17: A Wish Of Death

August 27, 2025·35 min·2 clips

Joan Tannenbaum records her own final words, thanking the man who just force-fed her morphine as the 'deepest, most lasting way to really be an intricate part of someone's every day.'

Finding her sounds almost ordinary. The tape has a last known address, so the narrator gets on another bus: six hours on a Greyhound, no internet, no digital trail. After Saxton, staying analog is not just a plan. It is a nervous little ritual. His daughter did it first. Since joining the Concentrics, she has avoided every signal that could let someone find her in seconds. He is starting to believe she may never come back. The larger world has already cracked under war and cold war, but his world is smaller now: tapes, bus stations, bad sleep, and the next address. Weeks ago, he was a retired Decker archaeologist with a blank schedule and not much to do besides go to the gym. Now he is standing at Joan Tannenbaum's door. Joan is not surprised. That is the bad part. She says she has been waiting for him, and she is certain he is there to kill her. It lands wrong, like he has walked into a scene that was prepared before he understood the script. Then she talks about vampires. Not capes, not theatre, not monsters in the usual sense. Workers in the dark, carrying on with their un-lives. Somehow the practical tone makes it nastier. Joan says they are dying out. The ones before her are scared, and they do not plan to vanish quietly. By the end, the question is not only where his daughter went. It is who arranged for him to arrive here at all.

As heard by us

A bus ride through a divided world, where private fear and public history keep brushing against each other.

Joan Tannenbaum follows a path ruled by fear, surveillance, and travel that feels more like escape than progress. The episode moves in a steady, grim line: a bus ride, a last known address, a narrator who has shut out the online world after Saxton, and a daughter who has gone…

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Why you'd press play

If you want a bleak, analog chase through a split world, start here.

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