Forest 404 · BBC Radio 4

Ep4: Of Earthly Delights

April 25, 2019·24 min·2 clips

A tiny old woman shoots Pan and then tells her the truth: Pan is not human — everyone Pan has ever known is a robot, and there is only one human left.

The episode opens with Pan's narration about why she descended — driven by unexplained sounds that have infected her dreams. She and the hands have arrived at the office of Guggenhammer, a brain tech, and found it destroyed, but recover a personalised map of the levels beneath Fume Town. The map guides them through heat bursts, gantries and convection chambers in an undignified descent through the infrastructure. Guggy provokes Pan about being a high-town princess who doesn't understand how the other half lives, and Pan pushes back. Guggy explains that their destination is the Oil Bridge — a floating barge of scavengers who skim toxic residue from a lake of chemicals and use their anchor as a conduit to the ruins below. The Oil Bridge crew see themselves as gatekeepers between the fast times and the slow world, and they demand payment in slow-world recordings — images of sunsets, sounds of the rupture. Pan is broke but has her recordings. She is conflicted about giving one up, describing them as the only genuinely real things she has encountered. She selects the recording that makes her most uneasy — a chorus of noise that feels against her — and gives it up as tender. Guggy and Pan catch the barge at the last second by jumping two storeys from a railing. The hands are left behind, unable to cross the toxic sludge without destroying their legs. Pan and Guggy pass through the oil lake via a pneumatic capsule system that shoots them down into the ancient city below. Pan arrives in total darkness and realises Guggy has vanished, and that he has stolen all her remaining recordings. Alone, she navigates through crushed and buckled streets of ancient brick buildings, following a distant sound and light. She finds a multi-storey concrete building — apparently an old car park — lit from within, and inside she sees a living tree for the first time. She cannot name what she is seeing, describing it in terms of pillars, fractal extensions, and shifting light. An ancient tiny woman then confronts her with a shotgun, demanding she step away from the tree. Pan is shot, and as she protests she has DNA, Thea explains that DNA in Pan's world stands for Dynamic Nanobionic Algorithm. Pan and everyone she has ever known are robots. There is only one human left alive — Thea.

As heard by us

A tense descent where the map matters as much as the mood.

Forest 404 leans into pressure more than explanation. Pan, Guggenhammer, and the hands keep driving downward through the sub-city after the entrance to Guggie's brain amendments is destroyed, with a virus suspicion and those intense, unstoppable noises hanging over the whole…

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Why you'd press play

A grim downward scramble with music, a working map, and a virus you do not want near anyone around you.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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