Overmodulated

Overmodulated





The mayor of the city did not like being out after midnight. He was a practical man who believed that most problems could be solved in daylight with a committee, a ledger, and a strong cup of coffee. Midnight meetings usually meant something had already gone wrong.
Tonight, he'd been the one to request the meeting.
The three men sat around a polished oak table in a back office of City Hall. Outside, the streets were nearly empty except for the occasional motorcar rattling past and the distant melodies of jazz drifting in from the nightlife district.
Prohibition had not quieted the city. If anything, it had made it louder.
Mayor Charles Wainwright folded his hands and studied the two men across from him.
On his left sat Police Chief Harold Donnelly, a thick-shouldered Irishman with a face that looked permanently suspicious. His hat rested on the table beside him, and his eyes carried the tired alertness of a man who expected trouble at any moment.
On the mayor’s right sat Attorney General Leonard Prescott, who wore a calm expression that bordered on academic curiosity. Prescott was not only the state’s chief legal officer but also, somewhat unusually, a member of the city’s Board of Education.
It was Prescott who had insisted the meeting remain unofficial.
“This is about the anonymous tips you forwarded to me about the speakeasies," Prescott pointed out.
"Anonymous? Not exactly,” the mayor said and slid a folded newspaper across the table.
On the front page was an advertisement printed in bold black letters:
THE ELECTRICIAN — LIVE TONIGHT!
Best gin in town!
Bogie’s Club, 17 Dock Street
Prescott frowned. “That’s a comedian?”
“Bad one,” Donnelly said. “But he’s consistent.”
“How so?” Presscott asked.
“Every place he advertises gets raided a few days later,” Donnolly said with a smile.
The mayor leaned back slowly and directed his attention to the police chief.
“You’re saying the comedian is tipping you off?”
Donnelly shrugged. “He never says a word directly. Just prints the address. Makes jokes about it on stage. Then somehow the place gets discovered.”
Prescott tapped the newspaper thoughtfully.
“So if they hire him, they get shut down,” he said. “They'd be stupid to hire him.”
The mayor sighed. “We never said they're smart. In fact we have an easier time if they're stupid.”
Donnelly answered first.
“One place has yet to be raided. Giovanni Brunetti’s,” he said, leaning forward.
The mayor nodded slowly. “Yes. I’ve heard of him.”
Everyone had. Brunetti ran a speakeasy beneath an otherwise respectable restaurant called the Absinthe. It had been operating for years without serious trouble, which in Prohibition-era politics meant only one thing: someone powerful had decided it should continue operating.
“Brunetti is unusual. He wishes he were an engineer,” the mayor said.
Chief Donnelly blinked. “An engineer?”
“Yes,” the mayor said calmly. “Radio technology fascinates him. I’ve seen his workshop. Oscillators, vacuum tubes, experimental receivers. Quite impressive for a man whose formal education stopped at fourteen.”
Donnelly chuckled.
“A bootlegger who wants to build radios.”
Prescott shook his head gently. “That is the interesting part. He does not think like a criminal. He thinks like an inventor who took the wrong job.”
Chief Donnelly leaned back in his chair and smiled in wonder.
“Well, inventor or not, he’s running one of the cleanest speakeasies in the city," Prescott said and smiled faintly.
“That is precisely why I asked for this meeting," The mayor said, and narrowed his eyes.
“Go on," Prescott said.
Mayor Wainright stood and walked toward the tall window overlooking the dark street below.
“You both know what Prohibition has done,” he said quietly. “It hasn’t stopped drinking. It has simply put drinking into the criminal elements hands.”
He turned back toward them, and continued: “And when intelligent young people want excitement, where do they go?”
Neither man answered at first, but then Prescott said:
“They go to places they shouldn’t. Mr. Mayor, what exactly are you proposing?”
Wainright returned to the table.
“Brunetti’s establishment converted into a place that indulges his passion for radio engineering. If we work with the Board of Education on this, we can give science students a real challenge.”
“Exactly,” said Prescott, as it were his idea too.
The police chief looked puzzled and tapped the newspaper advertisement again.
“The Electrician may be exposing speakeasies, but not Brunetti’s?"
"Exactly," said Prescott.
Donnelly crossed his arms. “You want to turn a speakeasy into a classroom?”
“More of a proving ground,” Presscott said.
Donnelly blinked. “For what?”
“For the future. When this prohibition thing is sorted out,” Presscott said.
The room fell quiet. Prescott continued slowly.
“Radio technology is advancing rapidly. Engineers are already experimenting with sending moving images through the air.”
“Television!” the mayor said, tentatively. “Perhaps someday.”
Prescott leaned forward.
“What if the brightest students in the city were given real problems to solve?”
Donnelly rubbed his jaw.
“You mean… inside Brunetti’s club?”
“Yes.”
The mayor stared at him.
“You’re suggesting we allow a speakeasy to operate… as an educational experiment?”
Prescott smiled.
“Think of it as intellectual contraband.”
Chief Donnelly finally laughed.
“You’re serious.”
“Quite.”
The mayor considered the idea carefully.
“And the comedian?”
Prescott shrugged.
“He serves a purpose.”
“How?”
“If The Electrician continues exposing reckless speakeasies,” Prescott said, “the worst ones disappear.”
“And Brunetti’s?” Donnelly asked.
“We think he has potential,” Prescott said. "We've already made a deal to arrest any of the mob owners when they show up. The city will take possession."
Donnelly leaned forward again. “You’re asking the police department to protect a speakeasy.”
“I am asking the police department,” Prescott said calmly, “to protect a laboratory.”
The mayor stared at both men for a long moment.
Outside, somewhere in the distance, a saxophone cried through the night.
Finally, he spoke.
“Brightest students in the city, you said?”
“Yes.”
“And Brunetti runs the place?”
Prescott nodded.
The mayor sighed slowly.
“God help us.”
He stood up and buttoned his coat.
“Alright. Let’s see what happens when the smartest kids in town are given a chance to change the world.”
Chief Donnelly picked up his hat.
“And if it goes right?”
Prescott looked toward the dark city skyline.
“Then one of those kids might invent the future.”
Somewhere beneath the Absinthe restaurant, a man named Giovanni Brunetti was already waiting.




In 1925, when Claude Gleason was just seventeen, he managed to borrow his uncle’s Model T and convince his two girlfriends to join him on a risky trip to the wilder side of the city.
At first, it all seemed simple enough. Claude’s uncle, a well-connected engineer, knew the speakeasy manager through the local board of education. He even explained the club’s curious slogan -“Getting in is just the beginning” - as a metaphor, suggesting that the place combined the rebellious partying of the Roaring Twenties with a deeper message about the value of education. According to Claude's uncle, the slogan was meant to highlight higher learning as a remedy for disaster.
Disaster was fresh on everyone’s mind. A world war had ended, a deadly pandemic had swept through, and now the country was deep in Prohibition - a time that ironically sparked the hedonistic spirit of the decade. Speakeasies became the escape, where the liquor was strong, the parties wild, and the crowds reckless. Many patrons were bored young speculators flush with paper wealth from a stock market that soared without logic, smooth-talking brokers who sold illusions of an easy life, and no one seemed to question them when their investments kept rising.
On the surface, everything looked golden. But underneath, the cracks were starting to show - cracks that could be glimpsed in a place like Giovanni Brunetti’s speakeasy, tucked in the basement of a respectable looking restaurant. It promised a dream that was forbidden.
As the name suggests, speakeasies didn’t let just anyone through the door. Entry was for those who understood discretion - people who lived by the phrase “loose lips sink ships.” Whether by credentials, luck, or a clever angle, they found their way in.
One man, however, had become an unintentional risk to the scene: a comedian known as The Electrician. His timing was sharp, but his jokes were dull. Still, that wasn’t the real problem. The trouble was that wherever he performed, the places he advertised tended to get raided and shut down shortly after.
By the time The Electrician arrived at Giovanni Brunetti’s speakeasy, he’d started printing a serious of conspicuous ads -“The Electrician Live! Come see me at Bogie’s on Friday! Best gin in town!” - and published the club address. A week later, Bogie’s was gone. Raided. Nobody could ever prove it was him tipping off the cops, but the timing raised concerns. And word traveled fast in the underground.
Brunetti’s let him in, but they were wise to him. And they had a plan.
The Electrician took the stage with his usual flair.
“Why did the bootlegger bring a ladder to the bar? Because he heard the drinks were on the house!”
Silence. A single cough. Someone muttered, “Jeez…”
“I told my girl I was opening at a speakeasy, and she said, ‘You’re all talk.’”
A glass shattered against the brick wall behind him.
“The cops raided my favorite joint last week. I asked the sergeant, ‘What gave us away?’ He said, ‘Well, the neon sign that said Not A Speakeasy was a little obvious.’”
Still, it wasn’t the groan-worthy humor that sealed his fate. It was the risk he carried. Everyone in the room knew it. He wasn’t just a bad act - he was a liability.
Then came the final punchline:
“Why don’t the cops go to speakeasies?” he asked.
A couple of patrons humored him: “Why?”
“Because they’re too busy busting them the next morning!”
That was it.
The bouncers didn’t hesitate. Like a well-rehearsed scene, one grabbed his collar, another snatched the mic. Before he could finish his next setup, he was hauled offstage, shoved through a side door, and dumped into the alley - where Brunetti’s “real punch lines” were waiting.
The Electrician always prided himself on his timing. But that night, for the first time, he was speechless. And no one ever saw him again.
Brunetti had grown more cautious as the world changed around him. Women had just earned the right to vote. Flappers were challenging outdated views on relationships, flaunting short skirts, bobbed hair, and a love for jazz and freedom. The world was changing fast - and Brunetti knew that to survive, his speakeasy had to stay one step ahead of trouble. Especially the kind that held a microphone.
So Brunetti sat in his back office, a cigarette burning down between his fingers, deep in thought. The Electrician had been a disaster. A loudmouthed, unfunny fool who talked too much and got what was coming to him. But now, Brunetti had a problem - what to replace the comedy acts with?
His staff had gathered around, tossing out ideas. dunking the clown? Already had it. Flapper girls? Too risky since cops paid extra attention to clubs with a stage full of dames. Juggling bartenders? Brunetti nearly choked on his cigarette. Then Mickey, the youngest bartender, leaned forward with a smirk. “Boss, what if we find the smartest kids in the city and have ‘em come here to invent television?”
The room fell silent, and then laughter erupted. Mickey was great as a bartender but he didn’t have a lick of smarts. Still to Brunetti it sounded like a good publicity start.
“Television?” Brunetti scoffed. “You mean like what I've been tinkering with in my garage? I'm already working on it.”
Brunetti took a slow drag of his cigarette, his mind working overtime. Mickey had just been joking, but he’d hit on something that they could get behind. Brunetti had always been fascinated by radio waves, ever since it became his hobby ten years ago. He'd assembled radios from parts. But television? That was the next frontier.
He had been keeping up with the inventors, the madmen trying to make moving pictures “fly through the air.” Some were even tinkering with adding sound. Brunetti felt sure the future was in a tube that was big enough to watch.
"Yes, let's have a contest to try to find the next future television engineer," Brunetti said.
Mickey grinned. “Sure, boss. We’ll go to all the high schools, find the sharpest kids. Tell ‘em we got a challenge - build a tube that people can watch and they drink for free.”
Brunetti chuckled. “Seventeen-year-olds don’t drink in my club.”
“Sure, sure,” Mickey said quickly. “But there’s also gambling, all of which favors us. They’ll want to be part of something big. And if one of ‘em actually figures it out, their money will help with expenses.”
Brunetti exhaled slowly, thinking about it. "What if someone did invent television under my roof?"
"Dunno boss."
"We'd make a lot of money if we held the copywrite," Brunetti explained, but he wasn't sure if the knuckleheads who worked for him, got it.
That was the difference between him and other club owners. Other guys only thought about the next week, the next raid, the next bribe. Giovanni Brunetti thought about the future.
He stood, putting his cigarette out in a full ashtray and then lit another.
“Alright. Put the word out. I want the brightest kids in this city down here, working on something real.”
Mickey beamed as he went running to satisfy that demand, but the others weren’t so sure of such a ridiculous idea. Mickey at least, couldn’t shake the feeling that they were about to witness something big.

The girls stood behind Claude Gleason when he entered the Absinthe Restaurant and he said to the host: "I want to make a withdrawal."
By saying that code phrase, Claude got a single skeleton key on a string and directions to a door by the restrooms marked "For Authorized Personnel Only." That led to a long flight of stairs down to a lower level that most weren't aware of. The door at the bottom of the stairs locked behind them, so there was no way back up once they’d gone through it.
“I’m not sure if this is what Mrs. Conover had in mind when she invited us,” Adeline observed, with uncertainty.
“Then let's just take it step by step and see where it takes us,” Claude cautioned.
Their teacher in Broadcast Science, Mrs. Conover had explained the difficult upward climb these two girls would need to make, if they were given a chance. Being young, optimistic and naïve, they intended to do just that.
Ahead, across the hall was a double door that was marked "Storage" and in there behind stacks of boxes of supplies, was another door.
Adeline and Beulah continued to stay slightly behind Claude as he knocked on that door. But the seconds seemed to linger after there was no answer.
Claude put a finger to his lips to quiet the girls and then knocked again. This time a small window in the center of the door, opened. Claude showed the key and the door swung wide. Smoke curled in the dim lighting, with various forms of tobacco mingling with a sometimes strong smell of moonshine.
Everything seemed to stop when seventeen year old Claude Gleason entered, a pretty teenage girl on each arm.
Someone made a joke that he looked like “The Next Electrician.” He was just too confident and casual. It was the kind of entrance that made men jealous and women curious.
He was only seventeen, but he carried himself like a man who had already made it. A slick suit, polished shoes, a pocket watch he flipped open and shut just to hear the snap. Confidence dripped off him like he had never known a bad day in his life.
The bartender gave them his full attention. The bouncers gave each other a look. Someone near the back chuckled and muttered, “Look at this kid. The next Electrician.”
A ripple of uneasy laughter ran through the room. The name The Electrician still left a bad taste - everyone knew what had happened to that loudmouthed comedian. The guy had run his mouth too much, made some bad jokes, and got himself dealt with.
Claude, clueless or maybe just cocky, grinned and said loudly: "I hope the last guy didn’t leave me any loose wires to trip over."
A chair scraped. A cough. The bartender stopped mid-pour and clenched a fist. It had suddenly gotten very quiet.
The two girls on Claude’s arms shifted uncomfortably, sensing the change. Then one of them whispered, “Claude, the jazz stopped.”
With the background jazz quieted, a burly man in a pinstripe suit loomed over them. It had just been a bad choice of words.
“Where do you kids think you're going?” he demanded, his voice a low growl. But before they could even react, the big one stepped aside to reveal a smaller and older man who appeared to be in charge.
Before Claude could say anything in his defense, Giovanni Brunetti, the manager, stepped forward to greet them at the entrance.
"Welcome. You’re the high school kids? We almost mistook you for trouble," Brunetti said, with a professional smile.
"I noticed that they were saying something about an electrician," Claude boasted, flashing a quick grin.
"Don't say that name,” Brunetti said, a little bit touchy with a smile that could easily become a sneer. He'd found ways of keeping people happy at his late night speakeasy parties, so long as he wasn't provoked.
"I won't talk about The Electrician. I'm sure there's lots of other things we can talk about," Claude said, profoundly.
“So who are your lovely escorts?" Brunetti asked after a slight hesitation and Claude introduced the girls as his "best friends and teammates: Addy and Beulah."
"You'll do well kid, if you understand that the rules here are like the rules of life. Any problem is tough and teamwork is the way to go. You come with a good recommendation by your science teacher," Brunetti explained, his gaze dwelling for an extended moment on the girls.
"Maybe you know my Uncle Jacob?"
"No," Brunetti said, but Claude knew he straddled the line between law abiding and he law breaking. His saving grace was being on the board of education. Claude's uncle knew all about "the speakeasy manager who wished he were an engineer."
Right now to Claude, he looked more like gangster who had enough power to make things go his way.
"The contest’s slogan is “Getting in is just the beginning." What's that mean?" Claude asked.
"It means that if you're lucky enough to get through some difficult challenges when you're young, then you'll go far," Giovanni said, eloquent in his reply.
Claude then followed Brunetti, who led him over to an old-fashioned safe, adorned with strange mathematical symbols, half-hidden in the corner of the room. Brunetti positioned himself to partially block the girls from going any further.
Making a ceremony of it, Claude took the key that he'd been given when he'd entered and inserted it into the appropriate slot. The latch clicked and the door opened inward. He went through that door but the girls could not follow. Brunetti and the bouncer made sure of it.
So the door slammed shut, Claude was gripped by the grim realization that he was in this alone.
Chaos theory states that even in seeming randomness, there is an underlying order - a deterministic path that can be deciphered by those keen enough to see it. Claude's future depended on what he was to do in the next few minutes.
Claude remembered his uncle explaining chaos theory to him. Now was the time he needed to recall the thought provoking conversations that he'd had with his Uncle Jacob, his teaching mentor over the years.
He examined the markings on the wall in front of him, recognizing them as a Fibonacci sequence he'd seen on that cheap decoder he got from a Wheaties box. Jack Armstrong had inspired him because all his adventures began with numerical problems. He quickly calculated the next number and turned the dial and got a click. Progress.

Seventeen year old Claude Gleason was seated at a small table with a box full of unassembled radio parts: two vacuum tubes, capacitors, resistors, coils, wiring, and a second box containing twenty oscillators, because he'd figured out his first engineering challenge of the contest for high school students.
Claude took a deep breath, and started to say aloud what he was doing. It was the scientifc thought process and it was almost like talking to Adeline and Beulah. Except that they were smart, contributed a lot, and made a difference.
“The tuned circuit will allow only the chosen frequency to resonate, canceling out interference. The coil and capacitor, if balanced correctly, will create the perfect oscillation to isolate the signal,” he said, piecing together a radio receiver as he spoke the steps aloud. “If the oscillator is overpowered, it will demodulate the signal and I'll lose.”
Maybe he was overthinking certain aspects of it, but he worked quickly, aware of the danger as he was of losing this opportunity if he twisted wires into the wrong configurations. He held his breath as he powered the receiver up for the first time, turning the dial with care and adjusting until the static resolved into a clear signal. When it was tuned to the right frequency, there was an announcer repeating a series of numbers over and over again. He wrote them down because as each series of numbers crackled through the tiny speaker, he added them to a combination lock for the exit door.
Turing the dial to the left, then further to the right and back again, he got a click: getting him prematurely out of the testing room and into the heart of the speakeasy.
Who would ever have known that one of the most thought provoking intellectual challenges at a speakeasy, could be solved so quickly?
The manager Giovanni Brunetti was surprised when he spotted Claude on the other side of the room. He'd gotten out much quicker than expected. He turned back to the girls, who he'd been speaking with.
"I'm afraid that we're all lost if we don't think," Brunetti had said to Beulah. "People can accomplish anything if they put their mind to it and I want all the bright ones to be future leaders."
"Claude's uncle had said that you're pushing back against the excessive drinking that is happening because of prohibition," Adeline said.
Adeline and Beulah's eyes were wide with excitement as they stood awkwardly beside Brunetti.
All the local high schools had been invited to send their best students, which included two of the brightest students that their science teacher had ever seen: Adeline and Beulah.
It was promoted as a real life challenge outside their school, made possible because of Brunetti's ties with the Board of Education, especially with their broadcast science teacher. It had been explained as a lesson that they couldn't get in class about the real struggles that most people needed to make to get by, a reminder to keep on the intellectual path of learning.
Giovanni Brunetti, manager of the speakeasy, had arranged for the brightest teams of three students each, to come and represent their schools. While some said he shouldn't have done it, he did everything with his usual level of secrecy.
"As a board of education member in good standing, I'd hate to think that you'll have it as tough as me. I only got mentored in being a tough bar owner," Brunetti said to the girls while Claude was being tested.
When both girls nodded with wide eyed appreciation, Brunetti smiled.
Coming at just the right time, the front doors of the speakeasy burst open.
The music faltered for half a second. A gust of night air swept through the room, ruffling the tablecloths and sending a few playing cards fluttering to the floor. A man stumbled inside - a wiry, red-faced drunk in a wrinkled vest, hair damp with sweat. His eyes, wild and unfocused, darted across the room before locking onto the first person unlucky enough to make eye contact.
“You!” the man slurred, pointing at a banker-type at the bar. “You cheated me!”
Across the room, Brunetti, the speakeasy’s manager, barely lifted his gaze from his cigarette. He exhaled through his nose, unimpressed. But as the troublemaker swayed forward, knocking over a chair and drawing uneasy glances from the patrons, Brunetti set his cigarette down and rose from his seat.
He moved like a wildcat with all the time in the world, taking slow, deliberate steps toward the disturbance. The bartender slid a hand beneath the counter. The bouncer near the back door tensed.
Brunetti stopped just within arm’s reach. “You lost a bet?” he asked, his voice smooth as a sharpened blade.
The drunk jabbed a finger at the banker again, his voice rising. “He stacked the deck, I know it! Ain’t no way I lose that kinda money, not on luck alone!”
Brunetti inhaled deeply, then without warning, snatched the man’s wrist and twisted. The troublemaker yelped as his knees buckled. The room hushed.
“Luck,” Brunetti murmured, tightening his grip, “is a funny thing.”
Then he shoved the man backward. The troublemaker tripped over a fallen chair and collapsed onto the floor with a dull thud. He groaned, rolling onto his side and for a moment, the entire speakeasy held its breath.
Brunetti gave a small, knowing smirk. “That’s chaos theory for you,” he said. Then he motioned to the bouncer. “Get him out.”
The moment passed. The music picked up again, and the tension dissipated like steam from a hot kettle. Brunetti leaned back, smirking. “Quite the performance,” he mused to the girls.
Claude, still in the shadows, exhaled slowly. Brunetti was cool but chaos theory ruled.



To Giovanni Brunetti, his speakeasy was never meant to be just a haven for illicit drinking and out of control behavior.
It was more of a place of whispered secrets. He wanted something more predictable: like the laws of mathematics, and radio and television technology. He wanted to bring his goal of intellectual development to those who needed it the most.
But some didn't agree with that plan. The speakeasy was owned by the mob and they had strict rules of how they wanted business done. If they knew he was providing an environment designed for learning about broadcast engineering, he'd be in big trouble.

So after his first test, Claude invited Buelah and Adeline to Uncle’s garage, a place cluttered with tools, electrical parts, and portions of unfinished radios. Claude wasn't willing to go back to Brunetti’s Speakeasy until they'd conducted numerous experiments, tinkering with the building blocks of radio, and even throwing around more advanced ideas of what could possibly lead to television.
There in Uncle Jacob's garage, they stumbled upon something unexpected: a shortwave frequency broadcasting at 6MHz.

The voice that crackled through the static spoke in perfect English, detailing advanced conspiracy theories of prohibition and of easy accumulation of weath.
They didn't think anything of it at first. Because of the long range of shortwave and the lack of fading, the signal could have been traveling from a distant land or originating from just around the block. The main thing was that it felt like a gift. As they listened, Adeline cuddled up to Claude and started getting affectionate.
"Are you really listening?" Adeline asked. "I am and it's divine."
Claude agreed that it seemed like the technical broadcast was helping them cut out an enormous amount of trial and error time.
Their moment was interrupted when Uncle Jacob arrived unexpectedly, surprising them. The pair were caught in an embrace and sprang apart hen Uncle Jacob asked them if they were making any progress in getting ready for their future practical tests, steering the conversation to the boy's education.
Claude couldn't be sure of anything except for the principles of radio engineering. He needed to confirm what he'd been hearing about lately on shortwave.
Brunetti had a theory he was beginning to call chaos theory: the idea that anything that could happen, eventually would when you weren't looking, a mindset which Claude was starting to believe in.
"Are we headed for disaster?" he asked his uncle.
"Some are maybe. But I'm not a speculator. You know that much about me," said Uncle Jacob.
What Claude was talking about were the news reports on shortwave which suggested that the excesses of the twenties would be paid for by financial disaster.
"There's a mystery unfolding about the outcome of all this excess partying, and you believe the truth is on shortwave?"
Claude nodded mutely, more intrigued than certain.