Cocytus

The ocean holds many deeper, darker places than Atlas Station -- and Synøve Pan finds herself trapped there and charged with a heinous betrayal. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh. The following is a production by r reading of

(00:05):
this episode contains depictions of drug use and strong violence.
A second oil age. Who were the Tritons? Were they

(00:40):
the underwater beings described in our myths? Or did they
simply emerge into a world conveniently primed to accept them.
Were they our ancestors, our distant cousins, something else? A
path has had honed me to endure them and their

(01:02):
narread forms, so I knew as much as anyone about
their abilities. I recognized the whorls and the wet stone
beneath me for what they were, the work of the Proteus,
the Triton bio techniq, so coveted by UDX, so necessary
to its undersea megaprojects. The things toiled in the darkness,

(01:27):
far from observation, but footage existed, frightful and amorphous masses
that bored through stone and huge drilling templates and foundations
from the sea floor itself. Everywhere they left this pattern,
I drifted in and out of consciousness. I heard the

(01:51):
rumble of the Proteus in the stone halls around me,
but it might have just been the nadier of the
black drug's influence. Unreality bleeding in with the uncertainty and fear.
But I woke at last, not to the drone of
some writhing alien burrower, but to the wine of surface technology,

(02:17):
the scan of a graph Inc tattoo applicator. I felt
it pressed cold against my chest tattoo, the tingle of
the particles realigning beneath my skin. I lashed out. Jesus
calmed down. I swung wildly and tried to spring to
my feet, but the shackle on my ankle caught, chained
to a loop in the stone. Hoffman, dressed in a

(02:40):
black skin suit, backed away from me to just outside
the limits of my leash. He had a graph Inc
applicator in hand. I caught movement to my left and
saw Jack's as well, identically dressed and armed with her
taped squid gun. A vicious slash wound bisected of face,

(03:01):
which had been hastily stabled back together with suit. Youre, Jill,
Are you done, unchained me? You're going to make the
last ones difficult, aren't you. I glanced down at the
mark on my chest and saw that it was now
a series of meaningless black bars. The lower marks were
the same, Fastard, do you think I'm happy with this.

(03:23):
Do you think I wanted to squeeze into one of
those things and come down here? I ask you. You promised,
and then you went ahead and exceeded even my most
pessimistic expectations. You are barely here a day, and we've
slid from a carefully calculated piece to the threshold of disaster,

(03:44):
incalculable productivity loss, multiple fatalities, trite, and relations set back
fifty years. And you know what, I was really looking
forward to our town and now that's not gonna happen.
I mean, all you had to do was going there
and put on your show and report back to the surface.

(04:05):
I honestly don't know if you're just an apathist burnout
or an actual traitor, but you're not my problem anymore.
As soon as we get those last two elder signs off,
let me that's not how I do things. You forced

(04:28):
everyone's hand here upon. It wasn't me. It was that
thing posing as a journalist. A journalist, not the drug
dup maniac for the crazy knives. You did this. You're
the one who answer to them. We'll see about that.
I flexed the other phantom muscle in my body. But
instead of an explosion of basilisk A sharp pain cut

(04:51):
through my thigh. I reached down and felt blood and
suit your Joe. We cut that out as soon as
we got here. We also extracted the neurotoxin cap, the
one that busts if your cortisol levels get too high.
They probably didn't tell you about that one, did they
anti interrogation measure. But we can't have your stroking out

(05:13):
on our hosts. They're sending someone new up early, just
for you. I came here for Buchlan, that's it, not
as an apathis weapons test, not to assassinate anyone. You're
the one disarming a DX agent and a Triton dungeon.
I am risking everything for you, Dex right now, for

(05:33):
our world, our children, not that you care anything about it.
As I stared up at him, the purple orbs pulsated
behind him, or seemed to twisting. The recesses of the
proteus is carved whorls. Hoffman's shadow lengthened. I saw the

(05:54):
shadowed Saint Bob and its depths like something drowned. Chane me.
I need those last marks, No, you need me. I'm
your only shot at getting back to the surface alive,
warning you dex about what really happened, and if you
that's when the butt of Jacks's squid gun connected with

(06:15):
the back of my head and I saw no more. Hello,
this is Sandy Holland and you're listening to. By the way,

(06:38):
joining me in the studio is Cameron Lack, author, techno
shaman and leading novelty theory proponent. Thanks for joining us, Cameron.
Thanks for having me Sandy. Before we go any further,
I feel like we have to get this out of
the way. Is novelty theory or religion? Uh No. And
we don't hold Terrence McKenna to be a prophety there.

(07:00):
I think that's one of the last things he would
have wanted, of course, But I understand the temptation to
call us by the R word, because we do what
religions do. We look for order in the cosmos, and
we do have a few sacred texts and programs, and
of course some of our central ideas go back thousands
of years. You're talking about the eaching, the ancient form

(07:23):
of Chinese divination. Yes, but it's not just that. It's
more than rare divination. The Book of Changes at least
from our perspective, from a human perspective, is an uncertainty engine.
We truly analyze it specifically, there's a sequence in it
called the King Wind sequence, and it reveals the way

(07:44):
time flows through our world. And this is the time wave. Yes,
and just like a wave, it has peaks and valleys,
and when we look at those peaks and valleys, we
find they line up just right, just right with major
events human history. Now, critics point out that during his

(08:04):
own lifetime, McKenna believe time would end in How do
you respond to that he was wrong? I mean, McKenna
died in the year two thousand. I feel like that's
important to note here. Yes, of course, and he was
making a prediction, ultimately an inaccurate one based on a
limited computing power. They didn't have what we have back

(08:26):
in the bay. But what he observed and what he
measured that was all real. There's a fractal pattern in
the flow of time, the rate of change in our lives,
in our universe, as we are pulled toward a singularity
of infinite complexity, infinite interconnectedness. It's the hidden part of

(08:47):
the future. It's what's over the wave, and you still
believe that the time wave will reach its zero point.
Oh yes it will. Very autopsy findings here on the

(09:08):
number of need not open on from ports. Post mortem
lividity matches up with reports of the corpsus position in
the has found by the mariners. Female blonde, mid thirties.
Cause of death appears to be severe cranial cerebral injury.
Clear science of traumatic intercranial hemorrhage. Some of the exposed

(09:30):
brain tissues unlike anything I've ever seen before. Only two
full brain autopsy here. First agreed Mike. We have burn
marks to the forehead and scalp, seemingly in the shape
of a human hand. Curious, no communit, no physical documentation,
I think we need no no. I was only out

(09:59):
long enough for them to wipe the last of the
elder signs from my skin, leaving rows of impotent black
bars in their place. I looked up, fresh blood dripping
from my scalp, just in time to see Jack's vanished
through a nearby tunnel aperture. I marked it. That was

(10:21):
the way. Probably not a direct physical connection back to Atlas,
but at least do you think I wanted to squeeze
into one of those things. The tunnels had to connect
to a subport or an airlock, but suits didn't work
this deep, at least not for landsfolk. I tugged on

(10:44):
the chain, but it was set into the stone, and
I realized now that the chain and shackle weren't metal
at all, but something else. Triton manufacture, something excreted by
their blob like automatons. The lynx felt ceramic that held

(11:04):
like steel. They'd cut away my outer clothing, leaving me
nothing but a vest in shorts. I was unarmed and
pharmaceutically bare, chained like an animal, and what little at
this would be recalled counting backwoods. Now ten nine, I

(11:29):
heard a sound in the gloom. I recognized the silhouette
of a Triton standing just outside the glow of the
floating lamps. I caught the faintest glimpse of its dark
eyes watching me, but it didn't advance. Instead, another emerged

(11:52):
from the shadows beside it and stalked toward me across
the great domed chamber. She was an aread. That much
was obvious by her stature and the symmetry of her features,
But there was something unfinished in her appearance. Her skin

(12:12):
had all the pallor of a corpse near translucent. Her
black hair clung like beached kelp. She wore a purple
biotechnic skin suit, and the body beneath it seemed preternatural,
as if she had too many ribs. She regarded me

(12:33):
with bloodshot eyes and grinned. So you're the one sinof pan.
I'm an official Eudex agent. Hush, you'll have your chance
to talk for the purposes of our time together. You
can call me fetus, another name from your myths. I'm

(12:54):
an official Eudex agent. I invoke ambassador status in the
terms of the oceanic cicle. Doesn't matter anymore. Were be
on that. You've crossed the line. You belong to the
deep now. I felt her terrible waves begin to move
through my mind, teasing the pleasure circuits a path this

(13:14):
worked so hard to deaden. The oilman prepared you well.
Do you feel it shadows of what it felt to
be human? I feel nothing before they carved it out
of you in order to shield your desire from the
likes of me. It intensified and I collapsed, trembling, ripping

(13:37):
the spirals in the floor. She stood over me now
just beyond the limits of my chain, but close enough
for me to smell the fragrance of sea water, and honey,
now tell me, tell me are The second oil age

(14:23):
was produced by Robert Lamb, Alex Williams, Lauren Vogelbaum, and
Josh Stain. This episode featured an jel Masters as sinov Pon,
Robin Bludworth as kin Hoffman, Annie Reese as Jack's, Eileen
Loyd as Thetis, Joe McCormick as Cameron Lack, and Dylan
Fagin as Sandy Holland supporting voice work by Holly Fry

(14:45):
and Scott Benjamin intro outro, and supporting music created by
the Weirding Mondule. Learn more at Module dot bandcamp dot com.
M from more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the

(15:21):
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