Codex Transportica

Professor Gerald Hopkins made a most remarkable discovery: an entirely new body of radio waves, interleaved amongst existing frequencies, but at a completely different polarity. Where normal radio waves have a polarity of either vertical, horizontal or circular, Hopkins had unwittingly tapped into a fourth configuration, which he named the Phasmic polarity (from the Latin for “ghost”).

Phasmic waves appeared to be clean, static-free and best of all, completely unknown to the enemy. The military application of such a new radio communication was seen immediately, and a large project was immediately born – the Transmission & Reception Array for Phasmic Radio (TRAPR).

Shown in the illustration above is one of the antenna towers used in the array: to facilitate fine-tuning, each antenna was on a manoeuvrable platform in order that the completed array could be re-shaped for test configurations. The interconnect ports can be clearly seen in the base of the antenna, and at the top is the lightning conductor and e-plane resonance damper.

By now, it is a matter of historical fact as to what happened when the array was activated. Until this point, small-scale tests had simply shown the phasmic wavelengths to be a viable alternative for radio communications. No-one had foreseen that phasmic waves were able to transcend the speed of light (thus forming the basis to the science of Phasmic Physics), and yet it was the TRAPR array that first proved that instantaneous communication could now be a reality.

During this early, optimistic time the Super-Large Array for Phasmic Radio (SLAPR) was given the go-ahead, with the remit that it have the power and capacity to carry all previous high level communications worldwide. But as we now know, the resulting messaging network did far, far more than simply enable orders to be barked immediately amongst the military command.

Experts now understand this to be the moment that the “Innocent Bystander” received the first of the transmissions – almost certainly due to the SLAPR emitting an unmonitored pulse of PR2 (or “Phasmic Reverse Radio”, i.e. Phasmic waves travelling at a negative multiple to the speed of light).