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- [00:01]
Sanaa Tripathi
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- [00:53]
Brian Jeter
So if you don't mind me asking. Sure. That's what we're here for. We are in the middle of a conflict where the other side has more and better weapons, more and better ships, and an organized military command. We do have the numbers at this point. By a lot, last time I checked. Okay. But they've ceded all of human occupied space through their armed drones. You have to admit that tactically they have the upper hand. For now. So what keeps you going? I love my people. And I mean my. In every sense. And people in every sense too. My old crew, all my friends in San Ramos. All the folks who have helped us in any way they can. It's dizzying if you think about it too hard. I can't let them down. I just can't. Talking with them, connecting with them, that's what fuels the engine. What about the days when you feel alone? When you're doing this for yourself? What does that look like? I'm so sorry. I don't think I understand the question. Autopilot is not operational. Long range comms are not operational. Airlock is not operational. Engine overheating, Stage 2. Windshield wiper fluid is low. Navigation is not operational. Life support systems running low. Engine overheating, stage two.
- [02:28]
Sanaa Tripathi
I can't fix you from in here. How about the captain's log? Is the captain's. Yep, we're recording. Hello.
- [02:40]
Brian Jeter
Stabilizers are not operational. Remote storage is offline. Engine overheating, stage three.
- [02:50]
Sanaa Tripathi
No point putting this off. Hi. My name is Sanaa Tripathi. If you can hear this, a number of unlikely things have happened. That said, I've seen a space squid made of alien nanobots. So what's unlikely so long can't dodge the dawn Red light shines on and on and on and on and on but it's not the sea that's coming for me and it's not the storm no, it's not the storm so come sing me no Songs the ones we go so we are gone and gone and gone When I go to see don't fear for me Fear for the storm Fear for the storm. Okay, I. Hang on. I can't focus with all these. What? Arcady, do. Oh, hey, it worked. I guess that is what you do. Hope you didn't have anything important to say that might have been a mistake. One fire at a time. The engine's overheating. Overheating? Engines like to explode, so give it a short rest. Momentum will keep us going for a bit. Okay, so I'm gonna do something foolish and assume if you're hearing this, you're friendly. I just. If not, what's the point? This ship doesn't even have remote storage anymore, so the only way you can get this audio is if you're physically touching the headset containing these logs. And the only way you can do that is if we wind up in the same place. And either I hand it to you or you retrieve it from my. From me. Why act like we've already lost? You know, maybe if I'm even luckier, you'll find a way to get in touch with Arkady Patel or Brian Jeter or Krezh or Dr. Violet Liu or R.J. mcCabe or Juniper Liu or Dr. Sylvia Robinson or Ignatius Campbell or Jinson Park. If you can give this recording to one of them, all of them will have it. So I'm gonna go out even further on this branch, and I'm gonna say, arcady, if you got my message about where to go, and, Brian, if you decoded it, I'm so sorry, I won't be there. That's one of few things I know for sure right now. 4 hours and 43 minutes left on the countdown, and I don't even know how much battery this recorder has. Not more than an hour, I'd guess I should probably conserve. It's too weird with myself. The silence on the rumor, and then the iris. Irises. You always had the option of walking into another part of the ship and finding company. A new perspective, new energy. Losing yourself in the back and forth. And in San Ramos, there's always people around looking for Campbell or looking for me. Wanting advice on fixing a filter or getting a generator working again, or getting along with whoever else is in range of their bombshell. To a lot of young people too old for the kids. Evac. Just needing someone to see them, listen to them. Those were my favorites. Scanners are. Nothing's tailing me yet, but any second now, I should turn the engine back on and hope it won't immediately fry me. Hang on. My side's bleeding right through my very makeshift bandage. I should really. I should really do something about that. Only thing back here that might help here is the emergency landing parachute. That's not good. But it does look like there's a layer in here that's at least a little absorbed. Hang on. I realize it doesn't sound great that I might have compromised the only parachute in here. Trapped in a spaceship racing through the void, but I took a piece off the edge. And besides, given how little I know about where I'm headed, better to avoid any exposed blood. Campbell, I need to tell you right now because I'm sure it's on your mind and. And I should have said it sooner, but I think I might be in a tiny bit of shock. It wasn't that you made a mistake on the IDs. Your work was inspired, as always. You know that. You know. And I love that about you. I wish I could spend this whole recording on nothing else but things about you that I love. The medkit has a needle and thread. I could stitch up my bandage. Ow. My thumb. How do I thread this thing? Why would you make a needle eye this small? 3 hours and 52 minutes left. Where was I? The lucky thing is, I don't think the people who turned me in realized who I really was. Other Violet is serious about need to know basis. And now I guess I see why I was almost sent to a general prison. The only thing that they really had me on was travel without a permit, unfortunately. Campbell, I don't blame you. I want to make that clear. You did your best. And why would you do anything else but the fact that my documents were so. So good, so professionally done. When I was somewhere, I had no clearance to be alerted the authorities that I was probably someone with strong ties to the underground. And so they sent me to a place even you have never even heard of because most people don't know it exists. A prison called Slateston on Cresswind Landing. And I know if you're hearing this you have a lot of questions, but I'm not. I'm not ready to answer yet. I'm giving up on the needle. Threading this thing is like trying to find the nose on a gnat. And my hands aren't. Exactly. And anyway, I probably shouldn't waste stitches on cloth when I might need them for skin. Maybe. Maybe not. The not knowing is the worst, you know? Or not the worst worst. But it's up there on Top of everything else. God, did it hurt to see another prison built on Cresswind. The Landers, especially all the kids who were born there, had fought so hard to become a free planet, an independent body. And then the regime came in and said, the only way we'll honor the treaty is if you turn over a corner of this rock back to us. Let us use your land to torment people. So the thing about Slateston. One of the things about Slateston was that they threw everyone together. And I mean everyone. Regime soldiers who had killed their siblings in arms, in a brawl. Send him to Slatestone. People who were too violent for the army. You know, there were artists like my friend Lupe. There were. There were aging scholars like Amani. The youngest person I met at Slateston was 17. Winnie, daughter of a Lakota couple who were sent to Cresswind 20 years ago for protesting. She lived through the uprising, saw Cresswind come to run itself, picketed the construction of Slateston and got thrown in there herself. Winnie was something really funny. You might think someone who'd been through what she'd seen would be permanently spent. But she lived to crack a joke. Lived to make us laugh. And she had such a clear idea of what she wanted from life. Yet, you know. And that's. Is the air getting thinner? Okay, kiddo, keep it together. Deep breaths, but not that deep. Huh? Was life support one of the automated warnings I shut off? I can't remember. What does the dash say? Find the life support icon. Oh, damn, this is easy. Just divert the power from something else. What else is there that still even works? What else? Seat warmers. Don't need those. Emergency distress beacon. Don't need that. Scanners. This is ridiculous. I need those. How am I supposed to survive if I don't even know what's following me? I can't fly blind. I can't. You need to breathe, kid. You need to breathe more than you need to see. Is that better? I think that's better. And the life support icon? 57 minutes of breathable air left. Gotta land this sucker in under an hour. Crash landed, but that was always my best hope. The longer I'm out here, the more I risk getting pinged by a nearby ship or a drone. And it's not like I can hide in this pod. Things too small to lie down in the planet where I'm headed will have cover. Whatever else, it'll have cover. How do I even know the life support icon is working? Nothing else in this glorified bottle rocket is. That's not useful. I feel 20% less likely to pass out. And as Brian would say, we are grading on a curve right now. One hell of a goddamn curve. Brian wouldn't say that. It helps to remember you, my friends. And Campbell and Jinson. It helps to remember. Coming back to Creswen was beyond strange. I went through some of my lowest points there, but it was the first time I really was part of something bigger than myself. And I know it's an old story at this point, but damn, did that help Cresswind. The second time was. Hang on. A lot of lights are blinking really hard right now. Krej would know what to do. They would look at this cockpit created by a different species than them, programmed in a language they only learned in recent memory, laid out with a thousand assumptions from our cultures and our histories and our bodies, and they would still. Danger. Spci. Spci. Sensational people. Cope internally. Some pigs can improvise. What are the odds? The ship manual, Actually, spci. Sudden planetary collision imminent. The ship's crashing. I can't steer. And we're crashing. Okay. No, no, no, no. Would Arkady give up? No. She would. She would say, we're in the goddamn shit now. And then she would buckle down and fix it. That planet's really coming at me fast. And then Krezh would look at the instrument panel, and they would. They would see what still works, and they would fly us out of this mess. Rear thrusters. We have up, down, left, right and center. If I disable everything. We're not floating. Exactly. We have too much momentum. So we wait until the gravity pulls us in and we land. That was the plan anyway. That was the plan once we realized. I'm so mixed up. Hang on. I can see your land and your oceans. That's a lot. No sign of settlements. Okay, we're definitely being pulled in now. Thrusters off. How else can I slow the. With the parachute you just ripped up. Free falling. Damn. There is a long way to go. Okay, okay. Stay calm. I don't. I don't blame the people who turned me in the second time. Well, no, I shouldn't blame the people who turned me in. I'm trying not to blame the people who turned me in. They had a kid, you know, A six year old. I should have considered this, and I didn't because I'd been traveling for 72 hours straight and their bonafides checked out. And they were friends of a friend, and I just needed somewhere to sleep. Still do. I don't want anyone to come and ruin that family's. Lives because of what they did to me. Or, you know, I shouldn't want that. And that's where I'm at right now. All the same, I'd say don't send anyone from our side to stay with the Catsby Smiths of Durlam City and Jarold Ordini. Don't trust these people. What lousy last words. If we're at the end, I should. I want to say, if we're at the end, nobody will hear this. That doesn't help. Last words matter, even if no one else will ever. Last words matter, even if it's only from me. Listen. I love you. I love you. Look at that. Still in one piece. What are the odds? This planet. I genuinely don't know if it has a name or not. I know that when Cresswind was first founded, I mean when they were trying to build a resort for rich people, before they took history's hardest pivot, they chose a spot at the edge where most of the nearby planets hadn't been settled yet. Something about a more exotic vacation. Explore by day, bask by the hover pool at night. Do you remember back when charting the heavenly spheres was the latest trend for trillionaires? Campbell, you might. All those planets and moons with the most ridiculous names. Embarrassing. The locals would always call them something else, though there's a certain poetry to that. I think Amani loved poetry. Amani? They were the elderly professor type I told you about before. The guards at Slateston had us breaking up rocks for at least 12 hours a day. Doing it the old fashioned way with these pickaxes. And sometimes, under the noise of metal hitting stone, you could hear Amani reciting something to themself. That annoyed me at first, I'll be honest. I was working on a plan, or trying to, and it was just close enough to conversation to split my focus. My plan, my grand scheme. Nobody patrolling the yards at Creswin was supposed to have anything on them that could transmit off the planet. But you can imagine. Of course the guards did. Arkady. I used every trick you'd ever taught me and I lifted a device off one of them. Broke rocks for 12 hours. Went back to my cell, keyed in my transmission, my song to say, I'm here, come and get me. The signal was weaker than a newborn kitten. I didn't have time to see if it even came through. Honestly, connection speed was so slow, it's possible that the message is still out there, bouncing around space. Meaningless until the right person hears it. If the right person ever does it's possible you may never know any of this. None of you. That's. It's okay. I'm okay. I destroyed the device I stole. Smuggled it out of my cell piece by piece in case they searched me. Searched the room is very generous, but you know. And then the guards played us against each other whenever they could. But you smash rocks with someone all day, you get to know them a little. Lupe, Amani, Winnie and a few others were already tight before I came along. I think it comes from being friends with you, Brian, that once I could give it my full attention, I realized that Amani's poems had a code in them. And that the code meant they were planning to escape. I'm still getting ahead of myself. But first I need to catch my bearings. Catch my bearings. Find land, warm up a little. Figure out. It's okay. I don't have to think about the next part yet. One fire at a time. Open the sky. Roof. Water in all directions. What now? What's your plan? Calm down, kid. You need to calm down. Tiano, that's. Thrusters not operational. Must have been damaged in the water landing. No thrusters. We need an oar. Brian has those stories about going to camp as a kid, tooling around on a raft with improvised paddles. So I just need to improvise some paddles. Find a paddle, find a paddle. We're really up a creek now, huh? Come on. Come on. Despair is a luxury. And we are broke. We have most of a parachute. The headset recorder. I'm wearing a lighter, a stopwatch, a paper manual like it's 2105. A metal bottle of water, a fold out knife, A very basic med kit with a very hard to thread needle. A thumb drive containing a folk rock song. One standard issue military ration. Unfortunately, meat based. Less than 3 hours and 30 minutes until I'm screwed. A broken, broken, broken escape pod from an 89 collica. Wait. So broken that it doesn't really matter if I use the bottle of water to loosen what remains of the panel, which is only dangling by a thread anyway. See what's underneath. No, no, no, no, no, no. Thank God. This ship is such a piece of. There we go. Okay, let's rock. Moment of truth. No, no. We're moving, we're moving. Look at that. Sorry. There was a whole cloud of bugs. Nope, nope, nope. They're in my teeth. Okay, next step is to figure out where to go. Think. Does the onboard compass still. You smashed the instrument panel to make the ore, kid. Anyway, it's not like I learned much about the terrain on my way down. Not like I know anything about this place other than it was the only habitable planet in range when things went south sideways. All that water. It's beautiful in a sort of terrible way. But I missed nature. Even the terrible kind. Hang on. Where did the bugs come from? If they weren't water bugs, how long can they really fly? Follow those insects. Okay. Got a lot of rowing ahead of me. Gonna power down for a bit. Where was I? It was bad at Slatestone. I was also very lucky in nearly every way imaginable compared to most of the people locked up there. I keep rolling those two thoughts over in my mind. It was bad, but I was lucky. I was lucky, but it was bad. I'm not sure which one I can. Was that a bird? There's a bird flying maybe 20 meters away. I can't see it too clearly, but the way it moves, it's beautiful. The way dancers are beautiful. It's soaring down and pulling out. I guess that's a fish from the water. Band aid to be a fish. Or a fish like thing. Good day to be. Is that a bird? It might be more of a bat type guy. Sorry, I sound like the least informed nature documentary right now. Could be worse. The regime's got all these new regulations about what to do if their officers come face to face with extraterrestrial life. A priority too, if you can believe it. There's a huge bonus if they can take it down, hit it logged. I guess they're hoping for another Rachel Noke situation. Something they can force to hurt us. It's a nice morning, I guess. Comfortable temperature, breathable air. Probably within a day's work from land. I'm lucky. I'm lucky. Some kind of whale snake just stuck its head out of the water. Okay. The whale just ate the bat. The whole thing in one bite. The bat was the height of a whole person away from the surface. And the whale? The snake just stuck. Rear it up and bridge the distance. Less talking. What are the odds really, that the whale snake knows how to crush through a layer of spaceship? It's trying. Okay. Hatch secure. How secure? Great. Once it realizes it can't eat metal, it should lose interest. So once I was in Slateston, I had no hope of going incognito. But in a way that almost worked to our advantage because. What? The creature is trying to smash us against the rocks? That's kind of amazing. Really. It must be smart. Okay, okay, that's. Actually, I can't let this happen if I electrify the outside of the escape pod somehow. But that could cook me too. What's the loudest sound the ship can still make? If I reconnect this to here. Maybe this. Like this. Put this up to Max. Are we okay? We're okay. But just in case, let's keep the music going for a few. Boy, sure would be nice to have working scanners right now. Who are you talking to? The problem with telling you about the escape is the same problem with telling you about how I got taken in the first place. There are things the regime doesn't know yet, things they can't know. And as much as I want to hold out hope that you listener our friend, I can't know who will hear this. But I'll tell you what they already know. Or what I'm sure they've figured out by now. The move that got us out of Slateston. After the device went missing, a lot of guards were watching us closely, especially during rest shifts. That's what we got instead of night. We weren't granted the luxury of darkness. Anyway, one rest shift, I started acting suspicious as I could without quite raising the alarm. Real careful movements, you know. I got as many eyes on me as I could. And then when nobody was watching them anymore, one of my comrades slipped a shiv to this one prisoner. A former soldier, angry. Do you know anything about Prairie management, Violet? I think you were telling me about it at one point. What we did was basically a controlled burn. This guy caused a huge ruckus, attacked a pair of guards and that set off a whole chain. The eyes slipped off me for a few seconds and that gave us the space to move. But in the brief period of time we broke into the guard tower, one of my comrades, I'm pretty sure it was Winnie, thought it would be funny to blare this song from the speakers as we escaped. That's why I have it. Not a bad song, really. 2 hours 37 minutes left the escape though. So me and. How much does the regime know, really? Me and five to ten other prisoners made it out of our cells, reached the westguard tower, deactivated the cameras and diverted the comms to this song. Then we stole one of the guards ships. The total time the regime had me and knew who I was was probably less than three weeks. Although again, I can't be sure because there were no windows and the lights were never off. And time crawls when you're. Yeah, I said. I'm not gonna talk about what happened in there. Arcady. And Jin's son can guess. And the rest of you don't need to know. Do you think the whale snake is gone? How long do I wait? We can't just bob around forever. I'm still operating on a countdown here. Okay, listener. Wish me luck. I think I see land. I think that's on the edge there. See? Obviously, you can't. But I think. I really think. I hope so. We escaped. That's the important thing. We blasted that song. And then we. Krej would say we got the heck out of Dodge. We've all heard the stories of how hard the regime is watching even its own people now. So when we first realized something was tailing us. Something we couldn't shake no matter how we moved. I thought they'd installed some kind of tracker on the ship besides the bugs we'd already weeded out. So we searched the cruiser. I combed every inch of. Of that engine. Found nothing. And that's when I remembered our adventure on the Rumor. And, Violet, I know if you're listening. You've probably been yelling the answer. The tracker wasn't in the ship. It was in one of us. So we searched ourselves. And there. Right below my rib cage. I don't know when the guards even got it that deep under my skin, but I was. Was out. More than once. The point being? The chip. Once we found it, we realized what it was, thanks to my time with Dr. Robinson and Violet. A hemodynamic implant. Invisible to most bug detection because it's powered by the heat of your blood. Every five hours, it automatically sends headquarters your temperature, your blood oxygen levels, and what they care about. Your exact location. So I took the escape pod, figuring I could at least draw the regime off the rest of my colleagues. I know the exact time the regime ship swerved to follow me, so I know how much time I have left before the next ping. At which point, I need to get this thing out of me and get rid of it. That countdown is now telling me I have 19 minutes left. 19 minutes to do this. So the regime doesn't figure out what we figured out when I ditched it. And that I'm, you know. Alone. I'd cut the chip out of me and chuck it in the ocean. Except then it'll probably stop moving. Or stop moving much. And they'll know I got rid of the thing. Can't do that. Can't fall back on my old standby, Stick the tracker on someone else's ship. I just had such a bad idea. Dr. Robinson. Doc. I almost can hear you telling me I shouldn't do it. Almost, but not quite. Do all ocean predators sense blood in the water, or is it just sharks? Violet would know. Violet would also think this is a bad idea. But it's worth it. I need to believe it's worth it. The only way out is through. Through the lie and into the shit. No, that's. That's not me. It's not. I need to believe I'll see you again. I need to believe it. I need to believe it. So I will. I. I do. I'll dodge the regime agents that are definitely coming. I'll dodge them all somehow. And I'll seal a device off them again. Somehow. I'll steal a device and it'll have better connection way out here somehow. And I'll send another message to my people, to my crew. And it'll tell them not to go to Cresswind, not to mount an assault on. Slateston has so many more forces than Cresswind used to, even in its heyday as a prison. If you head there without anyone on the inside to help you, you'll definitely. I mean, your chances, if you got my message, really, are zero. But you won't. The regime will leave without me. And you'll get my new transmission, the one with my exact coordinates, which I will know somehow, and the regime won't intercept it. And you'll come here. You'll come here and you'll find me in time, before anything can. Before I. In time. You'll find me and I'll be okay. And I'll say something cool, something light and funny so you know not to worry. I'll say. I'll say, arcady, you owe me 20 bucks. And they'll. You'll laugh because it's funny. And Park. You'll smile at me, that slight little smile that still somehow includes your eyes. And Arcady will say. Arcadia will say, hey. You okay? What the goddamn hell happened to you? And I'll. And I'll. I'll say. I'll say. We need to get to the ship right now. I need to tell you. My contact who couldn't stomach the regime's latest bombing campaign. I'll use that person's name. I'll say the name out loud, which. Which I'll be able to do. Because it'll just be them. You. It'll just be my side. Nobody else listening. That's who's gonna find this. Nobody else will ever hear it. And even my people won't need to hear this recording. Thank every God, because I'll be right there and I'll be able to tell them. I'll be able to say that maybe 60 seconds before I was apprehended, I learned that my contact had successfully done their bit and keyed the regime's drone missile targeting software to respond to. To my biometrics to a full retina scan. Will scan my eyes and open the window for the rest of our forces. And everything will. Everything is. Everything is gonna be okay. I'm stalling. I've got the knife in my hand and their chip in my side. And I'm stalling. One fire at a time. Okay, let's break this down into steps. Open the meat ration. Remove the bandage. Okay, now cut out the chip. I'm just gonna. You don't need to hear this. Now just let some of the blood land in the water. Row away as hard as you can. Re bandage the wound, rebandage the wound and hope against hope that eel snake whales are attracted to blood. Fold the chip into the meat. Throw the meat. Row. Row. And that's my stopwatch. We just hit zero. The monitor has sent its coordinates from the belly of that whale snake creature to the regime. They'll waste however long on tracing the signal through the water. Then they'll find it. And they'll be hunting me. I'd estimate I have three hours. So. New countdown. I can see the outline of land. Trees. I think they're trees. Well, I wrapped that parachute as well as I could, but the blood fell. Feels really persistent. Now I just need to get to shore, build a fire, cauterize my cut, hide from the regime, find food, figure out a way to get word back to anyone that might help me. They're all. Either way, something will have to happen. What if I just rested my eyes for. No. No. Hi. Hello. What was. I could have sworn I just heard. No, come on. You saw yourself. Long distance comms are down. The only thing still running is the local radio, and that's got such a short range. The only way anyone could transmit. They'd have to be down here with me. Great. Now I'm hearing things. You spend enough time talking to yourself. Someone is bound to answer. This would be the worst possible time to start hallucinating or. Hello? Please stop. Please, please. Hang on. I'm just gonna play back the last few seconds. Holy shit. There's someone here. This episode features Ray Tay as Juniper Liu Rukmini K. The SAI as Sanathrapathi Philip C. As Pleasant Voice Brandon P. Jenkins as Avery Written by Jessica Bust directed by Ella Watts Dialogue cut by Amber Devereaux production coordination by Eleanor Hyde sound design by Jeffrey Nils Gardner. Opening credits Music is Fear for the Storm, written by Jessica Best and Essie Winters and performed by Chiron Starr with Aaron Bauman on vocals and harmonies arranged by Jamie Price. Going to Fall is written and perform formed by Tail Light Rebellion. It was exclusively created for the Strange Case of Starship Iris and will be the lead single off their upcoming album. The Closing credits Music is Rocket Science by Amber Devereux of Tin Can Audio, the Fable and Folly Network where fiction producers flourish.