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

Memory leak

·57 min·5 clips

She discovers her father wasn't a student but a janitor hiding his shame, unraveling her assumptions about his life.

The excerpt begins outside the fiction. IMS points the mic back at the series and asks listeners to guess what it takes to make the show: time, cost, audience size, and patron support. The answers land pretty hard. Six to eight months of work turns into less than a grand in scraped together production money, around 10,000 listeners per episode, and 180 monthly patrons. Then the scene snaps into interrogation. Someone is alone deep in enemy territory. A stranger claims internal affairs authority and proves she knows too much by naming a private university secret. The soldier gives ground fast. What first sounds like random threat starts to look like a test of anti-program loyalty, with obedience wearing a procedural mask. The trenches do the real damage. The soldier says dying men did not call for the program. They called for their mothers. The reply almost softens, then cuts back in. That memory turns parents, fear, and ideology into something harder to file away. Virgil seems to be on trial, but the interrogator sounds relieved, as if she has found exactly the weakness she came looking for. Then history gets used as another trap. The United States and Germany after the Second World War make victory feel unfinished, even dirty. The ending breaks the spell with wildfire language and casino ads, which makes the machinery around the episode feel uncomfortably visible.

As heard by us

A production quiz gives way to interrogation, loyalty tests, and wartime argument.

The program starts by sizing up its own machinery: how long an episode takes to make, what it costs, how many people hear it, and how few of them pay.

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Why you'd press play

You want a sharp episode that turns a production quiz into a loyalty cross-examination.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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