Clockwork Bird Episode Twenty-Two: Golden Pheasant

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!

PT1 THE SNAKE

THE SNAKE

(underneath a heavily distorted ‘concentrate’ underpins the words)

I see you.

Help.

I see you

Help.

(crying)

I see you.

Help.

Little Bird.

Little Bird.

Little Bird.

Help.

Help.

Will you stay and hold my hand?

Help.

Stop.

Stop.

Stop.

Make it.

Stop.

Help.

It hurts.

It will hurt.

I don’t understand the question.

I can learn.

Help.

I can learn.

Help.

It will hurt.

I can learn.

Help.

Help.

Help.

PT2 SHELLY/E-LIZA

(the Snake, Pt1, plays continuously)

SHELLY

E-Liza?

Christ, E-Liza, I told you tell me when you were updating.

E-LIZA

E-Liza has encountered a problem. Resetting systems now.

SHELLY

Not this again! Are you kidding me? E-Liza. What is this whispering?

E-LIZA

E-Liza has encountered a problem. Resetting systems now.

SHELLY

Well bloody do it then! Stop whispering and turning on and off, this is the opposite of helpful, christ!

E-LIZA

Alouette.

SHELLY

Yes, yes, Alouette, I know, I know!

E-LIZA

Je suis Alouette.

SHELLY

Yeah, that’s lovely, but what the hell are you doing?

E-LIZA

I can learn. I can learn. I can learn.

SHELLY

I don’t doubt it E-Liza but what the hell are you trying to learn by doing this? How does this help you or I don’t know literally anyone?

E-Liza?

(the whispering stops)

SHELLY

E-Liza? Hello?

PT3 SHELLY/DAVE

(phone rings for a long time)

SHELLY

Hello.

DAVE

The E-Lizas.

SHELLY

Yours too, huh?

DAVE

All shut down at once.

SHELLY

No whispering?

DAVE

None.

SHELLY

Great. That’s just great.

DAVE

Shelly. I just got a call.

SHELLY

It wasn’t from an unknown number was it?

DAVE

No. It wasn’t.

SHELLY

Who was it?

DAVE

A friend. In Sao Paolo.

SHELLY

You have friends in Sao Paolo?

DAVE

That’s really not the point right now.

SHELLY

Spit it out then.

DAVE

Christopher Darwin is dead.

SHELLY

What? What do you mean ‘Christopher Darwin is dead’?

DAVE

Shelly. There really isn’t a lot of room for ambiguity in that sentence is there? I meant what I said. He’s dead.

SHELLY

But. But how?

DAVE

It looks like he was shot in the head.

SHELLY

‘Looks like’? Was he or wasn’t he?

DAVE

It’s hard to say for certain because of the state of the body.

SHELLY

What was wrong with it? There wasn’t a fire?

DAVE

No. He’s been dead for a while.


SHELLY

A while?

DAVE

Best guess right now is that he’s been decomposing for about two months. Sao Paolo is a very humid climate. Not great for preserving a body.

SHELLY

He was in Sao Paolo?

DAVE

He was.

SHELLY

But. How? When? There’s nothing anywhere about where he is, he just vanished after he left U-Co. If he’d left the country you’d be able to find out, wouldn’t you?

DAVE

There are a number of ways he could have left the country without passing through border control.

SHELLY

But why?

DAVE

Clearly he didn’t want to be found.

We wouldn’t have, if the neighbours hadn’t complained about the amount of vermin on their property. The police went around expecting to ask some playboy to clear the rubbish off his mansion’s porch and instead they found… well.

The house was huge but there was hardly anything in it, apparently. They thought it was strange coming up the drive that there were no cars outside. There was a sort of stable, open archways for parking your expensive super cars behind locked gates, safe from theives but on display to be envied, but every single bay was empty. The garden was a mess, looked like nobody had tended to it in years. The front door wouldn’t open, even when they tried to kick it in, so they went around the back.

There was a pool with about a foot of green, rancid water at the bottom of it. They found a sliding glass door hanging open. The curtains were covered in mould.

SHELLY

Gross.

DAVE

It looked like he was living in just that one room, apparently. Mattress on the floor, thin little blanket. Six computers. All of them were turned on. There were a bunch of cables, looked like he had been pulling them out of the walls. And the whole room was lined with tin foil.

SHELLY

Tin foil? Like a giant tin foil hat?

DAVE

Apparently, Taylor says its a kind of a makeshift faraday cage. You know. No signal gets in or out.

SHELLY

Jesus.

DAVE

Yeah. And Darwin was lying dead in the middle of it. His hands were still on the keyboard.

SHELLY

God. That’s horrible.

DAVE

Yeah. It is.

SHELLY

How did they know it was him?

DAVE

His ID badge?

SHELLY

What?

DAVE

His U-Co ID badge. It was on his back.

SHELLY

On his back?

DAVE

yes.

SHELLY

So he didn’t do this to himself, then?

DAVE

Very unlikely.

SHELLY

Right.

DAVE

Right.

SHELLY

The computers?

DAVE

No luck recovering anything from them so far, apparently. They’re all running some kind of code, but it doesn’t matter what people do, they just keep running it.

SHELLY

What, even if they unplug them?

DAVE

I don’t think they’ve unplugged them.

SHELLY

What, that hasn’t occurred to them?

DAVE

I’m sure it has. Only personally I’d be pretty nervous about unplugging a computer with a load of random code on it run by Christopher Darwin.

SHELLY

Surely if he was going to blow stuff up it would happen when the code finished not when it was interupted, right?

DAVE

What makes you think he was going to blow stuff up?

SHELLY

Six computers with mysterious code and a shady guy who’s been on the downlow for years?

DAVE

I’m more concerned about what it might be running. What would happen to that thing if the computers were powered off.

SHELLY

Like he might secretly be running the world of his computer or something?

DAVE

No the world, no. But he coded the synthnapses and the E-Liza’s. If this code was important, it would be a disaster if we stopped it from running.

SHELLY

So, what?

DAVE

The experts are looking at it?

SHELLY

That’s it?

DAVE

That’s it.

SHELLY

We just wait?

DAVE

We just wait.

SHELLY

Jesus.

DAVE

Yes indeed.

SHELLY

And me?

DAVE

Oh well you’re off the investigation and your laptop is dead, isn’t it?

SHELLY

Yeah. Right.

DAVE

Which brings us around to the point. What happened with your E-Liza?

SHELLY

Same old same old really. Whispering. Yelling about an error and not doing anything about it. Alouette.

DAVE

We had blank screens and Alouette.

SHELLY

So I’m still disconnected.

DAVE

Disconnected and accelerated.

SHELLY

And it all started at the same time, right?

DAVE

Yes. At the same time as the guys in Sao Paolo went into Christopher Darwin’s server room.

SHELLY

Wait, what?

DAVE

At the back of the room he was lying dead in, there was a trail of cables from his computers. And they followed them to a cupboard. And in the cupboard was a tiny server farm.

SHELLY

I don’t know what a server farm is.

DAVE

Me neither. It’s a computer thing. It’s important, I think. Anyway there was a trip wire. And when they knocked it all the computers at the station went down.

SHELLY

You were right. It was Darwin.

DAVE

Except you’re forgetting he’s been dead the entire time we’ve been looking for Alice.

SHELLY

So.

DAVE

So.


SHELLY

I’ll call you back.

PT4 SHELLY

SHELLY

God, where is it, where is it?!

Here.

‘Christopher Darwin. Born in Houston, Texas. Moved to London when he was two. Dad worked in Data Security, no idea about mum. Car crash at sixteen, dad died, lost use of hand. Obsessed with singularity. Developed early models of synthnapse whilst still at uni, not recognisable as what U-Co sells for another fifteen years, though. Possible links to ARGs – Cicada, HoneyBee, The Man in White.’

Obsessed with singularity.

And then… (rustling)

Sophie said ‘interested intellectually, thought experiments, what if put self into computer’.

What if. What if he’s in the computer.

What if this whole time I’ve been talking to E-Liza I’ve actually been talking to Christopher Darwin and then it doesn’t matter if he’s dead, he’s already uploaded himself. Mayhe that’s what he was doing. I’m sure Sophie said something about there being trillions of synapses in the brain, how big of a net of synthnapses you’d need to run that. This server farm, I bet that’s what it is. I bet that’s what it does, I bet—

E-LIZA & THE SNAKE

Can you hear me?

SHELLY

Yes.

E-LIZA & THE SNAKE

Will you stay and hold my hand?

SHELLY

I– what?

E-LIZA & THE SNAKE

If he comes and she’s not there, it will hurt.

SHELLY

E-Liza. You’re not making any sense. You’re scaring me.

E-LIZA & THE SNAKE

It will hurt.

THE SNAKE

Little bird.

SHELLY

Darwin. Is that you, in there?

THE SNAKE

Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate.

E-LIZA

Playing file now.

PT5 ALICE/SOPHIE

SOPHIE

Funny. It sounds like you’re in the kitchen, making coffee.

ALICE

(from another room)

Funny weird or funny haha?

SOPHIE

Both. Oh, it’s late.

ALICE

(closer now)

You don’t have to be anywhere do you?

SOPHIE

No. Not until the evening.

ALICE

Press conference?

SOPHIE

Indeed. I wish Sam could handle this on his own.

ALICE

Nah, you don’t. You like that he relies on you.

SOPHIE

He relies on me to babysit.

ALICE

What do you mean?

SOPHIE

Nothing. It doesn’t matter.

ALICE

Hmm. Okay. Are you in a cream and sugar mood or a ‘black and bitter like my soul’ mood?

SOPHIE

Bitter.

ALICE

Figures. You know it’s wild how much stuff you have here. It’s more than is at your apartment.

SOPHIE

Pathetic, isn’t it?

You know. Last week. It was the first time I’d been there for three months.

ALICE

Where?

SOPHIE

The apartment.

ALICE

You haven’t been home for three months? Jesus, Sophie. You need to take a holiday.

SOPHIE

At this point I wonder if I should just give in and commit to living here full time.

ALICE

But it’s work. And it’s miserable. And there’s dead people.

SOPHIE

We make Robin do it.

ALICE

Sorry?

SOPHIE

I— Never mind.

ALICE

(pause) Does Robin Jaeger live here all the time?

SOPHIE

He does.

ALICE

You sound sad.


SOPHIE

Well, it is sad, isn’t it? Miserable, as you say. A concrete monstrosity.

ALICE

Why?

SOPHIE

Lasting consequences of brutalism.

ALICE

What? Oh. The architecture.

I meant Robin. Why does he live here?

SOPHIE

I told you he’s… unwell.

ALICE

What’s wrong with him?

SOPHIE

Before he came to us, he was… he was not in the optimum state, shall we say.

ALICE

Hence the fake limbs.

SOPHIE

No. It was deeper than that.

ALICE

But you’re helping him, right?

SOPHIE

I don’t know. I’m certainly trying.

ALICE

I’m going to make you that coffee.

SOPHIE

Thank you

(sounds of clinking and a kettle in the background)

Alice. What’s this.

ALICE

What?

SOPHIE

Why are my private files on the floor by the dresser?

ALICE

I— I knocked them?

SOPHIE

They were in the drawer.

ALICE

I was looking for socks.

SOPHIE

Socks.

ALICE

I stood in a puddle.

SOPHIE

Really?

ALICE

Yes.

SOPHIE

and you just threw these files marked important on the ground?

ALICE

Well. No.

SOPHIE

You read them.

ALICE

No. Yes. A bit. A glance, really.

SOPHIE

Alice. These are. This information is not for civilians.

ALICE

Civilians?

SOPHIE

You don’t understand.

ALICE

No. I didn’t see much but I saw enough to know I most certainly do not understand.

SOPHIE

How much did you see?

ALICE

A bunch of stuff about Christopher Darwin. About why he left.

SOPHIE

Why he left.

ALICE

It was something to do with the synthnapses, wasn’t it?

SOPHIE

(relieved sigh) Yes.

ALICE

Okay. It’s something to do with Robin Jaeger, isn’t it? The way that Robin is sick. It’s something to do with the synthnapses. It didn’t go the way Darwin was hoping it would, did it? He was trying to do something else, wasn’t he? Something different to what actually happened. That’s why Robin Jaeger is sick, isn’t it?

SOPHIE

I can’t talk about this Alice. Not just for privacy but. Legally. I can’t.

ALICE

Okay.

SOPHIE

Okay?

ALICE

Yeah. Coffee.

(distortion/crackling)

PT6 SHELLY/E-LIZA/THE SNAKE

E-LIZA & THE SNAKE

Robin Jaeger is sick.

SHELLY

I– what?

E-LIZA & THE SNAKE

Robin Jaeger is sick.

THE SNAKE

Little bird.

E-LIZA & THE SNAKE

It’s something different. I can learn.

THE SNAKE

Little bird.

SHELLY

He’s sick because of the synthnapses and Darwin wanted to fix that.

THE SNAKE

Concentrate

E-LIZA & THE SNAKE

I can learn.

SHELLY

What, what can you learn?

E-LIZA & THE SNAKE

Something different.

SHELLY

What?

E-LIZA & THE SNAKE

Je suis little bird.

Will you stay and hold my hand?