DUST

DUST is a science fiction anthology made as audio drama. Its stories come from named writers, are adapted for performance, are voiced by credited casts and are finished by sound designers. The feed runs on two tracks. One is a set of Special Episodes, each a self-contained story from a different writer. These announce the story and its author, go straight into the drama and end with a reading of the credits. Kevin J. Anderson's 'Music Played on the Strings of Time' is the most conversational of them. It follows a musician who shrugs off a Sunday show he says nobody cared about, is sent to Dimension 25A43, and wanders the racks of a record shop in the one universe where he made it. Jamie Killen's 'Behind the Hatch', with Erin Moriarty and Patricia Heaton in the cast, takes the form of an interview: a woman is questioned about her job with Dr. Patel and the hatch her contract forbade her to ask about. Mercurio D. Rivera's 'Beyond the Tattered Veil of the Stars' is narrated by an alien mother who loses child after child to disease while she works on the genes tied to the malignancies. Its hardest moment belongs to a dying daughter, who asks her mother to solve not the plague but the cruelty of existence. Stephen Michael, credited as DUST's executive producer at Gunpowder and Sky, directed 'Music Played on the Strings of Time' and 'Behind the Hatch' and shares the adaptation credit on the second. The other track is 'CHRYSALIS', a serial told in numbered parts. Its narrator speaks from a 27-kilometer body, directs sentient drones around the world of Zanvir, and wants the Zanvirians to feel the pain of humanity's massacre. The drama comes from the pushback. Another voice argues that the people responsible are already dead, that children cannot be blamed for what their ancestors did, and that revenge only feeds a cycle of violence. Part Fourteen turns to the slower work that follows: borders, a ceasefire and rival claims for reparations between Terrans and Zanvirians, seen from a terrace high in the arcology of Nianton Prime. S.H. Serrano wrote the serial. Corey Hawkins performs in it and is credited among its executive producers, and Alex Kemp composed its original music. DUST has also carried outside work: the first episode of Derelict's 'Fathom' season, introduced by its creator, Jay Barton Mitchell. It is set on a research base built around what looks like a giant door in the ocean floor. After a flooded hydroponics capsule nearly drowns the crew, they argue over shutting down Mac, a V.I., and one voice likens shutting down a V.I. to terminating it. A listener who wants a complete story should start with a Special Episode, and one who wants a long arc should take 'CHRYSALIS' in the order of its parts.