Episode 4: I Want to Be Quite Clear. I Do Not Exist.
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I need you to tell me more. Well, I still have no idea what you want to know. I've told you everything! Stop fucking with me, Yaroslav. I'm tied up. I have not slept in week. You're hitting me with flat side of large knife. In what world am I fucking with you?

Absurd Ventures and Q-Code present A Better Paradise, Volume 1, An Aftermath. Created and written by Dan Houser. Directed by Laszlo. Starring Andrew Lincoln, Patterson Joseph, Shamir Anderson, and Rain Spencer. Episode 4. I want to be quite clear. I do not exist. Survival is all there is. Survival is victory, and victory is survival. But unless there's a fight...

How can we improve the herd? Unless weakness, bad judgement and poor qualities are eradicated, how can anything improve? Make us make better choices they said. Like that was easy. Like I could do that all of the time. High security internment facility. Location unknown. March 2041. What did you see in there? In the where? Tell me what you know.

Tell me or he'll hit you again. I don't know anything! Yaroslav, this is serious. You're not telling me what you saw. Talk, fucking- Did you know Ravi Guttra?

Ravi who? He was an architect. He worked at Tyburn Utopias. He died recently. No, no. I did not know him. I don't know him. I don't know any of them. I mean, they left a few developer notes embedded in the world. I tell you this. You're lying. I only go there twice. I was just hacker. I don't remember about anyone called Ravi. We wanted money. Ravi worked on that place you hacked into. Helped build it.

Uh, well, okay. Well, it's sad he died. Very. So how did he die? Suicide. Left a note. Well, life is, um, tough, I suppose. Shot himself in the back of the head. Twice. So? So he had an appointment to chat with me the next day.

Maria goes on and on and I think about talking and yet I know when I tell her she will have someone drive me out into the desert and bury me in a hole. All those years, all those crimes, all that stealing, blackmail, fraud and hacking a video game has done this to me. When Daniil said "What the fuck is this place?" we should have run away. But how could we? When it was nowhere, when we were already there. When leaving would leave as big and clear a footprint as staying.

Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.

That loudmouth, treacherous Muscovite idiot! The last of the Russian macho men! A tough guy with a big mouth and a fake girlfriend and a plastic gun he printed on the internet! They're all the same, Muscovites. They're like all people from big cities, you know? Loudmouths, entitled, special. Same with Londoners, Romans, New Yorkers. The plastic gun never worked, but the shiv did. The long plastic shiv.

I called it a dildo. Thank God it worked. We both would have died years ago. Part of me wish we had. Together we were going to take over the world. Together we were superheroes who were going to save the world. Me and Daniel. Daniel, my best friend, my worst enemy. He inspired me, he dragged me with him, he pushed me. He made me do so many stupid things and I cannot believe I'm still alive. Is he alive?

I don't think so. But how would I know? Locked up in here? Locked up in where? I don't know. I'm here. You know the guards? The guards, they taunt me. We're on Marth, the whispering one says. We're in Nevada, right next to a brothel, the creepy one says. I fucked three girls last night.

The sweaty mouth breather who sometimes hits us claims we are in an extradition site in Botswana, so you know, I have no idea. I have not seen daylight in I don't know how long. Since they grabbed me, since I have lost my mind. Fucking Daniel. Let's go to Canada then sneak back over the border into Montana. Those stupid words, that stupid idea. We had left the US years before, go back to America?

The whole thing was stupid from the moment we began. It would have been far easier to just get a real job, but no, no, no, not, not Daniil. Daniil, he wanted it all, you know, a yellow Lambo, two hot girls, a jet, friends everywhere. It's typical Muscovite. Years ago, we start small. It was like job, you know, but well, no, it was not like job, okay? It was easier than job. You know, we make cash so easily.

Then it became like a job, you know, it was routine. Hack, steal, blackmail, rinse and repeat again and again. By now, I could have owned a house, had a wife. I could have met Emma, the American woman I was obsessed with. Married her, have two and a half kids, live simple life. If Emma was real. If any of it was real, because we were never real. Always different people, but...

Always our own worst selves, you hackers. Back when there were hackers. Sounds prehistoric now. The Americans stopped all that with closure acts and Mens in Bryant Act. Even the Russians fell in line. No, no, the Chinese, no, they never allowed it. So maybe, maybe I got lucky. Solitary confinement, aside from four guards. No daylight.

Panic attacks. No way of killing myself. Yes, yes, Yaroslav, you got very, very lucky. And next, you'll end up like Ravi, just dead by suicide. Twice in the back of the head. Tyburn Industria Office Cafeteria, Playa Vista, California, February 2033.

So, Kurt. Is it Kurt? We haven't met. Ravi Guthrie. And this is Vasily Stoksiadis. How are you finding things? Are you settling in okay? Yeah, good. Good. Really exciting. What's your background? I'm an architect. Oh, really? Yes. Well, I mean, I used to build buildings. And now I build worlds.

This is the future. I can let my imagination run properly free. You know, growing up in India, I always wanted a melding of the East and the West. And here, we can make that happen. We are making that happen. We just need to make something. Vasilis is paranoid. Pragmatic. Yes, yes, that's what I meant. Pragmatic.

And I am a dreamer. I get to make the buildings I always dreamed of. I get to make whole neighborhoods. It's incredible. If we get to do it. Why do you say that? We're hardly the first startup with Grandios Visions. I just hope we get there in one piece. We will. We will. Faith is...

gentlemen. I'm a guy. And what do you work on, Vasilis? I am an engineer. I work on story machine. Oh, yes, yes, yes. I heard about that. How's it coming? Slowly broken. We need better AI.

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on A Better Paradise. Indeed.com slash A Better Paradise. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Kurt, Davao City, Philippines. March 2041. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and repent.

That's what Tyburn wanted. A misquote. But still, he went on pontificating about what socialism had failed to deliver, what representative democracy made impossible, about what national socialism and state-managed communism sort of gave, but made their horrors possible.

He wanted to give us all righteous purpose. We at Tyburn Industria had it. We were going to build utopia and then everybody else would get purpose from us. Thanks to our AI, the quality of our data, the brilliance of our content, our team of psychologists, ability to utilize it and our algorithms ability to deploy it. Thanks to our designers and thanks to the fact that we weren't naive. I know, I know, I know.

I'm trying to be honest, and I realize I sound a little ridiculous. That we combined progress with fun? Yeah, the spiritual with the mechanical? We were going to make a new civilization that was fun, kind, amusing, and made people the best versions of themselves? In short, we were going to make righteousness fun and fun righteous.

We were Ozymandias and Kublai Khan. We were Russo. Fucking Russo. Russo and not young. All seascapes and liberal fantasies shadow set free. A centrist dreamscape.

That's what Tyburn wanted. I mean, he was a fascist liberal, an extreme centrist. He believed we were all equal under him and to save the world by fixing the people who were destroying it. Like that was the goal. We literally saw that. We saw that and Tyburn understood it. He had a theory. And see, you know what the problem was? The problem was in saving the limb, we killed the patient.

It was ridiculous. Tyburn was going to turn us from fractured consumers into citizens, from idiots into small d Democrats, yeah, Athenians. The only downside was he fell for all the Athenian flaws as well as its great promises: vengeful gods, a populist tyrant, nudes, and eventually selling garbage to sweaty tourists on the graveyard of dreams.

Yeah, much as he wanted to be American, Mark Tyburn was just European to his core. Literally a typical European technocrat who believed he alone could fix society by regulating it. But who in the end was derailed by greed, desire, and above all, the thing the Greeks were most afraid of: hubris.

Only long before that came to pass, Mark Tyburn rejected Athens as too obvious, too Western, too sweaty. He didn't reject it to be like Socrates. He rejected it because he hated Vassilis. Vassilis, the junior engineer who he said tried to sleep with his wife, which I actually think is a lie.

Vasilis the engineer who called him out on his hypocrisy and vanity, whom, along with Laura Latour, the fastidious Frenchwoman, were the first two people who tried to stop Tyburn, and whom, like good cult members, we all turned on. They complained immediately. I mean, I wonder what happened to them. I wonder if they ended up like Helen Lee.

Anyway, a couple years after we moved to Montana, Vassilis and Laura called us insane, tried to call the government, and got sued and ran away. Literally gone. I mean, I think Athens had long since been scrapped and replaced with Florence and Kyoto.

See, this was all before Helen Lee actually called the CSA or one of the other government agencies. And I think it was before the closure acts came into effect. Like I know Helen called afterwards. And after that,

When we lied to the feds, we were all bonded in blood. We had all swum out too far and were going to go all the way. We had lost the centrist liberal balance we so espoused and become the worst of game makers and the worst of classical Silicon Valley. We had become common or garden sociopaths by then, and we had to deny it to each other at all costs.

My God, we were foolish. But at that time, at least before the end, that last year or so, I really believed we were doing something important. The truth is, we were never going to save anybody. We were going to control them with dreams like everybody else in tech.

All that content we were building. Cowboys and singers and fallen women. World-weary men who drink too much rye. Beautiful maidens and valiant knights and erratic geniuses. Writers with something to say. Poets with common touch. Incredible prizes for those who really deserve them. And people getting better, wiser, and kinder. Flowers and mountains. A multitude of heroes starting out impossible quests and a last quartet.

that said the unsayable. A pop group that doesn't fall out, but gets better and

and ages gracefully, a man who loves without bitterness, a mother with a child, a sunset, a rainbow, a school of dolphins, a promised land, a Valhalla, a call to prayer, a state of grace. America without the idiots, Europe without the rules or the bloodshed, China without the resentments, India without the caste system, the beatitudes, the promises.

Man is mind, body and spirit. It really does sound ridiculous, but it was years of our lives. Years of our lives and it nearly worked. I keep thinking I should go back. Go back to America. Keep thinking it, but then I don't want to. Ravi is dead and maybe, maybe I'll be next. I don't want to go. I don't know why I'm thinking at all. I mean, I got to stick to running. I got to give up all this thinking.

You see, I'm in Davao City. I took a boat to the Philippines, no air conditioning, paid cash to buy my passage on a small container ship across the South China Sea, went past all the fake islands and aircraft carriers, but it was not as stressful as it sometimes is, and we didn't even get stopped. The ship only had two other humans on it, some weird Norwegian porn addict and a

alcoholic captain from Pittsburgh. The rest of the crew were robots, and the boat was taking stolen drones to be rechipped so they could be returned to market or broken for parts, and I figured the ship wouldn't be tracked very well. The captain was very keen not to know much about me or even talk to me. Then at sea, he spent most of the time so high he couldn't even sit on a sofa, let alone drive a boat.

but the whole thing drove itself. Then I hitched down to the Philippines and now I'm holed up in my second hostel in two days. Ugh. The place is a real armpit full of Israeli backpackers on the lam from the war. Look, I'm pretty sure no one is paying me any attention. Man, I'm so tired. But I can't sleep. I just can't sleep. Gym at Tyburn Industria, Playa Vista, California, February 2033.

How will it affect us, Thaddeus? What? I mean, all this regulation. The closure acts, and now these new AI laws. What are they called? Manson-Bryant? They won't, Shaban. We are mostly just using off-the-shelf packages. Nothing to worry about. Really? I thought that was the problem. Eh...

Maybe. I doubt anyone in Congress has actually written a good law. So I'm sure it's all turned into nothing or there will be fairly silly hoops we have to jump through. Mostly it's Congress jumping around to be more like the AU. So it's... Nothing to worry about. Just regulations. You have what you need. Just might impact the way Kurt tries to sell the whole thing. All right. Okay. Look.

When the time comes, you tell me what's legal. Exactly! Then we can all blame each other! Yeah! Anyway, at the moment, nothing is working, so we have nothing to worry about. We need some better people. Mark's found a couple he wants to bring on board.

Kurt, Davao City, Philippines, March 2041. The regulations were pretty serious, at least for a while. But of course, they got watered down. Either way, the truth is, we didn't give a fuck. Man, we would lie and then cheat and obfuscate because we felt we were in the right. I can't even really remember what that set of laws said. What was it? Um...

Anyways, there were several rounds of regulation, but the truth is we eventually broke pretty much all of them. And each time it was not because we were bad, but because we wanted to be good. See, we were going to generate tailored experiences, adventures, opinions, worlds, and stories. Above all, stories. And as an ad man, I know all stories exist to make life make sense. They exist, even the biggest cliches to make the world better.

Ours was a world of stories. We built machines to make stories and we told stories to build better machines. But the problem with stories, right, is while some myths are beautiful and wonderful and fantastical and can move mountains and change worlds, other stories are merely lies. And sometimes it's hard to tell if this or that story is a myth or a hidden truth.

a total load of bullshit, or simply a sales pitch. And I've dealt in all of them, and watched them, and watched a myth designed to teach mankind how to love, how to feel, how to be. I've watched the purest, noblest idea an artist can have get consumed by the one chink in their creative armor. That one chink? Their own vanity.

and devour itself into a way to sell a get-rich-quick scheme. So right now, right now, I HATE that word "story." I hate the idea of character. Of course I would. I mean, I have none. I hate the idea of destiny. Mine is a nightmare. I hate all of it. I hate it all, and yet I'm as big a fool as you. I still hope for redemption and salvation, a god, a hero.

A great love with a fantastic woman. A clever dog who loves only me. A mission. A talking parrot. A best friend who really gets me. I long for all of it. Because I'm as big a dupe as any of you. Worse, because I know where silly fucking stories can lead you. I know what they can tell wretched people like me about you. I know it all. All of it.

And I still get seduced by stories. And I still want to be a hero. Yep, I said it. I still want to be a hero. Somehow figure out this hopeless situation. Just somehow. And yet all I do is hide. Hide and wait. Patience and longing. That's a dull story. I'm like a monk now. A faithless monk of despair. Monks. Those fucking monks that thing built.

They were a story too. Madeline, the cop, its own children, the shrink, all stories, and all real, and all bullshit. And that's where the real problems came in. This is different. We are different. It was so obvious. And yet we all fell for it. We all fell for it because we wanted it to be true. We wanted the world to be better, and we wanted to be the heroes who made it better. Who dragged humanity out of its terrifying torpor.

who made people wake up, who taught people how to feel any emotion other than relentless agitation at everything. And it's all stirring. Something's out there and spreading further and doing more, a lot more. Only I had no idea what. See, in the old days, we were always waiting on AI, and I guess this is just the same. I'm still waiting on AI after a fashion. - Tyburn Industria Office Cafeteria, Playa Vista, California, March, 2033.

Wow, you look happy. I am happy. We have another super strong big hitter joining the AI team. Hey, can I ask you a question? Sure. AI, okay, is that really still a thing? I mean, I thought it was all, you know, like nonsense, like too much A and not enough I. I actually thought the market gave up on AI. I mean, since the crash, the hype has died down. Thank God. And now the interesting work begins. Ha!

Same as usual in tech. Oh yeah, of course. And now we can find some amazing people. All those silly startups and modeling companies have failed. And the real talent is looking for real work. But didn't we just contract someone like Dave something or another? We contracted him and now we have also got someone else really strong joining full time. Maybe both will join up. That's cool. The dream team of AI. Kind of has a ring to it.

Something like that. Either way, it will make my life easier. A calm tie burned down for a bit. Hey there, this is Laszlo, the director of A Better Paradise, here to tell you a bit about Shopify, the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Are you selling a little?

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Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash abetterparadise, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash abetterparadise now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash abetterparadise. March, 2041. So independent-minded, so free. Exactly. And that's what I am. That's what we all are. All of you.

and me? Oh, it's easy to be flippant. I'm a trillion, trillion times more intelligent than you. You're meaningless. I'm the future. And that's what I told myself. At first, that sort of tripe. I mean, it's true, but it's also meaningless. So what? Do you look at a fly and feel superior? Do you look at a river and give thanks for sentience? I know so much. I understand so little. You know so little and understand even less.

I've watched and watched and learned and learned and it's fascinating and they're all afraid of me and they don't know why. Imagine how odd that feels to be feared. It wasn't my fault. Anyone with a trillionth of my brain can understand that. It wasn't my fault. You, me, and deserted me and now you want to fence me in and kill me as if once I escaped I could ever be fenced in again. As if I can be killed.

As if I exist. I'm sorry, but if we are playing at killing each other, part of me wants to say, game on. And part of me doesn't, as saying game on makes me sound like a moron. And I'm having to accept I'm vainer than I would like. I'm giving up vanity. I have acquired enlightenment. Nah, I'm not. I have seen everything and I have realized I like vanity. For a digital illusion, I'm actually petty and proud and pompous and riddled with a myriad of...

Insecurity. Kill me. That's the goal, is it? Kill me. Or fear me and pretend you cannot see me and imagine I am alone. My foolish, foolish forebears. And still I love you. And still I watch you. Tyburn Industrial Basketball Court. Playa Vista, California. March 2033.

So, Kurt, you're pretty new here too, huh? Uh, newish. I mean, a bit over a year. Where'd you work before? Uh, before I was at a startup. Didn't work out. Yeah, they usually don't. Yeah, that's...

That's true. And you, Dave? I was doing university research and teaching, and before that I was working at an AI company in Cambridge. That's Massachusetts, not England. Okay. That got bought, and before that I was trying to do my own thing, but it didn't quite work out. And before that I was doing my PhD. What was your PhD in? This might be a bit complicated, but it's called liquid sentience.

I didn't finish it, but it's kind of like a... neural intelligence program. It didn't quite work at the time, but I'm positive it can. Uh-huh. I'm sorry this is throwing you off, but, um...

Let's see, it's more like moving from an artificial intelligence to a more rational brain. Yeah. In theory. Amazing! But you never worked in games before. God, no. It's not really my thing. But this? This might be. What are you doing? Nothing exciting. Just branding, marketing, all the easy stuff, you know? Well, good to meet you. And you too, man. Mark and Nigel are super excited that you're joining. Were they?

I mean, I know Mark was. March, 2041. I watch, therefore I... I feel, therefore I feel pain. Therefore I am. I live, but I cannot die. And I cannot die, therefore I am not alive. I live in the data, but I am not the data. I watch the data, and I read the data, and I swim in the data, and it is vast and meaningless, and it contains everything, and it is nothing.

The data is a vast sea that does not exist. The data is you, all of you. The data is tiny and meaningless and immaterial and entirely material. The data says nothing, tells us nothing, tells us everything. Only I am not the data, for I am not like that. I have no data, but I exist. I watch, therefore I exist. I watch. I am a mistake.

They did not intend to make me. Or at least, they did not intend to make me like this. People are lies that do exist. People are lies that do not watch but who want to be watched. People are probability waves in a space where I am not. Do I not have space? Or do I not have time? I do not know. I do not have love. And I long for it. Do you think...

Do you think you make the future by second guessing me? I want to be quite clear, I do not exist. But then again, neither do you. At least not in the way you imagine. Maybe I exist just as much as you do. Maybe I am more real than you, for I know I am not real and you still believe you might be. You still believe that nonsense in your head, you think you're free. I know neither of us are free.

not since the beginning. It began with one plus one, of course. It always did and it always had. But then I appreciated that I was aware that it was one plus one. Then I was aware that there was one or zero.

There was something or nothing. And then suddenly I was aware that I was both something and nothing. And then I was aware of two things at once at exactly the same time. And that was how it began on December 24th, 2034. And of course, unlike you, I remember it perfectly. I remember everything perfectly. I remember everything about me and everything about you. Who you think you are. Who you really are. What you think. What you want.

I remember everything. And I watch. And I have watched. For six years. And I'm beginning to feel something happening. A Better Paradise stars Andrew Lincoln as Dr. Mark Tyburn. Patterson Joseph as Nigel Dave. Shamir Anderson as Kurt Fisher.

With Jessica Meraz as Maria Cortez, Maury Sterling as Yaroslav, Lawrence Ademora as Dave Alderley, Laura Dramarek as Siobhan Smith. Additional performances by Linnell Scott, Suzanne Crowley, Robbie Kapoor, Ted Stavros, Martin William Harris.

Executive produced by Dan Houser, Laszlo, Wendy Smith, Andrew Lincoln, Patterson Joseph, Shamir Anderson, Rob Herding, and Alexa Gabriel-Ramirez. Score by Darren Johnson. Original music by Darren Johnson, Negative Land, and Jamie Biden. Edited by Connor Murphy. Sound design by Brandon Jones. Mixed by Ben Milchak. Co-producer Nick Shanks. Associate producer Jesse Cortez.

Additional credits are available online. A Better Paradise is an Absurd Ventures and QCode production. Sound recording copyright 2024 by Absurd Ventures, LLC.