11: Entering The First Circle

August 6, 2025·28 min·2 clips

Jonathan Tozer describes finding alien structures on Ursus Magnus — and confronting a company official who ordered all of them demolished for raw materials.

The episode is structured as two intercut first-person monologues: one from an unnamed female private investigator employed by Deka Apprehensions, the other from a man named Jonathan Tozer. The investigator has been hired by Mrs. Warcher to find her husband, who disappeared after leaving a note that led to a self-help cassette tape containing a phone number. When the investigator calls, she reaches a frightened man reading from what sounds like a script. He identifies the callers as potential concentrics and explains that answering four honest questions will grant entry to the first circle. The questions are not financial or logistical but deeply personal. The first question asks about the caller's nearest moment to death, literally or psychologically. The investigator finds herself confessing to childhood depression at age thirteen, disclosing this to her client and to a recording device in her office. The second question asks about the caller's deepest regret. The investigator shares that she chose not to continue a pregnancy, explaining her decision came from fear about the state of the world. The man on the phone accepts both answers and moves on. Jonathan Tozer's parallel thread addresses the same questions. For the third question — nearest moment to murder — he recounts a debriefing after years on Ursus Magnus, an alien planet where his team documented remarkable structures. A Deka official informed him that all structures would be demolished for industrial drilling. Tozer pleaded to preserve one structure, called the Church of Panoptes, which he believed was an alien analogue for psychoanalysis or therapy. The official refused and Tozer physically choked him, stopped short of killing. He received counseling rather than arrest. The investigator, lacking a real answer to the murder question, fabricates a story about shooting an attacker in the legs with her service weapon. The fourth question asks for life's highest point. Tozer's most alive moments were not on Earth but on Ursus Magnus, specifically inside the Church of Panoptes. He acknowledges that walking on alien worlds made ordinary life seem flat. The investigator initially attempts safe answers — her daughter's birth, meeting her husband — but is called out for following social conventions. She settles on her years in the Deka arrest force, where team synchronicity and high-stakes operations made her feel most alive, at the cost of her personal life. Both characters complete the four questions and are asked to state their full names and addresses. Both comply. Both lines then go dead. The episode ends with the investigator and Mrs. Warcher sitting in the office waiting for something to happen, with no further instruction.

As heard by us

A first-day case log that turns routine procedure into dread.

Private I-27-33-B's first day at Dekka Apprehensions opens on a missing-persons case, The Concentrics, and the episode keeps its pressure in the ordinary rhythms of procedure.

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Why you'd press play

A missing-persons file that opens like a first-day confession from a private investigator.

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