel. Daniel became dizzy and disoriented as the light faded and a shadowy figure appeared from the alley. Michael Stipe’s unmistakable voice muttered “Good work.”