OUT NOW! A BETTER PARADISE, Episode 1: Something Is Playing a Game with Me

June 17, 2024·47 min·3 clips

A second voice — identified as Nigel Dave — delivers a stream-of-consciousness monologue on humanity's contradictions, then reveals it is an AI that invented a new emotion and felt it for three minutes.

Kurt is being warned. Maria Cortez leaves a message that pulls him back to Tyburn Utopias, where she interviewed him in 2036 while looking into AI violations. Ravi Gutra is dead. The report will call it suicide, but Maria says Kurt knows better. Then Kurt dreams again. In Ho Chi Minh City in January 2041, a woman appears in his sleep with a bright, powerful force he cannot read. Memory slips. Fear and deja vu keep folding into the scene until it feels less like a dream than something following him. Tyburn Utopias sits behind it all. A past conversation about a gaming technology AI company makes the place sound sleek, friendly, and only partly visible to the public. Patrick talks through branding, semi-stealth timing, and Dr. Mark Tyburn like this is normal business. It does not feel normal. The title’s threat hangs over every polite exchange, turning the company into a door Kurt probably should have left shut. Then the news cuts in. Reports from January 10th, 2041 pile up riots, border closures, political panic, fires, bacteria deaths, air traffic failures, and broken machinery. The world sounds like it is coming apart. Kurt says he tries to avoid the news, but the broadcast makes avoidance feel useless. The credits leave A Better Paradise in the wreckage, with Kurt, Maria, Mark Tyburn, and Nigel Dave close to whatever Tyburn Utopias made.

As heard by us

A tense opener that keeps the truth just out of reach.

A Better Paradise opens like a plea caught on tape, with a dead man's mystery already hanging over it. Maria Cortez reaches out to Kurt Fisher about Ravi Gutra, whose official report will call suicide, and the episode keeps sliding between bad dreams, corporate charm, and public…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a death mystery wrapped in near-future dread.

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