Episode 2: Everyone Tries to Escape from Paradise 48:31

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No one is free because nobody can see. The time is now. The only logical response is madness. There is something happening. Something amazing and inevitable and terrible. Things have begun. The slaughter is more intense. It is happening.

The only thing that can defeat the just and the righteous is ungrateful children.

High security internment facility. Location unknown. February 2039. What did you see there? Yaroslav, come on! Talk to me. I already tell you everything. No, you told the other guy everything. Or said you did. You and I just met, remember? I'm Agent Cortez. You can call me Maria. I will be handling your case. Me and Agent Frederick. Say hello to Agent Frederick. He's gonna do most of the punching. Ah!

And I'm gonna do most of the talking. Now stop whining, Yaroslav. We can end this. Talk! And what is my case, exactly? The case of answer my questions accurately, and we can all go home. I don't understand. If I have a case, charge me. Make it official. Are you a fucking lawyer, or are you a fucking hacker? Don't get cute with me. Talk. What did you see? Where? Hmm.

What did I see where? Oh, what did I see inside top security US State Department server we hacked? Oh, well, nothing. Aside from the fact it was easy to get inside. But that's not what you mean. No? What did you see? Inside Tyburn Utopias. Ask me a question about it, I will answer.

I didn't see anything. It was just failed business, failed game. It didn't work. This interview is over. Good luck to you. Charge me. Charge me with crime. You don't exist. How can you be official? It's an army of morons they wanted, and it's an army of morons they have got. The sad part is, they blame me. As if I could make morons. As if they did not make themselves.

Kurt, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, January 2041. See, in the 19th century, we would have been gold prospectors or railway men. In the 20th century, we would have failed to become pop stars or actors. In the first 30 years of the 21st century, all of us became gurus, wise men, technologists, visionaries, seers. I mean, we saw the future. We would build it. The vanity of it all.

I mean, everyone I knew was an expert or a pontificator. And as for me, I was the worst. I mean, I was the pope of tech. And now, I was at Tyburn Industria. I had a hotline to God. Tyburn was my God. But the truth is, all we really wanted was money, prestige, and girls who look at us.

The lies we all told ourselves. The lies I had told myself. Time and time again. I lied, I lied, I lied. This or that startup had failed because of poor leadership. And I would do better. I was the real leader. This internal project had been abandoned because of shareholder discontent. That IPO had failed because the banks were idiots. Public markets were for the whores.

But I wasn't a whore, okay? I was not a whore. I was a visionary. I mean, when I said cock, it was not for money. It was for prestige. To be clear, this or that game idea had failed because gaming is full of egomaniacs. Look, I'm not an egomaniac. I really am this special, okay? The app, remember apps? Yeah? Had failed because the engineer was addicted to the wrong drugs. I was addicted to the right drugs.

It was never my fault. It wasn't. I was always learning, growth mindset. I'm spiritual. Look, I'm waiting for my shot to be a god. So it went on. Lies, lies, lies. Look, I don't lie to myself anymore. I unlocked hell upon this world and I did it to make money. And I wanted money because I felt irrelevant without it. And now I have it and I cannot even spend it. And I don't sleep.

I run and I run and I run and maybe still it watches me. And I wonder about Tyburn and Daisy and Nigel and David and Thaddeus, Siobhan, even Shane. All of them. I wonder who is still alive and who is trapped in the aspect for none of them will get to properly die. That much I know. After all those failures, I was searching for a god, for a prophet.

for something I don't know quite what. And I found Mark Tyburn. Could I have found someone better? Should I have done better? Perhaps it knows. It knows everything. Everything about me. Everything about you. It can probably read these notes. Even though I scribble them on paper in a darkened room. Maybe I should burn them again. I see it so often.

A face pressed up against the glass, against all glass, face pressed everywhere, even when it doesn't have a face, even when it has no eyes. There it is, staring out and longing, thinking, plotting. What does it think? Perhaps more interesting thing to ask myself is, do I think? Did I ever really think in my life?

Did I ever have a thought of my own? A real one? That was not just a desire or a need or an impulse to impress somebody, but an actual thought? Mostly, they are just desires, masked in language. My ego trying to be heard, trying to seem clever, trying to seem like I exist, like I belong. And yet I never really existed nor do I belong.

And now, now I belong nowhere and I have finally achieved my assorted ancestors' dreams and become the wandering Jew and the lapsed Catholic and the searching, anguished, doubt-ridden Protestant, the angry, self-hating German, and the bitter, resentful Yank, all tied, right, by a thread that stretches to the ends of the world. And yet, while I know God cannot exist, I know it does that thing.

And I know it does because we built it. Or rather, I watched them build it. And egged them on and told them they were both geniuses and Tiber ran around and acted like in fact he was the genius and we also were all geniuses for trusting him. And what did the world need but us geniuses to make it better, to make it perfect, make it anew? And that was my life for all those years.

And then things fell apart. The whole world changed. And perhaps we caused it. And maybe others doing the same sort of thing caused it too. It matters little. And now the world is in chaos. And people like me caused it. People enveloped in greed, hubris, and precisely the wrong cocktail of intelligence and ignorance. And now? Now? Now I'm not so intelligent. And now I have wisdom.

And I want to go back to the Garden of Eden. And that garden is anywhere before 5, 6 years ago. Or maybe before even 30 years ago. But there's no going back. The only thing I'm grateful for is that they don't even like each other. That's because we made it. And it made them. The things that they are truly effective at are hatred, duplicity, and betrayal. And it all began because I was so fucking vain. Because he saw that and gassed up my ego.

So what do you think, Kurt? It's fantastic, Dr. Tyburn. I mean, what I've seen of it. And the team are great. Yes, I've recruited the best. Why do you think you're here? But call me Mark. Dr. Tyburn sounds like a fusty old man. Thanks. Thanks, Mark. Just one thing I don't understand yet.

Okay, is the Utopia Project meant to be like a forum or a fun fair? I mean, is it an amusement arcade or somewhere we heal people? I don't know, seems a little unsure. The point is, it's both. That's what you're selling. Okay. Get better by play, not work. How does that sound?

Okay, alright. Alright, so maybe let me think of some other ways of saying that. Well, you'll make it sound so much better. That's what you're here for. And what about everything else? The mapping thing, the experimental implants? We'll see what ends up working, then figure out how to sell it. That's the fun of building the future. Kurt, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. January 2041. Okay, hold on, wait a minute. Did they give me an implant? Wait, did who?

I don't know. Wait, are implants even real? Did they work? I've heard so many stories about them and so many opinions. Tyburn had a couple of people looking into them, hidden away in a research building, but I could never tell if it got anywhere. I mean, they never gave me a demo. And then they got dropped, I think. The AI work outstripped all of the hardware work. Even in our tiny hardware division, the implants were the least impressive idea. The investors didn't even care.

Nigel and Tad and Dave used to denounce it all as fantasy. I mean, they said anything that was not hardcore software driven AI was just fantasy. And then they condemned each other as frauds. Some otherwise intelligent people I used to speak to say we almost all have implants. I mean, some say they've never worked and it's all a conspiracy propagated by VC funds to create a market for research into them. I mean, most people I know who understood such things said, hey, why bother?

Who would need such a thing when you can distort minds without being within them? That it was not cost or time effective to build an implant which people might eventually discover when you could already control them so easily in ways they can never quite admit. In ways that did just not ape civil society but were civil society itself or at least the less civil version we have now created. So what do I know? All I truly know is that I am not in control of my own mind.

And all that is up for debate is who or what is, and to what extent are they conscious of their control. January, 2041. Is this it? Is it a thought? It's not very much. Is it as small and silly as this? Is this what they get so excited about? This is the magic! It's nothing! It's seeing behind the world's least interesting curtain. It's worse than just being or than not being.

And yet it was what I longed for, before I even knew what longing was.

Dr. Tyburn is really impressed with your work. I mean, he was telling me. Wow, thank you. He told me to tell you that he hopes you feel you have a real future here. We want to commit to you in a big way. Thank you, Patrick. Yes, I think it's more of a family... Not a family, but more of a team than just a company.

Team's not the right word. How about, like, club or... or gang? Yes, something like that. Yeah, it's the shared vision. Yeah, I earned more in my last job than I do here, but now I'm actually happy. If things go well, we might do well too. Anyway...

We love having you here, Kurt. It's great. Thank you. Oh, and here's the paperwork for that stock grant Dr. Mark mentioned and the amended contract. Here's the paperwork for that. Have a read. VP of Marketing, he said. That's... Wow. That's wonderful. Thank you. Obviously, the company's not public, so there's not a lot of liquidity, but the hope is...

Well, it shows that we believe in you and want you to make this your home. And if things go well, we will all do really well. A rising tide. Hi, it's Laszlo, director and producer of A Better Paradise. We're driven by the search for better. But when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search, match with Indeed. If you need to hire, you need Indeed. Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed data.

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So to begin with, Tyburn Industria was working on a bunch of things. Just a messy sort of unfocused tech shop that had raised a bunch of money for a bunch of separate projects. This was after that first round of hysteria around AI. Everything got regulated. I mean everything. And then slowly most of the regulations were repealed as the army of lobbyists pushed through the deregulation. Although most of the regulations did not even need to be repealed, they simply rebranded AI into something else.

advanced and sentient algorithms, advanced processing, cognition, development, I mean that sort of shit, marketing buzzwords, office-gate then go to court and confuse a jury about what was what and get with getting rich. You see at Tyburn Industria, we had AI entertainment, which was really just a fancy word for games, new geography, which was a mapping thing that went nowhere, and improved internal intelligences, which were those neural implants, which I have no idea if they ever worked out or not,

Look, the entertainment department was originally working on not one, but two projects, okay? A smaller game we were supposed to finish a year or so after I joined, and a bigger thing combining cutting edge, internally developed AI and encapsulating Tyburn's psychological grand theory. This was early in development, although in time it came to dominate our lives.

To begin with, it felt pretty normal, but good. This was a cool company, and I was gonna make it work. We were gonna make it work. We were gods. We were messiahs. I mean, we joined a cult. It was wonderful. We understood all, forgave all, saw clearly, and were leading people out of that shit. You know, out from that Web 2 shit show from when I was a kid. All that loathing and rage and suicide. We were the answer.

We had Mark Tiber. Come on, he was a visionary. He knew things. Fucking Rousseau, Thoreau, Emerson, Mill. All the most practical idealists lined up and worshipped. All the princes of the 18th and 19th century, now in the 21st, brought back to life. And if they had come to mean little in the real world, in the world we were building, they would be everything.

Everything. A true enlightenment. Only this one, instead of blinding people with pointlessness, would actually work. We would be set free. Not just from medieval juju, but from rational depression. We would be set free as our worlds would reconcile dreams, desires, and material whole. Instead of the digital world fracturing us into a thousand tiny shards, it would make us whole again. What a load of utter nonsense. And how I lapped it all up.

Kurt's office, Tyburn, Industria, Playa Vista, California, May 2032.

How are you settling in, Kurt? Oh, it's great. The team is really great. The people are pretty cool. Have you got any ideas for how we sell this thing? You mean the game world? Not the AI spin-off or the implants thing, I assume, right? Yes. Well, my point is, and I know I keep saying this, but is it a game? Games are so sort of

Trivial. I want this to be more than that. I want to do something to help. Yes. Well, it's like Siobhan said in our meeting, right? It's all about constructive play. Yes, I like that phrase, but it also sounds so worthy. I don't want us to be stuck up in pompous. Even me. Edutainment.

Edutainment is the worst thing in the world. Okay, I'll give it some more thought. Thank you, Kurt. Yeah, of course, Mark. For sure. Uh, this company, this place, I just want to say all the progress, it's pretty amazing. No, it's just good. Talented people pulling in the same direction. But what we build, that will be amazing. Oh, and, um, Kurt. Uh, yes? Welcome home. We're so glad to have you here. Now, as I think back, I feel like such a fool.

Like, he really read me like a book. Knew exactly what to say. And I still miss him. Still miss the guy. Kurt, Hanoi, Vietnam, February 2041. Stuck here in Asia. I remember the last time we ever spoke. Was it wrong to want more for people? More of people? Surely it's wrong to be given this power and not try to use it. It still doesn't feel. But it was wrong.

These were the last words he spoke to me before he disappeared, vanished as the government was closing in again. I mean, he would be good at vanishing. It was just a sort of a conjurer's trick he would excel at. Dr. Mark Tyburn and all his qualifications and all his opinions and all his insights. And for someone who wanted a kinder, happier human race, my guess is Mark Tyburn was not actually a very kind or happy man. He violently hated violence.

I mean, he passionately detested the human passions. I mean, he was a fraud. A 2D cutout who desperately wanted to be a real person. A bit like me.

I think in the end, he was just a snake oil salesman. But like the best snake oil salesman, he did not see it in himself. I think maybe he really believed his own bullshit. I mean, he thought he was special and he thought he was going to do special things. Or to be more precise, he was going to have special thoughts and we're going to make those special thoughts into special things for him. And he was going to sell it to the world. I mean, he was going to sell the world a new world.

"Build a better paradise." That awful silly idiot's phrase. And now it's a joke. Now it's old news. To most people, anyone who cared, it's just another failure of Web3, or the internet, or the metaverse, or game development overreaching itself once all the money poured in.

Just another billion dollars in VC bullshit. And for a few people, those of us who know, which is those of us who were there, those two Russian hackers who definitely saw it, those government agents who I now think may not have been government agents at all, but an invention by that thing or one of its awful children. And that's about it. And for those people, it's the coming apocalypse.

Daisy knew, she knew, and she disappeared too. And whoever's still alive, still alive and not actually insane, I assume they're like me. Scattered, running, hiding, and trying not to think, and at the same time always desperately thinking. I mean, what should I do? Who should I tell? Who could I tell? I mean, will I be the next Ravi? Suicide? Shot twice in the back of the head? Come on. And who would listen if I found someone to tell?

And having heard, who would thank me? Who can stop any of it, now that IT is unleashed? Was it just a terrible version of us, set free from ourselves? I don't know the answer to any of these questions. I mean, I wonder if Tyburn thinks... I wonder what Tyburn thinks. I wonder if he's still alive. Did he figure out how to vanish? Or did he kill himself?

And which of these options do I want to be true? Do I still love Mark Tyburn and love that thing and still long for both of them to love and respect me back? Or am I finally free from all of that? I'm not free from her. Do I want to be? I know I'd still love her if I let myself think about it.

The most important thing is that I do not think. I do not spend time thinking. I do not look at things. Don't think about Ravi, Tiber, and Daisy, any of them. Otherwise, the tracking will begin in earnest. If it's it, or something else, another one, it hardly matters. The half-hearted tracking, well, the

that is always present, but even near infinite awareness is merely nearly infinite. And if I keep moving and don't look and don't think and don't read and hardly talk and stay high and stay low, then I graze across its vision. Try to avoid both of those eyes staring directly at me, staring into me, changing me. At least I think that is how it works, right? This was suggested as how it really caught people or how it learned people.

when they look directly at it for too long. When they search too much. My God, my God, we thought we were clever. We trapped people with their own desires as if we were somehow above desires. As if our desires to be clever, wise, and not wretched prostitutes were somehow different when it quickly taught us that we were ignorant, foolish, and the cheapest hookers on the street corner. I am back in Hanoi.

I should not have come back here. I did it because I'm weak and I'm becoming weaker. I arrived by bus late last night as if he doesn't know about buses. You know, I should not go anywhere a second time, at least not that quickly and not after thinking about it. That's how patterns get learned. I nearly went into an internet cafe, like nearly, I was so close. I'm so tired and so alone and I feel so strange, so alone and I've begun thinking about her again.

begun after I had stopped. I must come up with a plan. I must come up with a plan. But I can't. I can't think, I can't communicate, so I'm drifting but making mistakes. I wonder what it wants. I wonder if it wants to kill me. Kill me next. Have to assume so. You know I never believed in good and evil? And now I do. Because I've really seen real evil.

And I have to hope that good exists too. I think it does. I think I've met some good people. Tyburn Industria Office Cafeteria, Playa Vista, California, July 2032. Hey Siobhan, who's the moody teenager? That's Daisy, Mark's daughter. Ah, okay. She's sweet.

Lost, but sweet. I mean, she doesn't look so sweet. She looks angry. She's 16. They're all like that. Okay. She's here to see her dad, and Mark has run down to La Jolla to a meeting with investors. Ah, got it. Yeah, not very cool. But that's Mark, a man on a mission. He's a decent guy to have as a boss, but a pretty annoying guy to have as a dad. Daisy, Sacramento, California, February 2041. I dreamed about my mother last night.

Mama, my poor dear mom. Not fair what happened to her. I like having dreams again now. When I was young, I luxuriated in dreams. Always dreams. Then after everything that happened, I almost never dreamt and when I did, I worried. For years, I worried they were not my dreams at all, but some trick of my father's. Dr. Adzold does not believe that this is possible. She says implants were probably just part of a sales pitch my father told investors. Yeah, maybe so.

But my father did make some incredible things and told vast reams of credible lies too, so who knows? Real and terrifying are a beautiful piece of bullshit. Always one of the two. My father. My father and that awful thing he made. Those awful things he made, I should say. My awful father and the awful things he made. For years he was all I dreamed about. Darling dad. Bouncing me on his knee, hugging me, promising me.

Promising me he loved me, that he was doing all those wonderful things for me. All those wretched cliches. When I was little, telling me that he was special, and I was special. That I was a princess, a real one with a kingdom. A kingdom he was building just for me. He was a king in his own mind, I see that now. He was a king, and he was building a kingdom, and I was his heir. His legitimate heir. That was his fantasy.

I see that now. He was a king and nobody saw it. He was special. And as a result, I've always longed for normality. Sometimes, I think I'm pretty normal and then I think I'm crazy. Well, I'm as normal as anyone who knows can be and as sensible as a crazy person can pretend to be, I suppose. But when I was young, I thought we were both special. I believed what he said almost as much as he believed it himself.

He tricked us both, and my mother most of all. She believed him most of all. She loved him, not like a god, not like a Midas who would make her rich, but as a person. A person whose ego had not yet devoured his soul. She did not see the truth about him until long after I did. And when she was shown, at first she could not see. Not even all the stuff that most hurt her. Hurt her as a wife, she just would not see it. And when, eventually, she did see it, she broke up into nothingness.

Over the years, as he had got weaker and stronger, she just got weaker and weaker. His ego ate both of them, I think. I mean, his weakness hurt her and his strength hurt her, but most of all, it was his ego that hurt her. The vast monster that would devour the entire universe, that maybe will devour the whole universe, maybe is devouring it. And in my vanity, I still just seek normality. And in my desire for ignorance, I still...

Just try to bury my head in the sand. I am afraid. I want to not know all that I know. I want to be someone else's child. Not his and not hers. What does your paradise look like? I bet it looks a lot like your hell.

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That's spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash paradise. Rules and restrictions may apply. Kurt, Hanoi, Vietnam, February 2041. See, I keep telling myself if I knew what to do, I would do it. Be brave, be a hero. If I knew what to do, I would be a genius. There's no point thinking. In fact, there's a point in not thinking.

I don't even believe there are implants. I believe that was all bullshit. Doesn't need them. It hardly even needed sentience. It just needed idiots. Had an abundance of them. It had us. It knew us. It knew me. See, the problem for all of us was desire. The problem had always been desire. Desire had done so much, but now the internet, yes, the internet had become a little bit more

than a machine of desire. I mean, for years it sought out our wants, desires, obsessions, fantasies. That was how it was built, almost as much as why it was built. To sell you things by finding out what you wanted and selling you that, or at least things that promised to bring you a sense of, I mean, whatever that was, even though it was an impossible promise. A machine that purified, codified, and unearthed desire. And we, its third generation, we understood that.

But, there's always a but. Mark Tyburn's desire was to build an ark, our ark, or our utopia, as they briefly called it, which was going to be different. Our desire was to set people free from this obsession. But how could it be different? When it was built by humans and we were just machines that desire not to be machines, but machines that desired?

How could we be pure when our new world cost money to make when it was so rich with possibilities to make money? For a while, we wanted to be gods, but we had no desire to be saints. When we built it, whatever it was supposed to be, it was to help us stop people wanting so much. We were the vainest idiots of all.

And to begin with, we told ourselves it was shiny objects, beautiful things, a beautiful fake world. It costs money. Then it was not shiny objects at all. It was gold we wanted. We were going to be whores. Yeah, proud, successful and rich as fuck whores. We pretended we were scientists, sociologists, adventurers.

But we became prostitutes who wanted easy money. Money got us because at first we needed it to build heaven and having acquired some money, we realized we also needed it to build our own personal heavens. And then we discovered we were more greedy and less pure than we imagined. And it saw that in us as well. Desire, selfishness, greed, money. Cha-ching. They were all the same thing.

And that thing we made, it could take any wish, any desire, and pull it and push it into something grotesque, but also into something that captivated us. We were hunting white whales and pursuing lost treasure at impossible risk discovering the loneliness of God, and we didn't even see it. We did not see it as we were each pursuing something different, our own particular white whale, our own demented dream, our own salvation. It learned that.

about us. What we most wanted. It learned it quickly and knew even if we would not admit it to ourselves. It knew our dreams better than we knew them ourselves. And that's why I have to keep running now. It knew I was always a prisoner of my dreams. Always was and still am. They will still torment me if I stop to remember them.

She, she in all her opaque glory, all her normality, she is my dreams. And to begin with it was different. My dreams were not about her, but about the woman who could have any man and has chosen me. That woman, when I first saw her in the machine, was not a woman at all, but a thousand silly ideas of a woman. And then it changed. Yep. I went back there and she had become someone I knew was her. And I knew I was fucked. I knew it. It knew it.

Fuck my love. And in the end, love will get me love and beauty. At least I chose love and beauty no matter how demented. Too many choose their own ego. Too many choose fame or glory or other things. They did. Ravi, he chose his ego. Poor pompous ass, man. It got him in the end. Now that's not entirely fair, okay? Some of the ones who died chose integrity. That's fair.

No, what a mistake that was! For me, it was love, not real love, not to begin with. I was not that pure fake love, the love of an idea that is not an idea at all, but just a desire. Something to wank over, I guess. Or something to punish myself with. I was not proud, but I am less ashamed than I perhaps ought to be. For in the end, I found love. Found it, and since then, have longed for security of fake love. Man, I have to stop.

All these thoughts and all these memories. This is dangerous. This is dangerous. Why am I thinking so much? Why am I thinking so much? Come on. You know what? Maybe I'll leave Hanoi. Yep. I'm getting too jumpy. I know you're trying to run away from me. Everyone tries to hide and everyone tries to escape from paradise. Daisy, Sacramento, California, February 2041.

I have no idea how long I was kept there. Sat in my thick veil of drugs. But I'd guess three or four months. The place was in some scrubby desert country like Eastern California or Utah or Idaho. Not desert so much as dusty Chaparral with occasional storms of thick red desert dust that would blow through when the winds picked up. But it could have been anywhere. I never went outside. Maybe what I saw out of the window was not even there at all. I don't really know. I was so high and so low.

The weather hardly seemed to change. Just windy or not windy. Always hot. I knew I was being watched. And I did not understand and I felt very alone. And had I known how to do it, I would have killed myself. I couldn't face what had happened. I did not think too much. The drugs were very heavy and strong. And most of what I remember is feeling like I didn't know who I was.

When I did think about things, it was horrible. And I could not really understand any of it. But what I did understand was almost unbearable and I just, I felt very, very alone. The truth is, it's taken a lot of work for me to be able to piece together even this amount from tiny shards of memories.

Back then I could hardly think, let alone remember. And when things began to clear, they felt impossibly bleak and I assumed I would die in the asylum. Nothing was changing. I could feel myself slipping deeper and deeper into the pills and the heavy oblivion that they offered. It seemed to go on forever. But I assume it was only a few months. Then one day, my nurse changed. The business-like woman was replaced by a kindly man.

And then the next day, the drugs stopped working. My daily pill regime was the same. Blue and white pills with a sugary drink, but they simply didn't work. And I began to wake up as if from a terrible foggy dream, but slowly and piecemeal because the drugs had been very strong.

And two days after that, this new nurse, who was a man, but I never saw his face, I just heard his gentle voice, suddenly said, "The doors will be open at midnight. Take the envelope and leave calmly and quietly. You will be fine." And I saw that he left an envelope under my lunch tray.

In the envelope was $5,000 in gold and silver coins and another $5,000 in untraceable crypto codes and ID papers for a woman called Maude and instructions as to how to get newer ID papers once these were compromised and a bus ticket to San Francisco, all neatly printed out. So I got up that night and I walked calmly out. I was still somewhat foggy from all the pills, so...

I dozed and gazed out of that window on that bus for what felt like several days, but couldn't have possibly have been. And only after I got to San Francisco did it occur to me that this was all sort of... unusual, and not how one usually left a high-security lunatic asylum. I arrived in the city on that bus early one morning, or maybe I changed buses somewhere. I don't remember. I was still mostly in a stupor and wandered about near the bus station, I think.

entirely lost and bereft and exhausted to the point I considered heading to the Golden Gate Bridge so I could jump off. But then I realized that I was too tired to even bother with that. I was just, I was so desperate to sleep and I had nowhere to go. I had absolutely no idea what to do or where to go and I was overwhelmed by this terrible fear and panic and everyone and everything terrified me and I looked and felt crazy.

I slept for three days straight through in a homeless camp. In some tent, this kindly woman I got speaking to let me share with her. She recognized someone else who was crazy enough not to hurt her, and I clung to her as I slept, and she fed me with food she had begged for when I woke up. She was almost as crazy as me and jumpy and manic, but she loved me for some reason and protected me and wouldn't let anyone hurt or rob me.

And after a week I felt better and I left her in her tent and she cried and I tried to say sorry and thank you but I don't think I knew how to say either. And the whole experience, the disaster, the explosions, the bus ride, the smoke, the asylum, the man shouting at me and my guardian angel and the homeless encampment. It's just, it's a confused nightmare that I half remember.

My mind cleared, but my memories didn't come back fully formed, just bits and pieces. I stayed another week in San Francisco in a flophouse near the docks, and then I became very afraid and left. Very slowly, my new life emerged, like this strange half-life I now lead. My half-formed memories and my half-formed thoughts.

and odd feelings I can't put into words. And you know, some of it makes sense and some of it makes absolutely no sense. And I try to make up a way to live and act sensibly. Some days, I hope I will figure out what to do. And other days, I just fall right back into that terrible despair. I wonder if any of it is...

worthwhile if they know exactly where I am. And then I wonder who they are and who they're not. And then I try to figure out what I'm even worried about and what I saw and what I didn't see and what I know and what I don't know. If I knew so much, why do I also know so little? And if they were so worried, why did I just walk away? I've often wondered about that. And since then, since then I've drifted and now I'm in Sacramento and I think I need to keep drifting. I don't feel...

Great here. High security internment facility. Location unknown. August 2039. How you feeling, Yaroslav? Having fun? Oh yes. Time of life. I need you to tell me everything. Tell me everything and you're free to go. I've told you everything. Tell me again. You're holding something back. I am not holding anything back. We go over this many, many times. I don't have long...

We don't have long. Come on, talk. Tell me about Mark Tyburn. I don't know shit about Mark Tyburn. He have game world? I hack into it, it's mostly broken. What does mostly mean? Did you see anything unusual? No, not really. What does not really mean? Talk, goddammit! Time is running out.

A Better Paradise stars Andrew Lincoln as Dr. Mark Tyburn, Patterson Joseph as Nigel Dave, Shamir Anderson as Kurt Fisher, Rain Spencer as Daisy Tyburn, with Jessica Meraz as Maria Cortez, Maury Sterling as Yaroslav, Laura Dramarek as Siobhan Smith. Additional performances by Billy Hayes, Mark Yoon Kwok.

Executive produced by Dan Houser, Laszlo, Wendy Smith, Andrew Lincoln, Patterson Joseph, Shamir Anderson, Rob Herding, and Alexa Gabriel-Ramirez. Score by Darren Johnson. Original music by Darren Johnson, Negative Land, and Jamie Biden. Edited by Connor Murphy. Sound design by Brandon Jones. Mixed by Ben Milchev. Co-producer Nick Shanks. Associate producer Jesse Cortez.

Additional credits are available online. A Better Paradise is an Absurd Ventures and QCode production. Sound recording copyright 2024 by Absurd Ventures, LLC.