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

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He found a golden monolith in a cave that transmits a signal without any power source.

The Program audio series is a politically charged, philosophically ambitious science fiction drama. This episode takes the form of a letter written by an unnamed Afghani man to his sister. He describes being removed from his village by soldiers at age seven after an event on July 6th (later revealed as the Haska Mina drone strike on a wedding party that killed 47 civilians), enrolled at the International School of Kabul where he was surrounded by children of American diplomats, officers, and intelligence personnel, and subjected to discipline as a surrogate for the untouchable children of power. The ISK curriculum taught him English and programming -- Java, Python, and C# -- which he describes as the most powerful magic available, able to turn a village boy into someone respected. During a senior-year field trip at 2,500 meters altitude, he strays from camp, falls through an opening, and discovers a golden monolith in a mountain cavern that turns out to be transmitting a signal despite having no power source. Over subsequent visits with his laptop, he discovers that the monolith is an access point to the code underlying physical reality -- that the world is a computer simulation. He spends months learning to interact with the access point, starting with the simplest possible task: creating a 25-centimeter cube of the same indestructible golden material as the monolith. He describes his philosophical evolution alongside his programming experiments: his decision to abandon belief in God while maintaining belief in religion as a necessary moral framework, his analysis of human society as a rent-seeking system that rewards short-term self-interest and punishes externalities, and his conclusion that the system must be destroyed before it destroys humanity. The letter culminates in his account of executing the plan: deploying 100 cubes, each sized to crush nuclear arsenals and centers of power, on the anniversary of Haska Mina -- July 6th -- destroying military installations, government buildings, and former heads of state's residences across every nuclear power. The second phase deploys 100 cubes each 1,000 kilometers per side into lunar orbit, spelling a message visible from Earth: a word to the wise, not to plead ignorance. The letter is addressed to his sister, to whom he also confesses that he can no longer recall her actual face -- only the face from the single photograph he has of her, frozen in time like the access point. The episode closes with a note from the creator: this episode is dedicated to 47 civilians killed at Haska Mina, 34 of them under 15, and that the Commander-in-Chief who launched the wars in Afghanistan retired in 2009 and is reported to have taken up painting.

As heard by us

A searching episode about God, memory, and a child taken by soldiers.

The Program opens with a bleak thought experiment about a simulated society, then moves into a child remembering, or not quite remembering, being taken from a village by soldiers and sent into ISK.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want speculative fiction that argues with history, God, and itself all at once.

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