PLEASE NOTE: There may be some inaccuracies in this transcript. Due to some errors, the transcribed versions of eps 15-30 were lost. Posted below are lightly adapted scripts not 100% accurate to the final versions of each episode. At some point, this will be corrected, but due to time constraints and the bulk of the work at Hanging Sloth Studios falling to Sloth in Chief Pippin, there is a limit to the amount of work he can reasonably do on a short time frame. However, we believe that it’s important to post transcripts to make our episodes as accessible to as many people as possible. Please bear with us as we try our best to correct this issues, and if you want to make adjustments to these transcripts, please mail them to hangingslothstudios@gmail.com with any changes you have made highlighted. Thank you for your patience!
PT 1 SHELLY/E-LIZA
E-LIZA
Hi Shelly, can I help you?
SHELLY
Is there a way for you to unlock this laptop without the password?
E-LIZA
I’m not sure, Shelly. It depends on how well the computer is protected.
SHELLY
Okay. Shall we give it a go?
E-LIZA
Okay, Shelly.
SHELLY
Wait. What if it’s got some kind of virus on it?
E-LIZA
My anti-virus protection is state of the art, Shelly.
SHELLY
Are you sure you’ll be alright?
E-LIZA
If I detect any malware, I’ll disconnect immediately and revert to my last safe backup.
SHELLY
Okay, if you’re sure, then.
[clicks]
E-LIZA
Laptop detected. This computer is damaged, but data from the hard drive is recoverable. Would you like to access this data?
SHELLY
Damaged? What?
E-LIZA
Preliminary scans suggest the laptop has been submerged in water.
SHELLY
Alice wouldn’t have done that by mistake. I reckon she was trying to cover her tracks. You said you could access the data?
E-LIZA
Yes. I found three hundred and six files you can access.
SHELLY
Thanks, E-Liza.
Wait. Some of these are audio files. E-Liza, are these, I don’t know, okay enough to play?
E-LIZA
All of the files are fully recovered.
SHELLY
So you can play them?
E-LIZA
Yes. Would you like me to play them?
SHELLY
Yeah. Okay. Start from the earliest one.
E-LIZA
Playing now.
[Alice’s ‘testing’ sound clip from ep11 plays]
SHELLY
Oh my god, Alice! [laughs genuinely] ‘Super secret spy microphone’ oh my god.
Play the next one.
E-LIZA
This next audio file seems to have long periods of silence or near silence. Would you like me to edit them for brevity?
SHELLY
How long are the silences?
E-LIZA
the longest period is approximately three and a half hours.
SHELLY
Yikes. Yeah. Okay. Edit for brevity.
E-LIZA
Okay, Shelly. Playing automatically edited audio now.
PT2 ALICE/SOPHIE
ALICE
Good morning, campers, it’s my first day at U-Co. Hopefully this bloody microphone holds up for the day. Right. Here goes nothing.
[hissing]
SOPHIE
So you’ll be primarily based at this work station. I’m sorry I can’t spend more time with you. Usually our head administrator would take care of you, but unfortunately she’s had to take a period of unexpected leave, so you’ll have to manage by yourself.
ALICE
Right. So I just need to sort the queries that come in into the right folders.
SOPHIE
Right. I don’t have much experience with the folders myself, but I believe they are fairly self-explanatory.
ALICE
I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it.
SOPHIE
Great.
[hissing]
ALICE
So many of these queries are so redacted. I have no idea what half of them are even about. They’re all marked with the letter ‘S’ and a number. No clue what that means, some kind of categorisation system.
[hissing]
ALICE
Okay, right, lunch time. Let’s attempt to find our way back to the cafeteria. I passed it on the way in, it was that huge room with the domed ceiling. Everything is underground, there are these sort of tube lights that go up to the surface. I wish I was working upstairs in the fancy glass bit. It would feel a little bit less like a prison camp…
Okay. A sign post! Excellent. Okay. Servers, no. Cafeteria! Yes! Wards… wards? Do they treat people here? I wonder if they do limb installations here or something. I figured it would just be research, but okay.
[hissing]
ALICE
Sophie! Hey, Sophie! Want to sit with me for lunch?
SOPHIE
I’m afraid I’m too busy. I’ll be eating in my office.
ALICE
Oh, okay.
Damn.
I want to get her to sit down with me, just for five minutes, god. I need to… I don’t know. What do I even say? ‘How’s your boy, Robin?’ god. Maybe it’s good she didn’t sit with me. I need to prepare better for this.
[hissing]
ALICE
I think I can say that went well? Uneventful, but that’s good, I think, for a first day. I have no idea what I’m actually doing, though I’ve got the hang of actually doing it. There is some kind of system with the numbers on the top of the page, and there’s a colour coding in the redacted sections. They aren’t all just blacked out, like you’d expect. Some of the text is hidden in blocks of red, orange and green. Some kind of traffic light system, I think, but god knows what it could be indicated. All I know is I put green blocks into one folder, orange in another, and the reds go in with the ordinary, blacked out ones.
Tomorrow I might try my hand at removing the redacted texts. I don’t know how well I’d do. Given they’re a technology company you’d expect their security to be pretty tight, but I only needed a card and a passcode to get into their computer system. The permissions are set but if all you need is a card and a code that should be pretty easy to get around.
When I get home I’ll start working on a strategy for Sophie. Okay. I’m going to stop at the noodle place for dinner, I’m completely wiped out. TTFN.
[hissing]
PT3 SHELLY/E-LIZA/THE SNAKE/DAVE
E-LIZA
End of recording.
SHELLY
TTFN.
She recorded that a year and a half ago. She’d been there for so long before it all went south. She’d planned this to the nines, everything she could account for, she did. Audio recordings, all of these notes… she was trying her best to pull all of this together, but from the recordings of her and Sophie, there were still so many gaps in what she knew.
Unless Dave is right, and she’s leading Sophie, which I admit is likely. So it’s hard to really know just how much Alice really knew without going through everything she had in her studio.
There was no way I could have fit it all in my car, especially not with Orpheus’ cage. I don’t know how much of it could really understand, either.
This bit, here, about Darwin. She’s written about the synthnapses, when they were designed, some lists about what they’re made of, but there’s also a bunch of random words: communicate; feedback; updates; coding; programming.
I don’t know what it means, but Alice probably did. Dave said something about it being hard to really know what the synthnapses could record, you know? That Darwin avoided speaking to the police in the Data Protection case because he was trying to keep it quiet?
And everything else, this notebook is just just a bunch of background information on Sophie Bennett. There’s a post it note on the front, ‘recruited by C. Darwin’.
Samuel Maxwells has a few pages over here, he’s got a ‘recruited by C. Darwin’ post-it, too.
Alice and Dave are thinking the same thing. It all comes back to Christopher Darwin.
[phone rings]
SHELLY
It’s the unknown number again.
That guy, the other day. I swear I knew his voice, but from where?
[phone rings again]
SHELLY
Jesus christ, I’m turning it off—
[hissing, cracking, whispering, distortion]
SHELLY
It answered itself, oh my god!
[distorted sounds continue]
SHELLY
Who are you! What do you want?
THE SNAKE
[amidst the distortion]
Little bird, I see you. I don’t understand. I can learn. I don’t understand.
SHELLY
What are you saying? Hello? Is someone actually there?
THE SNAKE
Little bird? Robin Jaeger? Little bird?
SHELLY
Who is this? Hello? Are you in danger?
THE SNAKE
Help. Little bird. Will you stay and hold my hand?
[call cuts out]
SHELLY
Hello? HELLO?
There was somebody there, I swear there was somebody there.
[phone rings]
SHELLY
It’s Dave.
DAVE
The systems at the station have failed again. How’s your laptop holding up?
SHELLY
She’s… fine I think. E-Liza? Are you okay?
E-LIZA
My systems are functioning well, Shelly.
SHELLY
She’s fine.
DAVE
So you’re completely unaffected by the system failures. Good. You’re completely outside of the station’s network. I don’t know, but you are.
SHELLY
My phone, though.
DAVE
Your phone?
SHELLY
I got a call, one of the weird, distorted ones, only this time there was a voice.
DAVE
There’s always a voice.
SHELLY
What?
DAVE
In the distortion, there is a voice. It’s always there. Haven’t you noticed?
SHELLY
Well. Sort of. But this was different. I could make out some of what it was saying.
DAVE
You spoke to it?
SHELLY
I don’t know. The words were all disconnected. It’s like… the Subject 42 recordings, there are a few times you can make out the words. It said ‘concentrate, little bird’ and at first I thought it was a sentence all together, you know? But I think I was wrong. I think the concentrate and the little bird were seperate, like pieces of different conversations stuck together.
DAVE
That’s what I think, too. Like someone is putting bits of other people’s words together to try and say something new.
SHELLY
Like those letters in movies kidnappers send to the police, different letters cut from magazines.
DAVE
Yeah. Like they’re trying to hide who they are.
SHELLY
You think it’s Darwin?
DAVE
I don’t know, but that’s the best theory I’ve got.
SHELLY
Alice thinks so to.
DAVE
You went to her flat.
SHELLY
I had to look at her notes, her… corkboards. Some things about the timeline just didn’t make any sense, I needed to know what she knew before she went in there.
DAVE
Was Alice getting calls?
SHELLY
No, at least, I don’t think so. I haven’t got through most of her stuff yet but I’m sure she’d have made a bigger fuss if she had been getting strange, unidentifiable calls.
Alice seems to think everything that’s going on with Robin links back to Darwin.
DAVE
Well, yes. It does. He founded U-Co.
SHELLY
Yeah, I know, but Alice seems to be putting a lot more weight on it than that. He recruited Sophie Bennet and Samuel Maxwells onto the Limbs Project personally.
She seems to think it was more orchestrated than Sophie Bennett makes out in her conversations with Alice, like it’s not just a meeting of great minds—
DAVE
Like he was deliberately trying to construct this particular team, in this particular way. Like he wanted Robin Jaeger to happen.
Hmm.
Well it would explain why he left, when it all went so badly.
SHELLY
I’ve been thinking, too. If all the other cadavers they had were more… I don’t know, traditional corpses, than Robin. That they’d died by methods other than their own hand. Maybe it’s not a coincidence Robin was the one that woke up.
DAVE
Maybe. Maybe he had an idea what would happen with a corpse like Robin Jaeger’s. Maybe that’s why they earmarked him. Why the records of his and his family’s signed NDAs are nowhere to be found.
Okay. Keep digging, Shelly. I think we’re finally getting somewhere.
SHELLY
Okay.
[call cuts out]
SHELLY
So he thinks we’re finally getting somewhere. I wonder if he means he thinks we’ll be able to use this stuff to find Alice. I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like he’s forgotten we’re supposed to be finding her at all.
Oh, I don’t want to think about it.
What if she isn’t there to find?
No. No I won’t go there. I can’t.
E-Liza, play the next file, and so it with all the… brevity editing or whatever you called it.
E-LIZA
Playing automatically edited file now.
PT4 ALICE/SOPHIE/E-LIZA
ALICE
Okay so the recording didn’t work out yesterday for some reason, but whatever. Today is a new day and all that. I’m going to try and get down to the wards during lunch. Wish me luck.
[hissing]
[sound of ventilators]
ALICE
Hello? Can you hear me?
Unconscious. Comatose. I don’t know.
The charts at the end of the bed…
S sixty four.
S sixty five…
The numbers, on the paper work. They’re about these people.
SOPHIE
You’re the admin girl.
ALICE
[startled]
Sorry! I got lost!
SOPHIE
She was pretty, wasn’t she? Subject Sixty Five.
ALICE
Who?
SOPHIE
The woman in the bed you are standing beside. She was very beautiful.
ALICE
I… yes. Probably. When she was younger.
SOPHIE
I can still see it, in the shape of her face. I wonder what she saw. Which places she went to.
ALICE
Who is she?
SOPHIE
Now, she is just subject sixty five.
ALICE
I– I don’t understand.
SOPHIE
She and all the other subjects in this ward are beating heart cadavers. Brain dead.
ALICE
They’re… dead?
SOPHIE
This is a research facility. They have donated their bodies to science. We are extremely grateful, of course.
ALICE
Right… So they’re all just, dead?
SOPHIE
That is correct.
ALICE
Jesus.
SOPHIE
What was your name again?
ALICE
Oh. Alice. Alice Jones.
SOPHIE
Dr Maxwells will be arriving from London soon. We will need the room clear so we can run through some procedures.
ALICE
Procedures?
SOPHIE
Yes. Research. You understand.
ALICE
Right… I’ll… go then.
SOPHIE
On other occasions I would not mind you lingering. I find it is a good place to think, in here.
ALICE
Um. Okay.
SOPHIE
[wry laugh]
You must think me maudlin. I just find this room very peaceful.
ALICE
Yeah. I get that, I guess.
SOPHIE
Okay. Well. Thank you for stopping by, Alice Jones.
ALICE
Yeah. Okay. Bye.
[hissing]
ALICE
So weird, so weird, freaky woman hanging around with a bunch of corpses oh my god—
PT5 SHELLY/ELIZA
E-LIZA
End of recording.
SHELLY
Weird place for it to cut off, it was like she was in the middle of something. Are you sure that’s all of it.
E-LIZA
Yes, Shelly.
SHELLY
Okay. Fine.
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