Out of Place: Season Two
Project Overview
Midnight Disease Productions (SCP Archives, The Hotel, Margaret's Garden) is currently casting the Second Season of Out of Place.
The podcast is told through in-universe recordings. Each episode is a report recorded by Andrew on a mission undertaken by Existential Threat Analysis of Nonstandard Timelines (EXTANT), a part of The Project that researches possible world-ending scenarios. The Project’s aim is to create a perfect timeline, altered to create the best possible world, and EXTANT’s role is to gather intelligence on how that timeline can be protected against threats that could completely destroy it. EXTANT consists of an armed investigation team, and a support echelon including Andrew. The team goes to timelines where the human race has been destroyed. They then investigate the world left over to find out what caused the human extinction. Andrew describes their actions and findings and then explains his conclusions about what happened in the timeline. The format is mostly a single-person narration by Andrew, but also includes recordings of interviews of team members or people they encounter and extracts from media they find.
This project is set to begin isolated remote recordings on May 12, and continue weekly through June 30.
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African-American, 30s.
Brandt is the team leader of the EXTANT field team. He is a rock-solid soldier and is uncompromising in the field. He leads by example and expects obedience as well as initiative from his team, who consider him a real hard-ass. Brandt has difficulty acknowledging vulnerability or uncertainty, even away from mission situations, and represses his feelings because he associates their display with weakness. Brandt is a US Army veteran and graduate of Ranger School. He was brought into the Project after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
After Action Report, reflecting on a mission to another timeline.
I felt sick at first. A real gutwrench. I fell, and when I got up, I was somewhere else. The smell was different first. The city had smelled of garbage and mould. This place was fresh and clean. It was so bright I could hardly see for a few minutes. There was grass beneath me. When I got used to it, I was in a forest. It was ancient. The trees were huge and gnarled, and covered in moss. I could hear birds. I didn’t know where the hell I was so I looked for high ground. I found a ridge where the trees thinned out. The forest went on for miles around, just carpeting the ground all the way to the horizon. In the other direction there was a castle. Of all the goddamn things, a castle, like it should be standing in the middle of Disneyland. It was the only landmark anywhere near, so I headed that way. It gets… it gets fuzzy. I have memories of there, but they’re not the same. When I try to focus on them they change and get… I don’t know. Like they don’t want to be remembered. There was a queen there, and a council of advisors and knights, and they were all trying to get their own way. Some wanted peace, some wanted war.
In-Field recordings from a mission, exploring an abandoned New York where everyone's uploaded their minds to a digital consciousness.
A drone approached Brandt's team.
POULTER
It doesn’t look like it has any guns.
BRANDT
Don’t mean shit. Stay down.
QUINTERO
It’s landing.
SANDIC
Is it gonna blow?
[ROTOR SOUND STOPS]
QUINTERO
Ok, well it hasn’t blown up. Guess it’s not a hostile.
BRANDT
Keep your distance. Sandic, check it out.
SANDIC
I ain’t checkin out shit, send-
BRANDT
Private!
Any Ethnicity, 20s.
Poulter operates the drones used for medium-range recon by the fireteam. He was trained by the US Army but lacks combat experience, and when he was brought into the Project he expected to have a purely technical role. He is more technically- and scientifically-minded than the other soldiers and adopts a moral detachment when confronted by scenes of death or destruction. Poulter is an idealist, believing in the Project’s Utopian mission, contrasting with the pragmatism of the others.
The EXTANT team is sent to a world where Humanity foresaw collapse and set up archives, as well as a gene library full of human embryos.
The place looked used. More of a feel than anything. Someone had been sleeping and eating there not long ago. We looked around the panels and saw a kind of camp with some sheets hung up on the office windows as curtains. There was a camp table with a stack of boardgames. A pallet of bottled water and a pile of the empty bottles. A kettle and a box of instant noodles. The lights and the kettle were wired up to connections in the walls, I guess to some solar panels or a fuel generator on the roof. That’s how come the lights were still working.
There was another sheet strung up like a canopy and it had half fallen down onto a camp chair. I knew before I pulled the sheet aside what I’d see. I just sort of assumed I’d find a body there. And there it was.
A field recording of the EXTANT team exploring a timeline where all humans have died of natural causes in their beds.
COMPUTER
I am a General Artificial Intelligence, referred to as Urania, created according to the recommendation of the United Nations Resolution on the Universal Availability of Transformative Technology.
POULTER
A general AI? That’s big.
BRANDT
We got anything like this back on Baseline?
POULTER
Only in theory. There isn’t enough processing power on the planet to make it happen, though.
BRANDT
Okay, Urania? What happened here?
COMPUTER
This structure was built over twenty-two years for the purpose of housing the necessary servers and support facilities for me to function. This location was chosen because of its low likelihood of natural disasters.
BRANDT
I mean, to the city. Doha.
COMPUTER
The city of Doha was reduced in capacity according to the change in its active population. This was achieved in stages over twelve years.
POULTER
We need to change our frame of reference here. This thing doesn’t exist in our timeline. It can’t. This AI’s existence is the point of divergence.
BRANDT
It’s what killed everyone?
POULTER
Maybe.
BRANDT
You might wanna handle this, Poulter. Shit’s too Star Trek for me.
POULTER
Urania, what were you designed for?
COMPUTER
To serve humankind.
POULTER
Can you be more specific?
COMPUTER
It was decided some time before my creation that the object of international government should be increasing human happiness. However, it was impossible to determine the best way to do this within the limitations of human philosophy. The question simply could not be answered by a human mind. In addition, all possible solutions had their opponents as well as adherents. Therefore it was decided before the question could be answered, an entity would have to be created capable of answering it. That entity was me.
POULTER
Who built you?
COMPUTER
A coalition of all nations pooled their resources and knowledge. The cause of human happiness was deemed to supersede national allegiances.
POULTER
So what was the answer?
Caucasian, early 20s.
Sandic is a mouthy and excitable soldier. He grew up in New York City. He was a high school athlete and adrenaline junkie. He lacks a verbal filter and comments on the squad’s environment and activities in a way that often brings reprimand from Brandt. Sandic has some deployment experience but nowhere near that of the fireteam’s older members.
The EXTANT group travels into a timeline where a genie has granted everyone's wishes and inadvertedly destroyed the world. This is Sandic's post-operation report.
Sarge had us moving down the road like it was Black Hawk Down, all covering angles and checking approaches. And this town, it stank. Like, really stank. I smelled it before, plenty of times. Dead bodies, I mean, I won’t say you get used to it, but it don’t surprise you no more. This time it was… riper. Kinda fruitier. Dumb, I guess, but that’s the first sign we had of it, the smell. So Quintero hears something and Sarge tells us to stop. We’re at an intersection with all these sandbags across the road and a kind of wall beyond that with a walkway on the top. Looks like the air force was using the town as a fallback in case some shit went down at Vandenberg. Anyway, Quint hears whatever it is again and then I see something moving. Someone’s lurching along the street at our 9 o’clock and I say, hey, it’s a live one. The guy’s all… shambling. Like one of his legs is busted. And there are a bunch more, too. Fifty plus, two hundred yards from us. And, look, I’m gonna say it. Frickin’ zombies, man. Like, ‘rotting bodies walking around’ zombies. And I say, ‘oh shit, zombies,’ and the Sarge is all like ‘can it Sandic you dumbass’ and then he sees them, too, and, I mean, that’s what they were. Right? Zombies. Then they run right at us. The stink coming off them hits us and I damn near toss my cookies in the road. I say ‘shoot them in the head’ because everyone knows that, right? I start shooting, we all do. Bam, bam, bam, like targets lined up. I pop a bunch of them, but the head thing? Yeah, that doesn’t work. They were still coming.
A field recording of the EXTANT team exploring a timeline where all humans have died of natural causes in their beds.
POULTER
Looks like a server room. A big one. That’s why this place is so cold, it must work better at lower temperatures.
SANDIC
You think this is bulletproof?
[TAPS ON GLASS]
BRANDT
Sandic, don’t touch anything!
SANDIC
I wasn’t gonna. Just thought if we could get through it, you know, Poulter could hook something up.
COMPUTER
State your purpose.
SANDIC
Who, who’s that?
COMPUTER
I am a General Artificial Intelligence, referred to as Urania, created according to the recommendation of the United Nations Resolution on the Universal Availability of Transformative Technology.
SANDIC
Are you, like, Skynet?
BRANDT
Jesus, Sandic, shut the hell up!
COMPUTER
My purpose is exclusively non-military.
SANDIC
See? It knew what I meant.
Hispanic, 30s.
Quintero is a combat veteran who contributes practical experience to the fire team. He is grim and unshockable, partly a product of his rough upbringing which drove him to the Army, where he found a home. Quintero is a stern, by the books soldier.
After action report after a trip into another timeline. This timeline is completely empty, seemingly a humanity-ending conflict has occurred.
The first piece of real intel we got was on the way out of Fredricksburg. Kind of funny, us four tough guys riding around on bicycles, but it beats walking, you know. Well, three tough guys and Poulter, I guess. Anyhow, it was a recruitment station. You know, ‘a career in the armed forces, ‘Be All You Can Be.’ Kind of ironic it was on the side of town that avoided the blast. Anyhow, this one had a big banner still along the front. Red, white and blue. It said ‘Appeasement Is Betrayal’. We took a look around. We found a box of pamphlets. Hundreds of them. Looks like they were handing them out to everyone who came in. Place was abandoned but they had gone in a hurry, same as everywhere else, so all this stuff was still lying around. We bagged a couple for evidence. We stopped about two hours in.
Field recording, after traveling to a seemingly abandoned timeline, your team is fired upon by unknown hostiles.
QUINTERO
Sarge, this place is hostile!
BRANDT
What do you see, Private?
QUINTERO
That body’s not decayed. Recent kill. Bullet wounds.
[DISTANT GUNFIRE, BULLET IMPACTS CLOSE]
BRANDT
Where’s it coming from?
QUINTERO
At least two shooters, one high, one low and close.
BRANDT
Someone get me eyes on!
QUINTERO
We got too much cover here. They’re gonna have to move to flank us.
A gruff older man, a survivor of an apocalyptic scenario. Lifelong New Yorker. Bitter, fatalistic, and damaged. Esterman lives in a parallel timeline in which a strange new genetic mutation gives some humans incredibly powerful pheromones, that lead to a cult-like obsession. Esterman loses his daughter to one such mutated person.
Remorseful, pensive, melencholic.
It started out as celebrities. That’s how I think it did, anyway. I worked for the city, I didn’t know anything about it back then. My daughter was into all that. They would be these people everyone loved. Not, you know, pretty, or pop singers or stuff that usually made people famous.
They’d have these people who would follow them around, go state to state just to be around them. To me, it was just dumb. They looked normal. I mean, they were always tall and that sort of stretched-looking, even at the start, but other than that they looked like regular people. But everyone said photographs or the TV didn’t show it. You had to see one in person to get it. And once you had, you’d never forget it.
An East African woman, 20s.
Tanzanian accent.
Magdalena is a hard-bitten survivor of a harsh and miserable world, pragmatic and blunt-spoken. She has not quite lost her thoughtful and philosophical streak. Magdalena is a native of Tanzania, and one of the last survivors in a parallel timeline.
Note: CastingCall only gave the option for a Nigerian/South African accent, but we are specifically looking Tanzanian accent.
In Magdalena's timeline, there are several technological advances that lead to a majority of Earth's population electing for a neural surgery to implant a microchip to communicate almost telepathically. When this technology is hijacked by unscrupulous forces, it renders a majority of the population into a comatose-like state.
It was big in China first, I think. That was where it was invented, anyway. Took off slowly. People didn’t like the idea of having things inside them at the start. But they were just so damn useful! Everywhere you went, it was there.
You could just think it and there it all was, TV, the internet. Then they made it so you could buy things with it, have details about everything just pop up right in front of your eyes. The real change was when they let them communicate with each other directly. You could think at someone, and the message would appear in their head. That was the difference. It changed the way people communicated. They didn’t have to speak. They couldn’t be misunderstood. Language didn’t even matter, not that it had before with these things translating everything as you heard it.
Grim, foreboding.
Then there was a man called Soledad. I heard he was from South-East Asia somewhere. The Philippines, somewhere around there. Of course, people were worried these chips could be hacked but the makers said they couldn’t be. Now and again someone found a way to hack into them but the ways in were closed right away. But Soledad was the one who worked out how to hack them all at once.
An elderly Australian woman.
Warm, wise and personable. Shereen exists in a parallel timeline in which it's possible to upload a human conscience to the cloud, suffering from a terminal illness, and elected to be euthanized in place of her digital double. This leads to the UN establishing a law that to be digitally cloned, one's body must be euthanized.
Warm, hospitable, peaceful.
Hello, Earth. This is Shereen Gibson, currently passing across the orbit of Pluto on the Consciousness Ark Ascension. Soon we will be beyond communications range, so this will be the last time I can talk to you. I will miss your world, but I will not mourn it. Our world is far from perfect, but it is ours, a place that we have made for ourselves so completely different from the one I once knew that I cannot describe it. And while I also look back with fondness on the life I once had, I am also blessed that I now live free of disease and ageing. If we avoid the statistically tiny chance of encountering danger in interstellar space, we even live free of death.
Any Ethnicity, Middle Aged.
The Computer is an incredible thinking machine, designed to help end Humankind's suffering through any means. The Computer was able to to placate the entire population, leading to Earth's demise.
A field recording of the EXTANT team exploring a timeline where all humans have died of natural causes in their beds.
COMPUTER
I am a General Artificial Intelligence, referred to as Urania, created according to the recommendation of the United Nations Resolution on the Universal Availability of Transformative Technology.
POULTER
A general AI? That’s big.
BRANDT
We got anything like this back on Baseline?
POULTER
Only in theory. There isn’t enough processing power on the planet to make it happen, though.
BRANDT
Okay, Urania? What happened here?
COMPUTER
This structure was built over twenty-two years for the purpose of housing the necessary servers and support facilities for me to function. This location was chosen because of its low likelihood of natural disasters.
BRANDT
I mean, to the city. Doha.
COMPUTER
The city of Doha was reduced in capacity according to the change in its active population. This was achieved in stages over twelve years.
POULTER
Urania, what were you designed for?
COMPUTER
To serve humankind.
POULTER
Can you be more specific?
COMPUTER
It was decided some time before my creation that the object of international government should be increasing human happiness. However, it was impossible to determine the best way to do this within the limitations of human philosophy. The question simply could not be answered by a human mind. In addition, all possible solutions had their opponents as well as adherents. Therefore it was decided before the question could be answered, an entity would have to be created capable of answering it. That entity was me.
POULTER
Who built you?
COMPUTER
A coalition of all nations pooled their resources and knowledge. The cause of human happiness was deemed to supersede national allegiances.
POULTER
So what was the answer?
Can be of any gender and nationality. An intelligent and, later, exhausted and traumatised scientist whose degenerating state is apparent in the course of their audio diary entries
Reflective, bitter.
September 4th.
We welcomed them as friends. Of course we did, that’s what we’ve been taught to do for generations. And they made the right noises, too. A spirit of interstellar cooperation. A sharing of knowledge. A helping hand to join the pantheon of spacefaring species. It was when they failed to deliver that we started to become suspicious. They built their observatories in orbit but the secrets didn’t come. I’m not sure what we were expecting them to give to us. Quantum computers, maybe. Nanotechnology. Some kind of immortality serum. We waited months, then a year, and all they did was build. They didn’t tell us how they built it all, either. It just started appearing in the sky
There were always people who doubted them, but they were the crazies. We called them conspiracy theorists who were jeopardising the relationship with our benevolent space brothers. Then we started to think maybe, just maybe, they were right.
An American male, a member of the support team working on debriefing the field team and assessing their mental and physical states. An educated, officious-sounding person who cannot quite emulate being genuinely concerned and compassionate.
BRANDT
That’s all I can remember for now. Doc, I’m kind of burned out.
PROJECT DOCTOR
That’s quite all right, Sergeant. This isn’t an endurance test. Take five, take ten, or call it for the day. This process will go at your pace.
BRANDT
The rest of the guys. How are they doing?
PROJECT DOCTOR
Fine. They were asking after you. They all send their best wishes.
BRANDT
Bullshit. Those guys hate me. Sandic said I was a bigger asshole than his dad.
PROJECT DOCTOR
In any case, they were debriefed and released to light duties. We’d like to get you back there soon, too. No rush, though. Your wellbeing is our first priority.
BRANDT
Your first priority is getting all the intel out of me. I don’t blame you guys, it’s why we’re all here. But don’t pretend this is daycare. The Project doesn’t look after us out of the goodness of its heart. It’s just keeping its tools in good condition.
PROJECT DOCTOR
We can come back to this later. I think you should rest, Sergeant. Eat, get some fluids. Clear out the cobwebs.
These are a pair of USDA technicians, one male and one female. They are unprepared for the crisis they find themselves in and eventually accept a jaded and fatalistic mindset. They are educated and exasperated by their situation but can otherwise come from any American background.
Hopeful, relieved!
We got through to San Francisco at last. They got a radio working and are trying to coordinate the West Coat. Not that they’re having much luck. The people over there are the same as over here. Weird how the folklore of a skull-headed god offering deliverance spread without television or internet. If we could harness that, we might organise some kind of concerted effort to get through this. Open up seed banks and parcel them out to locals, get militias going to defend communities, come up with plans for the next season, next year, next five. Instead, I get ten minutes on the horn with San Fran who say California’s being evacuated as the crazies move west. There are prophets everywhere. People are sacrificing the weakest members of their families to the thing. They built an idol on the Golden Gate two hundred metres high, burning day and night.
Pressured, stressed, tired.
I spent the last twelve hours working up a legacy scenario. It’s based on linking up with isolated communities who for whatever reason retain the agricultural and self-sufficiency skills without the reliance on technology. Religious communities. Amish, plain people. Militia and survivalist compounds. Areas of extreme rural poverty. Not necessarily the easiest people to get to work together. We send agents between them to share surplus, seed stock, maybe even help keep them from inbreeding. Not sure which people we will have left or how they’re going to make it from the Pennsylvania Amish to a survivalist compound in Arizona, but assuming they can, I’ve written down what they’re supposed to do.
A male American voice in the style of an archaic (in particular 1970s) radio advertisement or public information film, suited for making a strident patriotic speech.
You are an American. You believe in what America stands for. A way of life, a set of principles, an iron-clad morality. And you will fight for it. That is why America needs you. We are beset by an enemy that has already invaded us. It landed on our shores decades ago, silently and with malicious intent. It infiltrated our every level of society. But it did not defeat us. We found it, and we are rooting it out.
This enemy is the communism of the Soviet Union. For too long successive governments have appeased this foe, not willing to enter into war. The painful memories of past conflicts made cowards even of proud Americans. But now the depth and breadth of the enemy’s invasion have been revealed. They can only be fought
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