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

Hard fork

·50 min·4 clips

Dean realizes no one is in the other branches, uncovering the simulation's deadliest secret.

The Program Audio Series presents Hard Fork, a speculative fiction audio drama exploring what happens when a society discovers it lives in a computer simulation and gains the ability to copy itself into parallel worlds. The first fork is a geopolitical compromise splitting the Cold War superpowers into separate branches, broadly celebrated as eliminating hunger and war. Dean, the protagonist, grows up after the first fork and becomes a computer scientist fascinated by the departed branches while most of his peers are indifferent. A second fork follows, driven by cultural and ideological tensions, expelling so-called radical elements from universities and sending around twenty percent of the population into a new branch including Dean's sister. A pandemic creates a third fork for the unvaccinated, which Dean's mother voluntarily joins after falling into online conspiracy communities that promised a sysadmin figure would eventually merge all branches back together. Dean's wife then takes their daughter through an unauthorized fork, leaving him a single father. Each fork degrades the master branch's infrastructure, healthcare, and food supply, as the departing populations take crucial workers and social services with them. Dean spends decades on Project Humpty Dumpty with a team of researchers attempting to send messages across branches, achieving one-way transmission but never a reply. His father, embittered by worsening conditions, prepares to join a final populist fork after contested elections, despite Dean's pleas. In a frantic late-night coding session, Dean discovers the reason no reply ever came: the branches are read-only, meaning no new data can exist within them and everyone who entered them effectively vanished. Racing through empty city streets to reach his father before the branch finalizes, Dean calls repeatedly with no answer. The episode is a political and social allegory about how a society fragments through ideological sorting, each group retreating into its own world rather than tolerating difference. Tone is dark and satirical, with dry commentary on centrist politics, misinformation, public health, and the corrosion of trust. The audience is fans of speculative fiction, audio drama, and literary science fiction with strong social commentary.

As heard by us

A forked society turns into a dry, sharp lesson in class, memory, and self-determination.

Hard fork turns a software metaphor into a political fable about societies splitting apart in the name of order. Dean's hazy childhood memory, his father's certainty that the fork solved hunger and war, and the later housing shortage make the story feel less like a joke about…

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Want a forked society, branch politics, and deadpan theory in one sharp sit?

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