Out of Place · Midnight Disease Productions LLC

Entry #200: "Betrayal"

June 22, 2021·23 min·2 clips

Andrew Moss wonders how his primate brain reconciles with dimensional travel, fearing others in his position have gone mad.

The episode is framed as an archive report narrated by Andrew Moss, data archivist for the Extant team, a secret project studying existential threats in alternate timelines. Andrew introduces himself as someone brought in from university for his information management skills and practical temperament, suggesting the work requires a certain psychological ordinariness to survive. The Extant field team consists of Sergeant Garnett Brand, Private First Class Francisco Quintero, Private Richard Sandin, and Warrant Officer Poulter, all drawn from the US Army. They travel to alternate timelines inside a modified ISS emergency escape capsule, which emerges mid-air and crash-lands via inflatable bags. In this mission, the capsule lands south of Fredericksburg, Virginia, roughly fifty miles from Washington DC, in a timeline showing no communications traffic, no street lighting, and elevated radiological readings. The team confirms it is approximately eighteen months after a nuclear exchange that occurred around October 1975, based on newspaper and calendar dates found in the ruined city. They secure bicycles for transport since fuel degrades on that timescale, and begin moving toward Washington DC. On the outskirts of Fredericksburg, Quintero finds a military recruitment station with hundreds of pamphlets featuring a speech by Nixon, using language about purity, real Americans, and rooting out Soviet infiltrators. Quintero recognizes the rhetoric as similar to anti-Latino hostility his family experienced in 1940s Los Angeles and notes that Nixon, who resigned in their timeline in 1974, is still president here. As the team approaches Washington DC, a billboard shows Nixon alongside idealized military personnel under the slogan Stand Together Against the Reds. The city itself is heavily destroyed, its central sections devastated, with outer areas in various stages of ruin. Drone photography by Warrant Officer Poulter documents the destruction. The roads leading out of the city are choked with cars, indicating the scale of evacuation and its incomplete success. The team collects air and soil samples, then returns to the capsule and re-emerges in their home timeline within thirty minutes and one hundred meters of target, which Andrew notes as improving accuracy. Andrew's analysis centers on Nixon's documented alcoholism and use of sleeping pills, arguing that without Watergate removing him, he remained in power past 1975 in a state of increasing instability and paranoia. Andrew theorizes Nixon either ordered a first strike or provoked Soviet leadership into a preemptive attack. In debriefing, Director Beckman asks Andrew what recommendation he would make to the project board, and Andrew concludes the timeline is a curiosity with limited actionable intelligence. Beckman reveals the board agreed with Andrew's assessment, but closes the session by indicating that far stranger timelines are already queued for investigation.

As heard by us

A cold mission log where dimensional dread and nuclear ruin tighten around each other.

This episode treats apocalypse as a bureaucratic burden, and that choice lands. It starts in abstraction, with dimensional travel reduced to something the mind has to flatten just to keep going, then drops into a ruined American landscape where recruitment slogans, abandoned…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want serious sci-fi that treats dimensional travel and a nuclear false alarm like a briefing.

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