Out of Place · Midnight Disease Productions LLC

Entry #210: “Peace”

September 1, 2021·27 min·2 clips

The Universal Eugenics Code sterilized humanity while using advanced in vitro fertilization to control reproduction.

1. Out of Place's “Peace” follows a low-risk mission to an abandoned Earth with a surviving broadcast.\n2. Pacific S. Obadiah narrates the mission, while Ben Counter wrote the episode and Dana Creaseman created its sound design.\n3. The episode asks whether a technically successful system for controlling human reproduction could preserve the species while destroying humanity's diversity.\n4. The orbital probe detects a message stating, “This is planet Earth. We are the human race.”\n5. The broadcast contains corrupted historical and cultural data, implying that people anticipated the end of their timeline.\n6. The target Earth's pollution and emissions declined 30 to 50 years before the present, despite later broadcast technology.\n7. London remains the only city with visible activity, concentrated in the Financial and Business Center.\n8. Extant's three-person field team enters London through Hyde Park after Private Quintero's absence leaves the team understaffed.\n9. Warrant Officer Poulter identifies a Reproduction Enablement Center built around St. Bartholomew's Hospital.\n10. The center contains about 30 procedural rooms, cold storage, detention facilities, and biohazard-marked waste containers.\n11. A glass cylinder holds a kidney-bean-sized early-stage human fetus in bluish preservative fluid.\n12. Hundreds of broken cylinders and black-red fibrous growths fill the biological-waste containers.\n13. A dead man in a London office appears to have lived alone among newspapers, emails, reports, board games, bottled water, and instant noodles.\n14. The Universal Eugenics Code uses sterilization through water supplies and hospital-based in vitro fertilization.\n15. Government departments decide how many people are born each year under the Universal Eugenics Code.\n16. The documents describe an infection that repeatedly destroyed attempts to restore artificial reproduction.\n17. Pacific's narration shifts between military field reports, recovered documents, and reflective commentary.\n18. Ben Counter's audio-fiction format combines restrained investigation with environmental details, redacted debriefings, and ominous sound design.\n19. Listeners drawn to dystopian science fiction and reproductive ethics may appreciate this episode.\n20. Listeners seeking a fast plot or a conventional character-driven story might skip it.

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