Radio Waves are Funny Things…

In the GAGA universe, it was often remarked that the invention of radio – and the eternally emanating waves it produces – were the reason why the Earth was decimated by alien invasion in the third decade of the 21st Century. After all, radio waves propagate nearly endlessly, and as Thordin Goodfrey said in the subway tunnels during the Raid of New York City, “given the right conditions, and on the right day, and time, if our little planet was facing the right direction, radio waves would propagate all the way to an evil, dying world full of beings just itching to take us and make us their slaves…”

And, as Thordin Goodfrey found out, this fascinating characteristic of radio propagation also attracted the attention of the Telamer alien race, who ultimately stepped in and stopped the Maitre invasion of Earth… making humanity the inheritor of the Telamer’s Galactic authority and guidance.

Perhaps this latter reason is why the sentient android, Nick Goodfrey, continued to commit random acts of radio broadcasting throughout his two-thousand year lifespan in the Galactic Association of Globes and Asteroids. Radio broadcasts featuring his commentary, his preferred music, his thoughts on Life, The Universe and Everything, and his particular viewpoint of the humans and other races in the GAGA have been sourced through background radio telescopy studies to almost every sector in which Nick Goodfrey resided. Even his own enslavement at the hands of the Japanese consortium, Sindo Corporation, produced radio broadcasts.

Perhaps it helped that Nick Goodfrey was his own transmission antenna in later years- it does not explain the efforts to which the plucky android went to broadcast even short radio bursts of music, poetry readings, commentary and letters to his father, Thordin Goodfrey, before his technological advancements allowed this. The effort to which an android, then bound into service as a tool and a servant to the Wrought Family, and the Sinclair family after that, must have been considerable. Yet, scientists and radio archaelogists have found these Radio Free Goodfrey broadcasts floating around in the background spectrum of the GAGA, dating back to Nick Goodfrey’s first broadcasts- sanctioned ones- with his father Thordin Goodfrey in 2003.*

With a lever long enough, a man might move the planet… and with a radio transmission station far enough away, an enterprising android might even make a broadcast from the furthest reaches of our Galaxy, and have it one day brush against our own little Earth…

a true message in a bottle, from a space pioneer.

Commentary taken from Brandon Sands, New York Times columnist, in his 1800th anniversary column on the first Marconi broadcast, 12/12/3801.

*(Details about the dubious broadcasts, hidden far back in the first golden years of radio broadcasting in the late 1950s, remain unsubstantiated, and so the first authoritatively verified example of a Nick Goodfrey radio broadcast is that co-hosted with Thordin Goodfrey on August 27, 2003, six days after Nick was created.)