Item Seed: The Retrospective Radio
This item is, to outward appearance, identical to a portable transistor AM radio from about 1970 or so. It runs on 9 volt batteries, although the batteries may not be actually necessary: the Radio never seems to quite run out of battery power on its own. People who own the Radio seem to change the batteries mostly out of a sense of caution.
The Retrospective Radio operates exactly as a normal AM radio would, with one glaring exception: if you tune it to 1410 on the AM dial you’ll pick up a strong signal from a radio station (WTIM). There is actually a station with that frequency and call sign (out of Illinois), but it’s not this WTIM. This WTIM is a 24 hours news station that faithfully reports current events from precisely two weeks ago, in between commercials for products that nobody’s ever heard of.
What makes this valuable, instead of merely odd, is that the news reports feature information that was unavailable at the time. If a man was murdered, WTIM reports the murder – and who murdered him, even if the killer was previously unknown. The news analyses and expert interviews found on WTIM are likewise supernaturally accurate: those analyses and interviews routinely give the true motivations and reasons for various domestic and foreign events, and nobody’s been able to prove WTIM wrong yet.
In other words, the Retrospective Radio is one of those items that any number of conspiracies (or Conspiracies) will shed blood to control. So anybody who inadvertently gets a hold of it will very quickly have an interesting life. …Even, perhaps, an adventurous one…