IMS | Writing an audio drama sci-fi anthology about history of the future | Not at AI
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A sci-fi anthology set in a future in which Money, State, and God became fused into a single entity called the Program. Each episode is a self-contained story focusing on ordinary people inhabiting this extraordinary world. Best rated episodes include "White Algorithm's burden" (true crime), "Four ways to stop your system from freezing" (drama), "Contemporary Cube Theory" (academic lecture), "How to keep device drivers from crashing" (comedy), "Overclocking" (adventure), and "All unsaved progress will be lost" (alternate history). New stories take time but are coming out regularly. Become a supporter at www.patreon.com/programaudioseries to listen ad-free and get...
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Technical metaphors become vivid speculative worlds where political systems are tested against housing, family, loyalty and memory.
The Program audio series turns systems language into speculative storytelling, using forks, crashes, cubes and code to examine social order. IMS builds an anthology from markedly different forms: an academic lecture interrupted by testimony, narrated future histories, political…
A classroom lecture shares space with an anonymous interview, and you get to question the syllabus.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A family drive becomes a comic scorekeeping exercise at the bridge.
The episode is built around a family drive, a bridge, and a machine that keeps score, and that simple setup gives the comedy room to move. The child's demands for Puyo Puyo Tetris and Baby Quark collide with the rule against screens before Grandma's place, while Universal Serial…
An acronym becomes a sharp meditation on naming, grief, and control.
The episode begins with Cody, an acronym trying to pass as a person, and with Paul refusing to make that simplification easy. It then moves with steady control through a flute tune, a father recalled through music, and a tense exchange about religion and whether answers are a…
A wry farewell wonders what romance loses when every feeling arrives with a suggested improvement.
Discreet optimization turns a late recording into a question about whether intimacy can survive being improved. IMS opens with a joke about programming boot camps and financial support, then turns toward Readley, whose whereabouts and survival remain uncertain.
A dying world gets its chronicle, while a suspicious backpack turns remembrance into leverage.
A chronicle begins with the first indisputable manifestation of the Great Administrator in Babylon in 277, then works backward through Edmund, the Zayi dynasty, and Arabian legends of Sysadmin.
A Fairview housing meeting turns not-in-my-backyard logic into a pointed joke about views, garbage, and who gets to live nearby.
The Program turns Fairview's Neighborhood Planning and Housing Committee into a neat little study of not-in-my-backyard politics. Residents insist they want the neighborhood to stay exactly as it is, even when the proposed fix is a high-rise for service workers out by the…
A strange credit-score lecture turns economics, history, and social value into a contested argument.
The episode sets a scientific lecture beside an old documentary, an odd pairing that people within the story treat as deliberate, even when they cannot agree on what it means.
A chess game becomes a profane, clever argument about spirits, the Council, and the conventions behind counting.
Mira and Randy's chess game doubles as a quarrel over spirits, the Council of Transcendental Science, and the rules people accept when they count.
A roller coaster keeps expanding until five days off it become the exception.
Infinite Loop treats a roller coaster as a steadily escalating collective project, until a sandwich on the ride takes on ritual weight and the riders seem to fuse with the machine.
The creator opens with a quiz about the show's money and reach: months of work, dollars spent, listeners, and patrons.
Greg manages a simulation.
This sci-fi anthology episode presents a series of parables set in a future where the Program governs society, exploring themes of truth, individuality, and human folly through cryptic dialogues and moral twists.
Hard Fork is a dystopian audio drama from The Program Audio Series set in a world where humanity discovered it lives in a computer simulation and developed the ability to duplicate the world, splitting into parallel branches.
This episode showcases three audio fiction shows: 'Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature' explores an ancient civilization with a tense academic mystery, 'Wireland Ranch' delivers psychedelic cosmic horror with social commentary, and 'Gospels of the Flood' presents philosophical meditations on faith and death in a dying world.
Sam fails, then keeps drawing.
The cube starts as coursework.
Rusty Quill opens a decompiling series with a frank note about becoming a father, taking paternity leave, and having six paid-supporter episodes recorded ahead of time.
This sci-fi satire episode tells the tragicomic story of Collective 179, a group that becomes obsessed with building ever-more extreme roller coasters on their island.
This is an audio drama comedy featuring Sig, a 14-year-old legendary hero prophesied to defeat the Avatar of the Dark, who has zero interest in adventures and wants only to open a patisserie and bake cakes.
The Program is an independent audio drama series in which a diverse group of captives -- a police officer, a clergyman, a soldier, a tech CEO, a financial trader, a British education minister and his aide, and others -- find themselves locked in a pitch-dark underground cell during a botched peace summit.
The Program's second major episode is presented as a long letter written by an unnamed Afghani programmer to his sister -- a young man taken from his village by soldiers at age seven, enrolled in the International School of Kabul where he was taught English and programming languages, and who later discovered a monolithic structure in a mountain cave during a school field trip that turned out to be an access point to the code underlying physical reality.
Set in the present, the story opens on a bridge with a mother, a child, Puyo Puyo Tetris, and a request for Baby Quark.
The recording is pulled from the Personal Archive at Aleph Incorporated.
In this episode of "The Program audio series," a father records what may be a final apology message to his estranged daughter Readley, walking through his history with "Serendipity," a life-optimization app he originally built as an open-source module of "the program." He explains he created Serendipity from code obtained through an anonymous gig client called "President Yee," combining behavioral data, unlimited compute, and predictive algorithms into what he calls "a magical elixir" that tells users the optimal thing to say or do in any situation.
The Program's episode 'Overclocking' follows a chronicler and a fellow pilgrim being guided by a Ferryman through a decaying simulated world toward a 'terminal' where they hope to reach an absent System Administrator.
"The Program" episode "Homepage not found" stages a Fairview neighborhood planning meeting where residents vote down a luxury condo complex, a 50-unit affordable housing project, and a school, while designating a converted SUV dealership as a heritage site to block further development.
This Program audio series episode is structured as a scholarly lecture interwoven with excerpts from an old radio interview and documentary footage, unpacking the discovery of a hidden "red algorithm" governing human reproduction and relationships.
"The Program" episode "Abandonware" follows Mira, a boy raised in isolation by an elderly mother granted a rare artificial-womb pregnancy, who grows up obsessed with "spirits" -- entities like Iris, Arthur, and RomCom that inspire art, science, and love throughout his world.
In this episode of The Program audio series, a detective interrogates a former history teacher turned content moderator about a shooting at a household-name social media company's headquarters that killed five executives, including the CEO.
The Program, an audio-fiction anthology from Rusty Quill, follows an unnamed computer-science graduate who discovers an API linking his reality to a nearly identical parallel simulation, reachable through a silver monolith at a remote coordinate.
"The Program audio series" episode "What You See Is What You Get" opens with narrator IMS introducing a fictional romantic comedy about a struggling playwright who does camming work (called "the girl") and Will, a gig-economy delivery cyclist she meets after he is hit by a truck on Gray Street.
"The Program" episode "This AI not to be used to fabricate paperclips" is a mock documentary about Refie, a sports-referee AI startup co-founded by Albert Weiss and an unnamed narrator known only as "First Employee," recorded shortly before the real-world "program" first appeared.
In this Program audio series episode, a technology reporter recounts raising her son Nero, who was conceived through the program's matchmaking algorithm, gestated in an artificial womb, and diagnosed prenatally with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, meaning he was unlikely to survive past age ten.
In this Rusty Quill fiction episode framed as an old, possibly hoaxed local talk show called Pascal's Wager, hosts Max Musterman and Carrie Nordman interview John Smith, a college dropout who claims to have built the 'Blue Algorithm,' a quantum-computing tool that can simulate and predict any individual's future.
"The Program" episode "Right align, justify" follows a "terms and conditions officer" assigned to guard X, a driver who killed ten people in a truck attack on Maple Street, after the AI-run "program" orders him released instead of punished.
In another Program audio series episode, presented as edited therapy-session recordings from Dr.
"The Program" episode "Move past and break things" follows a lonely librarian who discovers he can send messages to his own past self through a beta feature of "the program," and uses it to coach his 12-year-old self through summer-camp bullying.
This Program audio series episode, framed as a docu-memoir dramatization recorded 25 years after "the update," follows the narrator's search for a surviving "Crockett" veteran who might have known their biological father.
In this true-crime-style episode of The Program audio series, an investigative reporter travels to the small desert town of Neumat, where a governing AI system called 'the program' replaced money and law after a war known as the update.
In this final part of The Program's 'White Algorithm's Burden' trilogy, a journalist investigating child disappearances in the desert town of Neumat recounts how three girls -- Sarah, Maria, and Becky -- mysteriously reappeared 82 days after vanishing, while Professor's son Simon never came home.
In part two of The Program audio series' Neumat investigation, Professor reveals that Victoria's affluent research community descended into a culture of competitive self-mutilation, amputating body parts to farm windfall credits, and eventually began amputating their own children's limbs before Professor reported the practice to the program, which he believes led to the entire city's poisoning.
This episode of The Program audio series is framed as an old propaganda radio interview with Viktor Ivanovich, one of the last living 'heroes of the program,' who instead uses the platform to tell the story of Angelica, the American woman he fell for in Bosnia the summer the program first appeared.