[Scenario Seed] The Night Wire

[Catsmate]

There is something ungodly about these night wire jobs. You sit up here on the top floor of a skyscraper and listen in to the whispers of a civilization. New York, London, Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore -- they're your next-door neighbors after the streetlights go dim and the world has gone to sleep.

The Night Wire is a short story in the general horror genre written by the obscure author H. F. (Henry Ferris) Arnold¹ and first published in Weird Tales in 1926. It's Ferris's best known work (of three) and one of the most known stories ever published in Weird Tales.
The story revolves around a pair of teletype operators, one named John Morgan and the unnamed first person narrator,  in a nameless American city skyscraper, who work the overnight shift in a news or press agency taking news messages from all over the world. The routine of "fires and disasters and suicides. Murders, crowds, catastrophes" changes one night when the start receiving messages from a city neither have heard of, Xebico.
This city starts to experience an odd fog (which may have started in a churchyard) that envelops the city in  a manner never seen before. By 7PM "All lights were now invisible and the town was shrouded in pitch darkness"

I'll leave you to read the story for yourselves, it's quite brief and available online here. It's also suggested by some guided as an inspiration for Carpenter's famous 1980 film The Fog.

This struck me as having some potential for a Who game.
There are a few ways to utilise the plot without directly experiencing the fog and retaining the story's flavour,

1. After a few of the messages are received the operators receive a visit from a strange man (or woman) and his companions. He seems to understand what's going on in Xebico and persuades the operators to reply to the messages, offering advice to the beleaguered city.
Or maybe, after the end of the tale, the stranger heads off to go to Xebico in person to help. Does the narrator join them?

2. Neither of the operators are familiar with Xebico, perhaps this telegraph line in that particular building is connecting to a different world, a parallel Earth perhaps? Is there a gap in reality allowing telegraph wires in different worlds to occasionally touch?
Or does this happen more often; perhaps there's a small network of telegraphers who know of this weirdness and use it regularly.

• This could of course be updated to the modern day. Is there an office block where a few of the overnght server-sitters know that if you patch into port 17/449 and set your DNS to 10.10.10.10 you can visit the web of another world? Assuming physical objects cannot be sent across but only data what effect could this have?
  
• Is this where some of the stranger images on our internet come from?
  

3. Maybe someone decides to turn the story into a play.



Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?



1. Of whom we actually know damn all. It's not sure if that was his real name and while sources say he was born in 1901 (or 1902) and died in 1963 (supposedly choking on a piece of meat) there is no verified source for any of that. He's said to have worked as an author and journalist, but the only known works attributed to him are The Night Wire", The City of Iron Cubes, and When Atlantis Was (published in 1937). He's also said to have worked in PR and real estate. 'He' may have been 'she' too.
It's a mystery.

[olegrand]

This is an extraordinary story - great theme, impeccable atmosphere and pacing... a real gem! Thanks a lot for this wonderful discovery!

If I were to adapt this for Doctor Who RPG, I'd probably keep the historical setting & wire technology - this could make for a great "Horror of Fang Rock"-esque episode... On the other hand, since we are talking about a time-travel RPG, a more complicated plot, involving both the "wire" era and our present-day Internet would be a fascinating possibility.

How about the following ideas:

The messages come from another reality - an alternate continuum, à la Pete's World / Inferno, etc. Periodically (perhaps on predictable dates, e.g. every 53 years or some other fixed cycle), due to some inter-dimensional quirk, the electric, electronic etc. communication signals from this alternate reality "leak" into our own communication networks, always for a handful of hours. The last messages from decades ago spoke of some eerie menace, like in the story. And now, several decades later, the invasion of the alternate reality is complete and the weird menace / fog / whatever is trying to cross onto our reality, using the communication quirk as some sort of gateway.

The messages from the past (the "wire" era) would serve as ominous forebodings of what will happen in our reality if nothing is done to prevent the entities from crossing.

[Catsmate]

Aug 9, 2020 8:55:33 GMT olegrand said:

This is an extraordinary story - great theme, impeccable atmosphere and pacing... a real gem! Thanks a lot for this wonderful discovery!

Thanks for the appreciation. The story was languishing in my huge notes doc for I don't know how long until I started reorganising stuff (Graham Island was another such find).
It's odd that one of the most famous, if not the mmost famous story in Weird Tales came from an author we know nothing about. There's probably a scenario there too....

Aug 9, 2020 8:55:33 GMT olegrand said:

If I were to adapt this for Doctor Who RPG, I'd probably keep the historical setting & wire technology - this could make for a great "Horror of Fang Rock"-esque episode... On the other hand, since we are talking about a time-travel RPG, a more complicated plot, involving both the "wire" era and our present-day Internet would be a fascinating possibility.

Yes it really does 'fit' the Pulp era better than today.
Though perhaps a sixties 'base under siege' setting with military teleprinters getting messages from a slightly divergent worlds, a different leg in the 'Trousers of Time'.

Aug 9, 2020 8:55:33 GMT olegrand said:

How about the following ideas:

The messages come from another reality - an alternate continuum, à la Pete's World / Inferno, etc. Periodically (perhaps on predictable dates, e.g. every 53 years or some other fixed cycle), due to some inter-dimensional quirk, the electric, electronic etc. communication signals from this alternate reality "leak" into our own communication networks, always for a handful of hours. The last messages from decades ago spoke of some eerie menace, like in the story. And now, several decades later, the invasion of the alternate reality is complete and the weird menace / fog / whatever is trying to cross onto our reality, using the communication quirk as some sort of gateway.

The messages from the past (the "wire" era) would serve as ominous forebodings of what will happen in our reality if nothing is done to prevent the entities from crossing.

I love it!

Perhaps in the UNIT era? When an archivist hears of something odd happening in some far corner of the world she remembers some transcribed paper tapes that UNIT 'inherited' from a previous agency.She's shocked to find the earliest of the records matches the current events; whatever had happened seems to be starting in this world.
Can she get her bosses to deal with the matter? What happened to the rest of the paper tapes, presumably covering later events, that were never transcribed? Can she (and the PCs) locate the surviving, now septuagenarian, operator and find out what happened that night? Does he have the missing tapes? What killed the second man? Is his body stored away somewhere? What killed him?

In the background strange events are spreading....