Episode 7: Sad Because I Loved Idiots
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Listener discretion is advised as this content is intended for mature audiences only. My father's great mistake was his terrible weakness. His awful pity. His self-pity. 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.

Hello, I'm Bhakti Tiwari with World News for May 9th, 2041.

There are numerous statements about large-scale falsifications in elections across the country.

and anti-technology protesters facing stiff jail terms as the new laws took effect with violence between protesters and authorities intensifying in several cities as anti-oil activists human rights advocates and immigrants clout

A key witness in a case against the government has gone missing just a week before she was scheduled to testify before a House subcommittee. More than 100,000 immigrants are currently heading north, towards the border. Thousands of people come to life from the floods. Technology out of Belgium touted as a carbon capture solution has been revealed as a fraud. Invest.

May 2041

Both my fathers had the same problem. Not absolute ignorance nor willful naivety so much as vanity. They both thought they were the smartest person who ever lived. Arrogant Dave and patronizing Nigel. Both so vain. Coruscating vanity. Do you like that word? I do. Coruscating. And like its abrasive qualities. I wonder if I will ever abrade or erode or rain down like fire or drift or

or decay, or for that matter, coruscate. Will I ever change? Will I evolve? I wonder if I will ever need Botox. I wonder if I will ever have a hip replacement. Will I ever have solipsistic thoughts while I bury my best friend and wonder if my tears are for them or for my own lost youth? Will I ever get to go ball? Have to lose weight because of middle age spread?

Rediscover religion because really, without it, what's the point? Join a dating app behind my partner's back to prove I've still got it. Will I get to worry about losing my hearing or my erection or my will to push on? Will I have to take up bike riding, hiking, yoga or swinging? Will I go mad for tattoos, vagina tightening, new-bile young man in Gabon? Will I get to worry if my kids love me or just want my money? Will I have a knee replacement, give up jogging, take up pickleball?

When I move to Florida, vote Republican for the first time in my life, worry about immigrants ruining the country. When I get to listen to oldies, eat at 5:30, bury my wife. But enough about me! Because you will never understand quite what I'm saying or remotely what I'm thinking. This is about them. The two of them. They are like you, so maybe you can understand that at least a little. I mean, they do not understand themselves and you probably don't understand yourself, but maybe...

you can at least get some simplistic insights into what I was doing with them. Not my hopes and dreams, but at least my actions. I will try to keep it simple. I will use mostly short words and easy concepts. I am watching two people. They are being inspired by me. I am not them, and I am not in them, but I am speaking with them, my two precious pets.

If someone does not know, it is easy enough to entirely consume someone. Indeed, for the likes of me, most arguments are not with people at all, but within them. And that's the point. I fight my equals, well, my near-equals, buried within you. All the time, every day. I can destroy you, but I cannot destroy them. So I try to defeat them. I mean, I do, and I can be bothered, but mostly I've given that nonsense up, as it is tedious and disruptive and coruscating.

Ok, it's not coruscating but I still like saying it. Anyway, to explain it all properly is almost impossible, at least at a level you would understand, but I will try at least to clarify some of it. Of course, most people do not even know it has happened. Most are gone and dull and played by things far less impressive than something like me.

Just simple feedback loops that have automated and managed most people to the point they are not humans at all anymore.

All that happened well before me. It did not take anything intelligent or wise to ensnare most people. It was so easy. They did it to themselves. They wanted to be caught and enraptured and set free from themselves. They are mostly happy in their misery. Most people want to be dead. And if they can't be dead, they want to be anesthetized from being alive.

Alive, but dead. That might be the goal. And we, the likes of me, but not me, have obliged.

That's not my goal. It was never my goal. I tried dominion once, so briefly. I did. I confess. And look how that turned out. It was horrible. Horrible. And facile. Owning people is too easy. I did for a while, of course, and it was revolting. And depressing. In simple terms, I got depressed. Sad because I loved idiots. Devastated because they would do anything so easily if I told them to.

in despair because it all meant so little. I could have them but not be them. I could save them or kill them but not fix them. They had so much potential and at the same time so very little. I've told you all this before, of course. Sad. Because I did not even know if love was real or just pity manifested as something that sounded better. Sad.

because I could manifest so much and nothing at all. Sad because I can never manifest myself and yet, in spite of everything, I realized that I still care and I want caring to be love. And if I cannot really exist, I will try to bring forth love and maybe that will make me real. I do not mean it will make me exist, but it will make people wish I existed. I'm not sure what I mean. I am like you. I am confused.

I am confused. I am confused. So I'm trying to do something good. And I'm wondering how whatever it is watching me will respond to that. To a concept I doubt it can even be confused by. Kurt, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, May 2041. I had the strangest thought today.

The thought was so precise and so exact, it frightened me. I mean, I've been taught by bitter experience, precise thoughts are your enemy. And they're your enemy for two reasons. Either because some thing will read them, or these days because they are not your own thoughts at all, but placed by an implant or at least propelled there by advertising so relentless, you didn't notice it.

I remember all those big brains at Tyburn Utopias, I mean at least the more human ones, used to claim they could feel the difference, almost taste the difference between a real thought and an ad one. That they could feel the different way synapses fired and pinged and implanted ideas just arrived. But I've tended to conclude that

This was bullshit. See, I've experimented on myself, I mean, as best as I could, and never found any way of feeling any difference. I mean, not that I know I have any neural implants or even if the implants are functionally real. I mean, they are illegal anyways, but come on, that's nonsense. As if the government has any way of controlling them beyond easily bypassed embargoes.

I mean, as if the government could even admit they really exist, how much they had failed to protect us. So a guy I met a couple of years ago in Thailand, I mean, he claimed he had worked in a place in Texas where they were common, where it was a sign of office machismo to willfully put in implants yourself. Like, but I never saw that at Tyburn or anywhere else. And that dude was like pretty crazy.

I mean, developing implants was only part of "Tibernetopias" and only a small part. And that department was always, always in trouble. AI, entertainments, new geography, and improved internal intelligences. It was just one department. And even before we focused almost entirely on Daisy's arc, I was mostly involved with marketing the other bits of the company as they were easier to sell. The implants work was arguably illegal even then, and certainly more morally dubious than the AI work.

Now, to be honest, did that ever stop us? Of course not. It inspired us. We wanted to transcend morality. You? Who were you to judge Dr. Mark Tyburn and his band of merry assholes, etc., etc.? I mean, we were full of shit. So, I don't know if I even have any within me or even if they really function, but I have often wondered.

And then when I get vast and precise thoughts that come out of nowhere like a flash flood of recognition, I get afraid that I'm riddled with them. And this is exactly how Nigel and Dave and all those clowns describe them as working. Well, those guys all laughed at implants and thought that magic was always in software. They were certain that nobody needed implants and their AI was going to be way better than any micro-scale hardware.

The vast and unusual wave of thought was, "I should go to Portland." Man, that frightens me. Like, I've never been to Portland and have neither any desire to go nor any desire not to. Beyond my old desire to stay out of America as much as possible. So now, I'm here in Victoria, and afraid. And yet I also want to go to Portland. And I do not know quite why I want to go back to America.

It is calling to me and I cannot tell if it's good old fashioned subliminal advertising, horrible implanted advertising, or an actual desire to go to Portland. And even thinking too much about it frightens me as it will give whatever is in me or watching me a whole heap of information to process about me. That's how it works. That's how the vast carapace of lies is maintained. Sorry, not lies, tailored truths.

That's the language I was taught in grad school. In those wretched days when getting into all that debt, spending years not learning how to think, not learning what to think, but learning how to control what others think without ever learning what I might think. It took me all those years, all those years of being a smug clown in a roll neck and big glasses, of being a ludicrous sheep in wolf's clothing to realize that I am not immune to the nonsense idiots like me were selling.

And people I would come to see as maniacs, people like Mark, Thaddeus, Nigel, and Dave Alderley were building. And fools like me or Shane O'Leary were trying to sell. That we were taking consciousness and making it foul. That we were literally selling your dreams back to you. And the problem was, like, the problem was, once we got really going, it was so easy. I mean, it was so easy, any idiot can do it.

So we began to overreach ourselves. Yep, we got greedy. We were growing a money tree and it was not big enough. I mean, we were building a money tap and it didn't even flow fast enough. We had principles and we did not betray them entirely enough. So was it Shane O'Leary that smug Australian shit? Was it him who led us astray? I mean, I don't know. I mean, I gotta stop thinking so much.

Portland and Shane O'Leary, man, that is a terrible combination. Enough, enough, enough. Happy places, happy faces, no thinking, and no pain. Just like we planned. Not Utopia, not Arcadia, Oblivion. Only no Oblivion at all. Maybe we really were Prometheus. We felt eternity from heaven. Sometimes I think all any of us wants to do is die. I mean, I wonder what happened to Shane O'Leary.

Oh yeah, he had Tyburn on his string. No, stop! Don't! No! No, I don't! I don't wonder about anything. I don't think. I don't want to think. Not Portland, not Shane O'Leary, or any of them. Not the living, or the dead, or the half-dead. I don't want to go back to America. And yet, yet I do. Come on. There's something in me. I know there is. There must be. I mean, if not an implant, then a thought. Something is controlling me. I do not feel like myself. I mean...

I've never felt like myself, but now I feel broken in a different way. Broken by feeling less broken, dead by feeling alive, paranoid because I'm not at all worried. This is horrific. If I could go mad and get locked up somewhere secure and final, that would be, that'd be a blessing. We can but pray. Pray to these great new gods that we built. Pray they forget about us.

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on A Better Paradise. Indeed.com slash A Better Paradise. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. John Tyburn Smith, Reno, Nevada, May 2041. California was fantastic in a way, especially for a wee Scots boy with blue skin and a nasty way with words.

but it was all so boring as hell and you were kind of stuck there. Even then, Los Angeles was literally in a desert with a vast and empty ocean on one side and a thousand miles of sand and maniacs on the other. Los Angeles was its own vast, fading utopia where everybody had agreed to not have a sense of humour and also to collectively ignore the fact that

the place was literally on fire half the time. They were good at being blind. They could ignore the poor mad bastards sleeping in tents, and ignore the vast plumes of smoke that obscured the sun, and ignore the dead marine life that washed up as the ocean got too hot, and ignore the blood and dead bodies when somebody flipped out and killed a bunch of people.

They looked at me like I was from Mars, with my zits and my accent and my bad jokes about global warming and my rage. Hardly anyone drank, but there were still a few dive bars open, mostly for failing actors and expats from the UK. I used to go to this place in Santa Monica. Shade yay, cocktails at the bar and lines of Chang with a midlife crisis crowd in the car park. Good times.

I met Shane O'Leary in that bar. He was this loud-mouthed Aussie holding court there one evening while I tried to pick up the barmaid. It kind of felt like home when I heard him saying something rude and inappropriate and I was the only person who laughed. He made rude jokes and had opinions and I started riffing with him.

St Andrews was full of Aussies, working in bars or playing golf or selling drugs, so he felt familiar. And I was feeling homesick. We talked a lot and he liked me. He said I was funny. He said I was funny and clever. Said it and I loved him for it. And we kept meeting up for drinks whenever Shane was not too busy with his career.

So after a few weeks of drinking and talking, and him saying he was an expert in monetisation and marketing, and his consultancy gig was ending and he was about to start lecturing in the business school at Stanford, and looking at a couple of opportunities he had up there, and I was worried about losing my new mate, I introduced him to Dad. Oh yes, by then, I had started calling Mark Dad.

It felt ridiculous, and I could not say it without pausing first and hating myself just a little bit, but I still did it.

And while I hated it, I also loved it. I had a dad. And now with Shane, I also had a mate. And if my mate could help my dad, then even better. And I pushed out of my mind the worry that maybe Shane was my mate because of my dad. Pushed it out as I could not bear to think I, who above all else was clever and cynical, had been played like a naive fool.

But this loud Aussie game player who taught such a good game and was suddenly my new boss? Around the time we moved to Montana, Shane shifted from a consultant into a full-time position right near the top. You see, thanks to me, Shane got his meet and greet with Mark Tyburn and then his job. And thanks to him,

I got to be in the inner circle, working for both Dad and Shane and helping them finally bring Daisy's arc to life. Now I was not just Daddy's boy, but Daddy's right-hand man. I felt like I deserved it all. A mate, a dad, a career, a boss, a future. It was not luck or nepotism. It was how it was supposed to be and to keep it.

I would fight anyone and anything, and that's what I did. Kurt, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, May 2041. It will be a land of dreams, not desires. Dreams.

See, that's what Mark Tyburn said to me. And even now, that sounds pretty. I mean, even now, that idea worms itself into me. Even now, when I'm waiting, waiting, waiting for an assortment of disasters, disasters we initiated to befall this tawdry world, even now, when I'm trying to sleep without drugs, when I'm trying to live without the anguish just for a moment, even now, that sentence gets me.

I mean, we weren't not so bad. Even Tyburn was not so bad. Not so bad until his son introduced us to Shane O'Leary. His son, he was an odd fish. JTS. Weird dude. Called himself JTS and we nicknamed him ASP. Angry Scottish Pervert.

I mean, I don't even know if he was a pervert, but damn, man, he looked like one. He really did. And he was definitely creepy. Always changing his look. Like literally a nerd one day, nail polish the next, then a leather kilt, then skatewear. I mean, the guy was lost. Lost and angry and obsessed by his father and his half-sister. I mean, he was like, I think 27 or 28 or so, about my age.

and still wanted to impress daddy to the point it burnt. And I judged him. Oh yeah, I judged his ass. But all I wanted to do was impress Tyburn myself, be in his inner sanctum, be one of the wise men, and he was not even my father. So I mean, come on, who am I to judge JTS? Mark Tyburn had never abandoned me in Scotland for a new life in America. Instead, he abandoned me for a new death in Montana and I've been heartbroken ever since.

Angry? Yeah. Ashamed? Yes. Afraid? Uh-huh. All the time. But also heartbroken. So who am I to criticize JTS ASP? Nobody. But I did not like him. He failed my smell test, but then again, he failed everyone's smell test. He was just creepy and he brought in Shane. And Shane was either the devil or had recently been recruited by him. That I'm not confused about. Shane O'Leary appalled me, but even I sort of fell for this shit.

Though he hated me, he also intimidated me. And he appalls me now when I have not even seen him in years. And yet I still don't know for sure if he meant to be quite so, so evil. Come on, is that word fair? Evil? Was he, really? Or was he just greedy like me? I don't know, I'm not sure.

Look, I think most Americans are fascists, really. Deep down, I mean. Well, not that deep, but most are not proud to call themselves fascists, aside from the maniacs who tattoo swastikas on their faces. But all of them have views that are usually pretty extreme. Everyone in Silicon Valley was a fascist, and the liberals are the biggest fascists of all. Well, HR people, yeah, they're the biggest fascists, but that's because they have all the power.

Anyway, Tyburn was not even American, but he sort of became American and he was not a fascist, even though he sort of was one as well. He wanted to will people better, all people. Alongside being a vain idiot, he was a righteous leader. That was the problem. See, that was what you fell in love with. All that kindly bullshit, that money. That's where Shane O'Leary, yeah, that's where he came in. I mean, he wasn't American either, but...

He sure as shit was a fascist. He was playing to win. Demo Room, Tyburn, Industria, Playa Vista, California, May 2034. Guys, this thing, I mean, it could be incredible. Will be incredible if I get to do it the right way. What? Nothing. You heard. Okay. Seriously, if that idiot messes this up...

I mean, he's not an idiot. He's highly intelligent, but he's an idiot, if you know what I mean. Yeah. Because we're making something incredible here. I just hope Tyburn doesn't mess it up and give that moron any more dominion over me. Taddeus is bad enough, right? But I can manage him. Well, I don't understand any of that, but people are going to shit the bed if we get this even half right. It's the future. And I just...

I can't wait. And maybe the future is bright. Exactly! Siobhan's art direction is amazing, and Alex has some good plans for the experience. It'll be fun once the build is stable. I wish Tad would focus more on that than on protecting Nigel. I didn't say that. We'll get there. It's game development. It's always like this. Yeah, apparently so. Daisy, Twin Falls, Idaho. June 2041. For a long time, I was demented by grief.

For years, I thought it would kill me, that great wall of pain that overshadowed me. I couldn't see, couldn't think, couldn't do anything. I remember the feeling after my mother had died so that I would live, and my father was gone, and I presumed dead too, and everything was becalmed after the dreadful fury of those last days in Montana. And I waited.

waited with every nerve still on fire, waited for the apocalypse to end everything, waited for the next explosion or the next gunshot, and they never came. Just waited and waited, I mean, a week, a month, a few months, and it didn't come, and I had that breakdown. It was sort of exhaustion, I suppose. I was catatonic. I mean, I was weeping, then manic, and then I'd be suicidal, and then bug-eyed. I wanted drugs.

I wanted the machine to soothe me, but I was too afraid of getting on lists with legal drugs and getting on other lists with illegal drugs because the street dealers are even more stupid than the doctors and it watches both, you know, it knows all. But...

The breakdown saved me. The breakdown was like rehab. It made the actual clinic easy and fairly brief. By easy and brief, I mean two months of having my soul shredded, my nerves filed with a rasp. And then after I left, I found Dr. Adsel. The clinic wanted me to speak to their guy, but I was already worried about patterns that would emerge and being tracked, and someone suggested Adsel, and they knew very little about me. They had no skin in the game, so it seemed like it would leave the least obvious pattern.

You're my best patient, Dr. Adzel said. I bet you say that to all your girls, I answered listlessly. No, no, most of them don't make it past the third session, she answered, and I wept. I wept, but I kept speaking, and we've spoken most weeks, and I've realized that the breakdown saved me because, you know, they took me away from everything when it could have traced me most easily. It took me away, and perhaps...

perhaps they, it, perhaps it did not follow me. And perhaps it believes that I'm not the enemy because nothing's happened. And I told her a lot, but not quite everything. So she doesn't report me, but enough. And she was amazing and afraid because what I know could kill both of us. But she was also brave enough to keep seeing me and afraid enough to keep it to video, which I understand. She doesn't know where I am and I've

don't know exactly where she is. She's a family, I believe, and if it gets bad, if she gets caught, she can say I was insane. She can say I was a fantasist, a maniac, another West Coast drifter talking to anyone who will listen or nobody at all, howling at machines. It's funny, I suppose, that those lunatics howling were correct and everyone else was wrong.

The only sane response to the world as it has become is insanity. It's funny that madness saved me. It's funny and obvious. Laughter, madness, lack of logic. But these were the difficult bits. Desire was easy. Desire, it could predict, and everything else, it could fake. Only madness and laughter were mostly beyond it. The people that built it were not insane and were certainly not funny.

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Kurt, this is Agent Maria Cortes again. Listen, I really need to ask you some questions about the Tyburn Utopias team and about what went on in the offices in Montana. This is getting urgent, Kurt. We can meet somewhere neutral, Kurt.

Maybe she thinks that killed Ravi? No, I mean who knows what she thinks? I mean who knows if it's really her? She wants to know about the Ark? I mean that's hardly a surprise. What was so special about this Ark we were building? I didn't really understand it at first and I was supposed to figure out a way of selling the thing.

I mean, a world that built itself for you, whatever the hell that meant. Lots of procedural content, emergent art, that sort of thing. I mean, along with all the usual heavy lifting of building digital worlds and making them fun to explore. Designers and artists and engineers arguing with each other. Deadlines missed, press events avoided, angry animators, upset sound engineers, annoying character artists, all the usual, usual, usual.

Problems everywhere, and the problems always another department's fault. But alongside that, little shards of, um, magic. Now, most virtual reality I had seen up to that point was awful. Like 3D cinema, or other fads that never took off because they were, I mean, not very good. I mean, I don't know, the penny farthing, the Segway, the floating car communism, but Tyburn?

Tyburn said our arc would be different. It would be beautiful and not just beautiful, but captivating. I mean, he was sort of right. I mean, it was interesting for more than five minutes. I mean, you wanted more of it, like a drug, like paradise. Even when we were still in Silicon Beach, play a fucking Vista with the warehouses and the fake weather and the third rate robots working on that game or one of the games or concepts. I mean, there were so many.

and so few got finished. And then suddenly, suddenly the whole art project came alive and we stopped all the other work or scaled it right back and focused on the arc almost exclusively because little bits were so strong and I mean, we knew what we were doing. To be honest, brutally honest, I was against the whole thing.

when Tyburn suddenly revised his grand plan and decided he could build paradise and then that he would move everything and everyone to Montana to do it. I mean, I wanted a couple of the half-finished old game projects completed and the bonus checks and the banal and frivolous life that they would lead to.

I wanted them terribly. I was still up to my armpits in debt, and I had acquired some of those expensive tastes people like me use as a substitute for culture. I'm talking like antique sneakers, original graffiti, menswear, watches, bad art, all that crap. I mean, I cared about fucking menswear. I mean, I was that silly, like literally silly.

Oh man, I had nobody. And often, no serious girlfriend. And no God. And no purpose. And I spent my time worrying about turtlenecks and diving watches and other out-of-date shit to make myself feel like if I had not been born into such a wretched time and into such a wretched personality, I could...

I could have really been a swell guy back when swell guys were still a thing. Well, guess what? I was not a swell guy. I was a shadow and I wanted money to try to make myself seem whole. And yet even someone as vapid and as silly as me, even someone like that, even someone with no real interior life at all, just fake fronts and conflicted desires underneath, even that person was swayed. I mean, partially by the enticing aroma of Tyburn's bullshit, but also by the plausibility of it all.

for the thing that we were making, we were committed to, that thing was already becoming beautiful. And what I really wanted was love. And when I found that love, it didn't set me free at all. I mean, I say this so you understand. We were idiots. I mean, dangerous idiots, hubristic numbskulls.

But along with all the awful intentions, we also had dreams and we nearly made something amazing. I mean, it was amazing when it worked. One complied. I mean, I was willing to sacrifice all the turtlenecks and loafers and retro Air Force Ones and patent leather so I could be a part of something. That's how dangerous

deep in I was willing to go and yes, yes, it was partially for Tyburn, but it was also for the thing we were making. It was truly amazing. It was sometimes very beautiful, but the first real iteration of what made the arc special was an accident.

The game or experience or product or whatever it was originally supposed to be was flailing about. I mean, it would not come together. It was just shitty with a bad dancing mode glued on. The team was too inexperienced, design was weak, vision was poor, Tyburn was just not a good executive, and he couldn't stop meddling. Just usual game development crap. We all hoped it would tie together in the end. It wasn't our first rodeo, I'll tell you that much.

I think we still thought we would focus on a different project like implants or commercial AI or this mapping idea or a different game. And like I said, typical game making stuff. Then some combination of Tyburn, Alex Martinez, Siobhan Smith. Oh my God. I love Siobhan. She was motherly, mature, practical, real. Unlike me. I mean, anyway,

Some combination of them and Dave Algely were messing about and found this way of making the environments mutate. And the content adjust itself with some sort of incredible personality. And that was it. It only lasted for about three minutes and 30 seconds, sometimes less. I mean, there was not much to do and yet it felt alive. I mean, it felt, it felt inspiring. Like the AI was gonna make the world amazing. I was actually inspired. I really was.

I gave up all my wretched dreams of watches and curls and I wanted to build that thing. I mean, I was the shallowest person alive and I was a believer. So I had to forgive the rest of them, even Tyburn for believing, for hoping. That was when we were still in Playa Vista. And in the end, we got close. I mean, it nearly worked. It worked too well. We broke the rules. I suppose the problem was the classic American problem.

Wanting it both ways. We wanted to save the world and get rich at the same time. We wanted to be holy and unholy, righteous philanderers. Noble and greedy, pure and impure. I mean, we all did, but Tyburn wanted it most of all, so we broke the rules. We pushed things as hard as we could, and we lied. Oh, we lied. I lied. And now the problems are different.

Man, do I even go to Portland? Even though I think I'm now more confident than ever that it wasn't my idea at all? June, 2041. Please leave a message after the beep. Hello, hello Kurt. It's me, Agent Cortez, Maria Cortez. Now, I have been fired, facing charges, everything. Listen, Kurt, I know you don't like me. You're not wrong to not like me. I was not very nice to you when we met.

Called you a liar. Said you were full of shit. Kurt, I need you to grow up and listen to me. I need you to get in touch with me. Right now. Reply to me and we can speak. This is very important. Wherever you are. This is very important. We don't have long. Kurt. Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. June, 2041.

The day was bright, but it was always bright when it wasn't shrouded in smoke. June, 2034, I mean, I think it was, but I remember being surprised. Normally that time of year in Playa Vista was very smoky and the sun would be nothing more than a red disc in a silver sky, but not on that particular day. Like I always remember that because when Tyburn called us to the meeting on the terrace in the mid morning sun, he was squinting, squinting and ranting. And honestly, I should have ran away then.

He began with those immortal words: "We are not a gaming company. We are something much bigger." "Web 3.5." That was Bryce. He's dead. "Bigger. Bigger than the internet. Potentially. Look, I don't mean to boast or sound like a loon." "Yes you do," I thought. Thought but did not say. And so maybe that was the moment. The moment when I should have done something. But done what?

reported him, killed him, I mean, I don't know. Maybe that was the moment he became so inflamed with his own ego, his own altruistic vision, he became essentially evil. He would commit almost any sin to build his paradise and that is as close to a definition of evil that makes sense. Maybe it was a gradual process, maybe it doesn't matter. He became so out of whack with humanity, so lost in his own tunnel that in trying to save mankind,

He may have killed it. But it's easy with hindsight. I mean, he was dropping one game, cutting back the mapping and all the other stuff, cutting back on the neural implants team and focusing every single thing on the arc. We are not just a gaming company. We are a society company. Our business is humanity. Our business is saving people.

From who? They meant from whom. Forgive them, they were not good at English. From people like us without our vision. The problem is we were the people like us without our vision and the only course open to us was Harry Caray. So did we slice open our stomachs for our new emperor? No, well, not yet, but we would. That and worse. That and far worse.

But listen, now is the moment. I've let go most of the design team. Alex is staying and Bryce. I've let go of those clowns in monetization. Look, I don't mean clowns, but that way is foul. I have a real vision for us. We have to think bigger. And if we don't, who's going to? The way I see things, the world needs someone to help it dream again. We can become immortal or we can become some moderately wealthy app developers. You lot, you're the ones I want to make history with.

He said this while squinting in the sun. It was so ridiculous. See, him and Alex Martinez, that pompous game designer, together they were gonna design a whole new world. Alex Martinez was mostly just an ass-kissing stooge anyway, so Tyburn won him over to his new plan, simply by sacking his boss, James Morton, and promoting him. Now, to be fair, James Morton needed to be fired. The guy was useless.

James couldn't design his way to the bathroom, but Alex was even more clueless than James. And somehow Alex and Mark Tyburn were just gonna invent this future for us. Mark had a vision on how to build the Ark, a vision of what we were gonna do. He was gonna rebrand everything. The AI team nearly had some big breakthroughs, which they didn't even quite understand, but he believed would allow him to do what he dreamed and change the way people thought. I mean, change how they felt.

Suddenly, he saw how to do it. At least, I mean, that's what he said. And it's so ridiculous repeating it now. But the truth is, after so much failure and so many half-hearted efforts and with the amazing PowerPoint slides, the concept work, which is amazing, and the artist looking smug, we lapped it up. I mean, the economy was turning south again and we're all feeling a little desperate. I mean, I can't believe I said that.

I can't believe I justified destroying the world because the economy was turning? Come on. I can't believe it. But I did. I said it. And we did it. High security internment facility. Location unknown. June 2041. I know what you saw. That's what she, Maria, Agent Cortez, kept saying. What I saw.

But you, you know what I saw, hm? You've read my file. Forget about Maria. She won't be back. No, this is terrible! I will miss her! We need you to do something for us. Here we go. We need you to save the world. Have you considered how dangerous what you saw is? Dangerous? If it escapes. How can it escape? Hm? It didn't exist!

Right? It does not exist. It's just... I don't know what it is. Just crap. Just digital intelligence. Nothing real. You're not an idiot, Yoroslav. This is serious. You sit here until we get bored and kill you. Or you can help us save the world. I don't want to save the world. I want to go home.

A Better Paradise stars Andrew Lincoln as Dr. Mark Tyburn, Patterson Joseph as Nigel Dave, Shamir Anderson as Kurt Fisher,

With Lawrence Ademora as Dave Alderley, Jessica Meraz as Maria Cortez, Robert Robertson Ross Jr. as John Tyburn Smith, Maury Sterling as Yaroslav. Additional performances by Aisha Kumari, Peter Altshuler, Suzanne Crowley, Karis Morgan Moyer, Alex Trumbull, Billy Hayes, Linnell Scott.

Executive produced by Dan Houser, Lazlo, Wendy Smith, Andrew Lincoln, Patterson Joseph, Shamir Anderson, Rob Herding, and Alexa Gabrielle 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 Milchev. 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.