The Program audio series · IMS | Writing an audio drama sci-fi anthology about history of the future | Not at AI

Free trial period

·1 hr 6 min·6 clips

Hostage-takers force nine strangers to decide who dies first in a dark room.

The Program is an independently produced audio drama series created by IMS and distributed through Rusty Quill. This episode, presented as a free trial of the series, drops listeners into an underground cell during an unnamed international peace summit, where nine people from different countries and professions have been taken hostage by an organized armed group. The captors communicate via PA, demand cooperation under threat of death, and tell the group it must decide which among them will be handed over first. The group's membership is deliberately heterogeneous: a police officer from an unnamed country, a clergyman of unspecified denomination, a soldier and military engineer, a tech CEO traveling with a date named Serenity, a financial trader famous for crashing Iceland's economy while pursuing an arbitrage opportunity, a British minister of education and his aide, and an unnamed Afghani programmer. The episode uses the hostage scenario as a pressure-cooker frame for extended arguments about the political conflict that led to the siege -- references to a nuclear strike, a Dirty Friday massacre, the illegitimacy of asymmetric warfare versus the legitimacy of resistance -- without ever naming the specific nations or conflict, making the themes deliberately universal. As captives are removed one by one, the remaining characters debate increasingly fundamental questions: whether God exists and whether religion is necessary regardless, whether pain is a necessary signal, whether sovereignty is just a narrative that serves whoever won, the moral difference between killing one's oppressor and being killed by one's oppressor, and whether the last person remaining in the cell is the most cunning survivor or the most complicit. The clergyman volunteers himself when confronted with the question of whether self-sacrifice requires certainty of an afterlife. The policeman disqualifies himself by attacking another captive and insisting, as he is taken away, that if the afterlife has everyone in the cell in it, he prefers hell. A financial trader observes that the captors may have inverted the expected dynamic: perhaps the last one in the room is the one they intend to kill. The episode ends mid-chaos. The tone is darkly comic, philosophically dense, and deliberately provocative, with no authorial voice intervening to adjudicate among the competing moral claims.

As heard by us

A harsh, funny argument where grievance, ideology, and absurdity keep colliding.

Free Trial Period turns a plea for support into a tense, bitter argument about land, belonging, return, and the memories people summon after violence.

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Why you'd press play

You want a political sci-fi argument that keeps sliding between jokes, grief, and systems talk.

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