EP0009 – Chief of all Muses

I found something. It’s not a radio broadcast, it’s… some sort of dictation, like dictated notes, and it’s from inside the JMB. 

Written by Kale Brown with assistance from Elias Taylor. Produced by Kale Brown. Artwork by Kale Brown. 

Starring Cam Clark (@Pocceto) as Doctor Sasha Hyles and Kris Allison (@knalliso) as Doctor Timothy Morris.  

Starring Jesse Hall (@wastedarkcell) as TectoVision Employee.  

All music and sound effects used are available under a CC0 license. Music was ‘Sphere’ by Andrew Kn. [LOUD EERIE NOISE] was ‘Sci-fi Ambient Drone’ by Niedec. 

Visit us on Twitter at @sinkholepodcast or visit the website at sinkholepodcast.com. 

Transcript

INTRO: [Someone inhales deeply; their inhale has a distant, echoing quality to it. A strange, rattling sound grows in volume and speed before fading into eerie, warbling music. There’s a strange crackling sound. The voice whispers “Sinkhole.” The pitch and speed of the music drop, fading into the next track.]

[A low, slow hum fills the background. The melody is subtle and largely ambient.]

I’m right. I know I am.

I found something. It’s not a radio broadcast, it’s… some sort of dictation, like dictated notes, and it’s from inside the JMB. 

Or the “Innes and Montgomery Institute of Research and Development,” I guess, but nobody ever called it that, not even after they changed the name.  

Let me play it- you’ll see what I mean. 

[EXPERIMENT NOTES] 

Dr. Hyles: Fourth quarter, 5-Day Polyhymnia Dosage Refinement Test, Day 2.

Adding 2 microliters of… [sighs] compound TH7F-34 to wells A1 through A3 of plate one. 

Loading ten micromolar group into the flow cytometer as we speak. [sound of something being loaded] Proportion of fluorescing cells is seventy percent, with a cell density of 941 cells per milliliter- 

[right-side orientation, a little tinny] Dr. Morris: Have you checked the sample temperature, Florence?

Dr. Hyles: [groans, moves right] Tim, I told you I’d be in 5G today! 

Dr. Morris: [beat] Sasha? 

Dr. Hyles: Yes! Move to another room- I can’t have you talking over me while I’m dictating notes. 

Dr. Morris: You move. You know I prefer to work in 5B.

Dr. Hyles: [tightly] I can’t move, Tim, I’m in the middle of a cell count!

[EXPERIMENT NOTES END]

Did you hear that? 5B and 5G. Those don’t sound they’d be next door to each other, do they?

Remember this?

[INTERVIEW EXCERPT]

TectoVision Employee: I don’t have to guess- it was something about the way the vents were positioned. You could be all the way over in 2F and somebody would say something in 2A and it’d sound like they were standing right next to you. We started planning around it- if me and Carlos wanted to talk logistics, we’d have to go over and tell the folks in the other room to can it or get lost for half an hour just so we could hear ourselves think. 

[INTERVIEW EXCERPT ENDS]

It’s the exact same acoustic issue as the TectoVision staff were having- the exact same. 

This recording is from inside the JMB, which means it’s from Calliope Research, and that means it’s not a broadcast. You can tell just from listening to it that it’s not for public consumption. 

Nothing Calliope did was for public consumption. 

Sometimes I think they bought that building specifically because it was so ugly, like they hoped it would discourage people from even wanting to look at it. 

You know that string of letters and numbers? Towards the beginning of the clip- TH, uh… one second.

TH7, uh, F34. At a glance, you might think that was a chemical structure or something, but it’s not. I tried looking it up. 

It’s a code, probably specifically intended to make it completely impossible to know what they’re talking about unless you have access to some sort of key. 

Doesn’t that seem kind of weird for someone who’s taking notes in a corporate lab? Notes that nobody else is ever likely to hear in the first place? 

If what you’re worried about is a hypothetical spy using your building’s fucked up acoustics to overhear the details of an experiment from four or five rooms away, maybe not. 

That sort of paranoid would be very on-brand for Calliope. 

Calliope was infamous for that. 

They were so notoriously secretive about their work that making wild guesses about it was a running joke on CPPL.  

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, these two women from the neighbourhood, Tonia and Charlene, would do this half-hour talk segment, and it always started with a game called Chief of all Muses.

[LOUD, EERIE NOISE]

Each of them would suggest the most outlandish thing they could think of that day, and then listeners would call in to vote on which they thought sounded more likely. 

Here’s the thing: in case you’re unfamiliar, the phrase “chief of all muses” comes from the poets Hesiod and Ovid, who both used it to refer to the muse of epic poetry. 

Calliope is the muse of epic poetry. 

They never said outright what the game was about, but we all knew. Everybody knew. All you had to do was search the name. 

It didn’t help that none of Calliope’s staff were from the area. Folks almost never saw them outside the building, and everybody who did said they tended to be kind of terse and evasive even if you tried to talk to them about things that were completely unrelated to their research. There was actually a rumour going around that they weren’t allowed to talk to us, weren’t supposed to interact with the locals.  

And, I don’t know if any of you would remember this because it was only mentioned briefly in that documentary excerpt I shared, but the site the JMB was built on used to be a community park. 

That’s important. 

I moved to that area a while after Calliope acquired the building, but what I was always told was that before that, back when TectoVision was there and afterwards, when the building was empty, people would still go and have picnics on the lawn and under the trees and… and the biggest problem anyone ever encountered was a problem with the design of the JMB itself. 

Apparently, the way the windows were shaped and oriented meant that at certain times of day, certain windows would focus the light they reflected into a point on the ground… and sometimes they would set the grass on fire.

But because the visual aspect of the building was so important, instead of doing anything about it, Soper Realty set up this automated sprinkler system that went off at the specific times of day that the lawn was most likely to catch fire.

So you could just be having a nice lunch with your family and suddenly get fucking soaked because it was August and Soper had updated the sprinklers to account for the fact that the current position of the sun meant the JMB was trying to commit arson slightly earlier in the day than you’d expected. 

Supposedly, the front of the building was the worst for it: the whole façade was glass, and because the road leading up to it was asphalt, sometimes it’d get so hot it could actually melt the soles of your shoes.

Couple people filmed themselves frying eggs in front of the JMB just to prove a point- you might still be able to find those videos somewhere. I’m not sure. 

All that stopped the second Calliope moved in. Not the JMB laser window issue- the “people actually having fun with the wacky properties of the building nobody wanted built there in the first place” issue. 

When I lived there, not only had Calliope put up fences around the entire property, they also had security patrolling the lawns to detain anyone who tried to get inside, even if they clearly weren’t trying to approach the building. 

[laughs quietly]

One time, a local birdwatcher got in a huge amount of trouble just for pointing her binoculars at a tree that happened to be inside the fence- she was an eighty-five-year-old Uruguayan woman who barely spoke English, but Calliope made such a fucking production of it that she made it onto the local news. 

She actually became a bit of a celebrity after that- a year or two later, CPPL organized a volleyball tournament to fundraise for local wildlife preservation, and the winning team called themselves the Peeking Luisas. 

Calliope was so outrageously hush-hush about what they were doing that it was honestly kind of cartoonish. That’s where all the conspiracy theories about them being responsible for the Sinkhole come from.  

I’d probably be more open to the suggestion myself if they hadn’t gone under right after the Hole opened up.

[beat]

I didn’t mean for that to be a pun. 

They went bankrupt and were dissolved, is what I was trying to say- though I guess it’s not untrue to say they went under in a literal sense, y’know, since the JMB fell into the Hole. 

[LOUD, EERIE NOISE]

Relatable. 

But yeah: this audio is from Calliope, from the JMB. There’s no doubt in my mind about that. 

And that’s thrown a wrench into my working theory, which is that these signals are the Hole sort of… echoing or repeating broadcasts that were going out at the time it opened up.

I know it sounds a little harebrained at first, but if you… if you consider that me and the other members of the hundred-twelve didn’t age while we were in the Hole, it actually seems pretty plausible that it could be… I don’t know, this moment stuck in time? 

The Calliope audio, while it doesn’t necessarily disprove that theory, has created a very weird issue for me. 

Why do I have this? 

Why is this here? 

Why is this audio that was very clearly intended not to be public coming through in such a public and accessible way? 

It’s really thrown me for a loop. 

What does this mean for the other tapes? Some of this stuff I’m coming across, is it- is it voicemails? Phone calls? People giving voice commands to their smart devices? What am I hearing? What is it that I’m listening to?  

And… if this isn’t constrained by the parameters I’d thought, if these aren’t things that were intentionally broadcast for public consumption, what are the ethical repercussions of that? 

I mean, I don’t really give a shit about airing Calliope’s dirty laundry, they’ve been gone for forty years and fuck ‘em anyway, but what if some of this stuff is private- is personal? 

Forty years is not that long. 

It’s very possible that there are relatives of the original Sinkhole victims who still live in the area. 

Again, I know the… relationship to privacy, the way people feel about it- [falters]

But I was in the Hole.

And I know… it would make me really uncomfortable if…

And my friends… 

Most of my friends are still in the Hole, and I don’t know… I don’t know how I feel about the idea of coming across one of them. 

About hearing one of their voices and having it be… just how I remember it. 

Forty years out of sync with the world and… a decade out of sync with me.

I don’t know how I… I don’t know. 

[softly] I don’t know.

This isn’t quite what I thought it’d be. 

[long pause]

I’m going leave this here.

You’ll hear from me soon. 

[The ambient music fades into the next track.]

[An eerie, warbling music akin to the opening music plays, rising in volume and then slowing and quieting.]