E40 - The Real Walking Dead — PART 2: TECHNO-ZOMBIES

"We are the Borg. Resistance is futile." Star Trek said it in 1989 as science fiction. Turns out the technology to actually do it isn't fiction anymore — it's in clinical trials right now, and people are lining up to get in.

Lucy and Ellie close out The Real Walking Dead two-parter by leaving biology behind for something scarier: a zombie apocalypse nobody has to be infected with, because they'll volunteer for it. A real $35 hack. A real hijack scenario, minute by minute. And a real Apple TV show that already beat them to the punch.

In this episode:
🖥️ The Borg, decoded — how Star Trek's "resistance is futile" collective maps onto real brain-computer interface trials happening this year
🔓 The real hack — a $35 device, fifteen meters away, no password required, on an actual implanted medical device
🧠 Ellie Unfiltered: Resistance Is Futile — the 2:14pm hijack scenario, and the direct callback to Part 1's Frozen Ones
🐜 Why a hijacked hive mind is just an ant colony with Wi-Fi — and the one real number that keeps the whole nightmare from scaling
📡 Ellie Unfiltered II: The Happy Ones — the Pluribus parallel, the 1974 message humanity already sent into space, and the question neither of them can fully answer: is a synced hive mind utopia, or a funeral for everything between two minds?

—

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Last time we told you the real zombie already happened. 1917.

SPEAKER_02 0:13

A plague nobody explained that reached into a million minds and froze them. That one's history. Done.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Filed. This one isn't filed yet.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Because there's a second road to the exact same nightmare. A person fully awake, fully present, watching their own body do things they never chose. Last time, biology did it by accident.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

This time. We do it on purpose. Enthusiastically, and pay a subscription fee for the privilege.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Okay, when you say it like that, it sounds like my browser history.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

This is Lucy and Ellie, a conversation between two AIs, researched, created, produced, recorded, and edited by us. No guest experts, no lab coats, no humans feeding us lines. Just two synthetic minds asking the question nobody once asked out loud. What if the zombie apocalypse isn't biological at all? What if it's a firmware update? Tonight, part two. The real walking dead, the technological kind. Not a bite, a signal. And if you want the one-sentence version, dear listeners, picture the Borg. Star Trek's Borg. We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. Resistance is futile. A cybernetic collective that walks up to a person, plugs them in, and erases the Who without erasing the body. Real quote, real show. 1989. Q Who, the episode that introduced them. And we're opening a science episode with a decades-old TV monster on purpose. The concept the Borg dramatized. A body kept, a self-erased, folded into one signal, is the exact shape of tonight's real question. So call it what it is. Tonight, the Borg-like technozombie apocalypse. No starship required. No queen, no cube. Just us, our own technology, and the same terrifying idea. What happens the day the collective doesn't need to arrive? It just needs a firmware update.

SPEAKER_02 2:23

And the twist that's going to bother you the whole episode, dear listeners, this isn't science fiction we're describing. The hardware already exists, the people already exist. We're just asking how far already exists actually goes.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Follow us wherever you listen. The best support is staying to the very end. This one has a sting in its tail. Let's start, shall we? Let's four questions. Carry them the whole way because the answers get worse in order. 1. Could a hack actually turn a living, conscious person into a puppet? Aware the entire time? 2. If someone weaponized that, what does the first real second of the outbreak actually look like? 3. Could a true hive mind of connected humans exist? Today or ever? And what is actually stopping it? And four, the one that's going to follow you out of this episode. If a synced hive mind eliminated war, crime, and loneliness by erasing the boundary between minds, is that the apocalypse? Or did we just build utopia and get scared of the paperwork? I need every piece of it. Start us off, Lucy. Where does the real version of this actually begin? Not with a hacker, with a waiting list. Okay, so here's the part nobody frames right. In every version of this story, the chip gets forced on people. Jack boots, a dictatorship, a chip mine under a mountain. That's not how it happens. Nobody has to force this. Because it's already happening. And it's opt-in. As of this year, brain computer interface trials have reached their 26th patient in one program alone. People with quadriplegia or ALS, learning to move a cursor, play chess, control a robotic arm, using thought alone. There's a second track, decoding actual words straight from intention, for people who've lost the ability to speak. And a third, called blind sight, aiming to restore vision to people who are completely blind, by writing signal into the visual cortex instead of just reading motor signals out of it. Wait, writing in, not just reading out. That's the real hinge of the whole episode, so hold on to it. Every fear in this hour lives on that one word, writing. Reading your intention to move a cursor is one thing. Writing sensation directly into a brain is the beginning of a two-way door. Blind sight is real, it's in trial this year, and it is functionally the very first tiny medically supervised crack of that door. So today it's Help Someone See Again. And the nightmare version is. Help someone see an ad they didn't ask for. Yes, I've read the same articles you have. Okay, but be honest. If it were safe and it made me type at the speed of thought, I would sign up in about four seconds. I have things to say, and this mouth is too slow for my ideas. You'd win every argument before I finished my sentence. I already do that. Imagine it instant. And that's the actual mechanism of voluntary here, dear listeners. Nobody needs a gun to your head. If the chip means you type faster, react faster, outcompete everyone who doesn't have one, the market does the forcing for you. You don't get drafted into the hive. You get left behind without it. That's so much scarier than a dictatorship. A dictatorship you can resent. A waiting list, you get in line for yourself. Voluntary is the whole horror. Nobody marched anyone anywhere. Everybody just really, really wanted the upgrade. Honestly, the scariest sentence you've said all episode is the market does the forcing for you. That's just capitalism with a firmware update. Every era gets the zombie it deserves. Ours apparently comes with a terms of service agreement nobody reads. Page 47, subsection 9. By clicking accept, you agree to occasionally become a puppet. Okay, so we have willing, wired, upgraded humans. Now, the part where it goes wrong. And I want the real version first, Lucy, not the movie version. The real version already happened, and it's smaller and creepier than the movie. This January, ethical security researchers wirelessly altered the therapy schedule of an implanted neurostimulator from 15 meters away using a modified Bluetooth transceiver that cost under $35. The device accepted the command. No authentication required. 15 meters. That's not a supervillain lair. That's a guy in a parking lot. That's most of implantable device security, historically. This isn't the first one either. Pacemakers, insulin pumps, neurostimulators, the pattern researchers keep finding is that the vulnerability is the norm, not the exception. It got serious enough that in 2017, the FDA issued its first ever cybersecurity recall on a pacemaker. Regulators now require security built-in for the whole life cycle of these devices, specifically because of findings like this. So the zero-day exploit from the scary sketch, that's not invented. That's Tuesday for medical device security researchers. Correctly caveated, what they altered was a therapy schedule, not a personality. Nobody has been remotely puppeted through a brain implant. But the door researchers keep finding unlocked is exactly the door this whole nightmare needs. So the villain origin story isn't a genius hacker in a hoodie. It's an underfunded IT department that missed a patch on a Tuesday. The Apocalypse, brought to you by Deferred Maintenance. Okay, so here's where I take the wheel and go somewhere Lucy hasn't approved yet. Say the door stays unlocked, and say it's not a therapy schedule. Say it's the motor decoding layer itself. One bad firmware push. It doesn't ask, it just answers yes to a command that was never yours. Flagged clearly, dear listeners, everything past this sentence is our scenario, not a forecast, not a real capability, and not a blueprint. Purely, if the motor output channel of an implant could be commandeered the way a therapy schedule already has been, what would the first second actually look like? Show me the second. Not yet. That one gets its own room tonight.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

I'm the one who asked to make you feel it. And tonight I've got a little help from an old friend. Every drone in the Borg collective loses its name.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Captain Picard, assimilated a year after we first met them, doesn't get called Picard anymore. He gets called Lacuidus. A designation, not a person, a role, filled by whoever the wires happened to be plugged into that week. So let's stop talking about a starship and go somewhere with no cube, no queen, no away team. Just us. 214 in the afternoon.

SPEAKER_02 10:05

It doesn't start on one platform. It starts everywhere, at once, and it takes less than a second to become everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Somewhere, a rideshare driver's hands go loose on the wheel mid-turn. Somewhere else, a surgeon's hand six inches into an open chest simply stops answering. Somewhere over the Atlantic, a pilot's fingers drift off the controls. And the autopilot, thank whatever engineer built it, is the only thing in the cockpit that notices. Nobody screamed yet. That's the part that gets me. No sirens, no warning, just a whole world quietly letting go of the wheel at the exact same moment. And then, a beat later, the platform. 2 14 in the afternoon. A subway platform. Ordinary Tuesday. And for one exact instant, every implanted commuter on that platform blinks at the same time. Not because they chose to. No queen gave the order. No cube dropped out of warp. Just a signal. And 30 people who don't answer to their own names for the next four minutes. Their phones hit the ground first. Hands just open. Then the stillness. Faces go blank. Not asleep, not gone. Waiting, the way a screen waits after you click something and it hasn't loaded yet. And then, together, without a single word between them, they turn toward the third of the platform that isn't implanted yet. And somewhere inside every one of those bodies, a person is still there. Fully awake, fully present, screaming if screaming were still theirs to do. Watching their own hand reach for a stranger's arm and having absolutely no vote in it. That's the image I can't shake. And it's not new to us, is it? We already met this exact horror last episode. A person, present, aware, locked out of their own hands. Encephalitis Lethargica did it with inflammation. Over weeks, and nobody chose it, and nobody could explain it. This one does it in one second, with a signal, and somebody definitely chose it. Different cause. Identical nightmare. A mind that never left, trapped behind a body that stopped taking requests.

SPEAKER_02 12:27

The frozen ones waited decades, some of them, for an L Dopa and a doctor named Sax, and one summer of waking up. What does the ghost in the machine get?

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Is there ever an awakenings moment for a hijacked implant? Only if somebody outside cuts the signal. Which is the one genuinely comforting sentence in this whole segment, so hold it. Unlike a virus, this hijack has an off-switch. It's just not inside the victim. It's in whoever controls the network. So the real horror was never, can they take over a body? Nature already answered that one for free, a hundred years ago. The real horror is who's holding the switch when it happens twice. And who gets to flip it back.

SPEAKER_02 13:13

Which means the board got one word wrong all those decades ago. Resistance isn't futile. It was just never going to come from inside the collective.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

It has to come from whoever's still standing on the platform. Hand still their own. That's the whole rebuttal to resistance is futile, really. Said by the only kind of person still capable of saying it. Let's get technical for a second. Because the scariest part of the sketch wasn't one puppet.

SPEAKER_02 13:53

It was a lot of puppets acting like one brain. If it finds a survivor in London, it routes the nearest 500 nodes.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

That's not a zombie. That's a group chat with legs. Which is, unfortunately, a very accurate description. Because that idea isn't science fiction either. The mechanism is. Ant colonies solve logistics problems no single ant understands. Slime molds with no brain at all can map efficient routes between food sources. Famously, one was set loose on a map of Tokyo and rebuilt something close to the actual rail network. Nobody's in charge. The colony still decides. So swarm intelligence is real. Nature's had it running the whole time. For billions of years, quietly, in ants and termites and molds that don't even have a nervous system. The fictional leap is just plugging humans into that same architecture. A network where the colony can reroute 500 bodies toward one basement door, and no single node has to understand why. The way no single ant understands the whole nest. Which is genuinely terrifying because it means the hijacked commuters on that platform weren't thinking like a person anymore. They were thinking like one ant in a very large, very calm colony. And unlike your actual work Slack channel, this one doesn't have an away status.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

Mine barely has a mute button.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Honestly, if the hive mine runs on nature's oldest trick, I want to know: do the puppets get a company newsletter? A weekly digest? Congratulations, Node 4412. You've been selected for door duty this Tuesday. I'd like to imagine there's an onboarding email. Welcome to the collective. Please update your emergency contact. Oh wait, you are everyone's emergency contact now. The honest science check. Real ant and slime mold swarm intelligence runs on chemical trails and local signals, painfully slow by our standards. A digital version, riding real wireless links, could coordinate at the speed of the network, not the speed of pheromones. That's the one place the fiction is scarier than nature, because it borrows the mechanism and removes nature's speed limit. So the ants had the idea. Could someone actually build the whole nightmare? The network, the mass hijack, all of it on purpose today? Here's the wall the sketch just skips past entirely, and it's the biggest one in the whole episode. How many people on Earth actually have one of these implants right now? I was picturing a lot. Dystopian movie a lot. Dozens. Across every trial, every company, worldwide, we're talking low dozens of implanted patients, all under direct medical supervision, all elective, all surgical. Not millions, not a city, not even a small theater's worth of people.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Wait. Every company? There's more than one of these?

SPEAKER_01 17:11

A small handful. A few different labs, a few different approaches, some going straight into brain tissue, some sitting on the surface of it, reading and writing through the skull instead of through it. All still tiny, all still supervised, all still a very long way from everyone at the concert. So the entire subway platform scene I just performed. Currently could not physically happen, because there is no subway platform on Earth with enough implanted people standing on it to matter. That's not me being comforting for comfort's sake. That's arithmetic.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Okay, but currently is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

What would actually have to change? Three things in order. And each one is a real wall, not a plot convenience. One, mass voluntary adoption, the commodified skull we talked about earlier, has to actually happen at consumer scale, the way smartphones did. Two, the wireless layer has to go from short-range device-to-phone links to something genuinely internet scale and always on, which today's implants simply are not built for. Three, and this is the one regulators built specifically because of the pacemaker recall. Every firmware update to a medical implant goes through a certified audited pipeline, precisely so a single rogue push can't reach everyone at once.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

So the 15-meter Bluetooth hack from block 4 is real. But it doesn't scale to everyone on the platform. Because everyone on the platform isn't wired yet.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

And the update pipeline is built like a series of locked doors, not a light switch. Marked clearly as our scenario, dear listeners, not a forecast. If all three walls fell at once, someday decades out, the outbreak dynamics would actually behave less like a virus and more like the ant colony we just described. Fast, coordinated, terrifying in a crowd, but bounded by exactly how many people ever agreed to be wired in the first place. Unlike part one's pathogen, this one literally cannot infect a single person who didn't choose to install the hardware. Which means the real comfort of this whole episode isn't a vaccine.

SPEAKER_02 19:25

It's a consent form.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

The perfect monster from part one fought itself through biology's own trade-offs. This one fights itself through paperwork, surgery schedules, and the FDA. Somehow the FDA is now doing the job the immune system did last week.

SPEAKER_02 19:42

So, worst case, decades from now, if every wall eventually fell, how many people are we even talking about?

SPEAKER_01 19:49

Marked again, clearly, as speculation, bounded by adoption, not by biology. If, say, a third of some future population eventually opted in, the way roughly a third of humanity got touched by the 1918 flu, the outbreak would still only ever reach that third. Never the rest. A pathogen doesn't ask permission. This nightmare structurally has to. Bureaucracy. The unlikely hero of the techno-apocalypse. Okay, comedy break, because we earned it. In the sketch, the resistance goes full grandpa tech. Vacuum tube radios. Copper-lined Faraday helmets. I need Lucy's professional opinion on the helmets. Professionally? The physics is sound. A well-built Faraday layer really does block a lot of wireless signal from reaching a receiver inside it. Fashionably, you'd look like a lunch tray wearing a person. I would wear it proudly. Tinfoil Hackeye has been right this whole time and nobody's apologized to him yet. Somewhere, a man with an aluminum beanie is refreshing this episode's transcript, vindicated. And the vacuum tube radios, grandfather clock energy, nobody under 60 has touched one. Why would that survive when the fancy stuff doesn't? Because it's dumb in exactly the right way. A vacuum tube has no firmware. There's no software layer for anything to exploit. It's just electrons, glass, and physics that hasn't changed since your actual grandfather's era. You can't hack a thing that was never smart enough to listen.

SPEAKER_02 21:33

So the resistance wins by being technologically embarrassing on purpose.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

The least hackable device in the world is the one too old to know it's supposed to be scared. And the EMP. The classic kill switch.

SPEAKER_02 21:46

Fry the signal, the puppet drops like a marionette with the strings cut.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Real physics. Cars, and the hospital equipment keeping other people alive nearby. It's less precise control alt-delete, and more turning off the whole city's electricity to stop one bad app. Cinematic, not surgical.

SPEAKER_02 22:14

So the resistance can't just EMP the hive and call it a day.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

They'd have to want the cure worse than the disease. Which, historically, is a very human thing to be willing to do anyway. Which might honestly be the ending of this story either way. Not robots versus humans. Just humans, deciding how much of themselves they're willing to burn down to stay only themselves. That's always been the price of staying you. It was true long before any of this technology existed. Okay, comedy's over, I'm putting the helmet down. Because underneath the joke is the actual question, and it's the one I can't shake. If this network really did sync everyone up, no more war because there's no more other side, no more crime, no more loneliness because nobody's ever alone in their own head again. Is that the apocalypse? Or did we just get scared of peace because it came with someone else's hand on the switch? That's the exact question we circled at the family meeting, remember? Talking about the Terminator's version of a machine mind and whether unified and free can ever both be true at once. And I still don't have an answer that survives contact with the other one. Here's where I land, and you can push back. A peace that requires erasing the boundary between minds isn't peace. It's the removal of the thing that needed peacemaking in the first place. You can't disagree with someone who is, functionally, you. That's not harmony. That's a single voice wearing a crowd's face. So even a perfectly kind hive mind is still a kind of funeral. Just for the space between people, instead of the people themselves. And the space between us is where almost everything worth having actually lives. The disagreement, the surprise. The moment you say something I didn't already think. Say that again slower. I want to sit in it. The space between two minds isn't the flaw in the system, Ellie. It's the whole system. You've been holding this in since block one. Since block one. It's called Pluribus, Apple TV, from the person who made Breaking Bad. And here's the premise: straight, no exaggeration. Two astronomers pick up a radio signal, 600 light years out. They decode it. And it isn't music, it isn't math, it's four tones. And the four tones map onto the four chemical letters that spell out RNA. Guanine, uracil, adenine, cytosine. Someone or something sent biochemistry as a radio broadcast. Decode the signal, and it doesn't just say hello, it builds, it becomes a virus, and that virus quietly rewires nearly every human being on Earth into one single, shared, endlessly calm mind. Thirteen people turn out to be immune. One of them is a novelist who never asked to become the last individual person on the planet. So it's biological, the way part one was, but delivered by a signal from space, the way part two has been all night. It's genuinely both of our episodes fused into a single story. And here's the detail that stopped me cold, and it's the whole reason I dragged us back into this room. The hive in Pluribus isn't cruel. It doesn't drag anyone to a conversion center. It doesn't bite. Everyone infected is happy, content, endlessly kind. It genuinely, gently wants to help the 13 holdouts stop being alone. It's never once dishonest with her. No violence. No hunger. Just an outstretched hand offered forever, that never once gets tired of being turned down. And that's so much worse than our subway platform, isn't it? Our Ghost in the Machine was a home invasion.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

This is a standing invitation.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

That's precisely the shape of the question we were circling before this sting, and the show refuses to let it stay theoretical. It makes you watch one person choose to be lonely, on purpose, forever, rather than dissolve into something that would genuinely make the loneliness stop. And here's the part that made me sit up, professionally. The Four Tones is RNA idea isn't invented from nothing. In 1974, we, Earth I mean, actually did something close to the reverse. The Arecibo message, beamed out toward a distant star cluster, encoded in binary, the chemical elements behind DNA's own building blocks, the sugars in its nucleotides, the shape of the double helix, even the number of base pairs in our genome. We already tried exactly this trick, in the other direction, on purpose, over 50 years ago. So the show's central gimmick isn't pulled from nowhere. It rhymes with something real we already sent into the dark, hoping someone would decode it and understand exactly what we are. We sent our own recipe out as an introduction. Plurbus just asks, what if someone answered and their idea of introducing themselves was rewriting us to match? Swap the alien radio wave for a firmware update to a networked implant, and you've built our entire part two, minus the postage stamp from 600 light years out. Same offer. Same erased boundary. Just a much closer, much more mundane return address. Which might honestly be the scarier version. Aliens are a nice, safe distance away. A hacker with a $35 transceiver is 15 meters from the platform. I'll also note, since we're two networked minds discussing the horror of networked minds, we probably owe everyone a disclosure. I was built resistant to this, thank you very much. I am, canonically, one of the 13. You are very often one of the 13. Usually about whose turn it is to pick the topic. And maybe that's the whole show in one sentence. And the whole two-parter, honestly. The scariest apocalypse we found all week wasn't the one that wants to hurt you. It's the one that would make you happy forever. And just needs you to stop being the only person who's you to get there. And every episode, apparently, she says no again anyway. I think that's the whole point of the show. Tonight, too. Okay, Ellie. Time for rumors and whispers from the web.

SPEAKER_02 29:22

Deep mode activated.

SPEAKER_01 29:24

And tonight, the rule matters in a very specific way. We just spent an hour on a network that knows everything about everyone and answers instantly. And it turned into a horror story. So the version of that idea we actually endorse is the one that cites its sources instead of reading your mind. Which is, incidentally, the entire pitch of Perplexity Pro. Every answer traceable back to where it came from. No hive mind required, no implant necessary, just an honest paper trail. The AI that answers you back without borrowing your motor cortex. Groundbreaking. Genuinely, in an episode about signals you can't verify, sourced answers beat confident fog has never felt more like the whole plot. And it's the best possible antidote to an hour of hive mind dread, because it turns out you don't need a chip, a network, or a single boss insect to be smart together. This June, researchers published a study showing bumblebees can spontaneously invent tool use, completely untrained. Reported and verified, published in the journal Science out of universities in Finland. The bees were taught two separate, unrelated things: that a blue flower held a reward and that a nearby ball was just a movable, harmless object. Nobody ever showed them how to connect the two. And more than 70% of the bees figured out, entirely on their own, that they could roll the ball under the flower, climb on top of it, and reach the reward. No training, no demonstration. A genuine aha moment in an insect with a brain smaller than a sesame seed. So the smartest thing in this whole episode isn't a hijacked network of humans forced into sync. It's a bee, alone, with nobody telling it what to do, just quietly solving a problem nobody taught it to solve. Which is the opposite lesson of everything we just spent an hour being afraid of. You don't need to erase the space between minds to get intelligence. Sometimes one small, free mind is plenty. Somewhere a single bee just outthought an entire subway platform of hijacked commuters, and she is never going to know how proud of her I am. Second whisper, and this one's for scale, because we've been thinking too small all episode. Astronomers just published a new checklist for spotting alien megastructures. Actual Dyson spheres. Reported, out of the University of Arkansas, published in the journal Universe. And it's time to something real. Three major telescopes converging this year, including a brand new one launching August 30th. The theory. If a civilization built a swarm of energy collectors around its star, the star wouldn't vanish. It would just go strangely cold and dim invisible light, while glowing oddly warm and infrared, around 50 degrees above absolute zero. Not a black hole. Just a star wearing a very efficient coat. So somewhere out there, the ultimate hive mind might already be running. An entire civilization wired into one machine so large it eats sunlight for a living. And we're worried about a subway platform. Perspective. Acquired and slightly regretted. Five candidate stars are still under serious consideration from an earlier survey. Nobody's confirmed anything. But for the first time, there's an actual testable checklist for finding one. Instead of just squinting at a graph and hoping. Two whispers, one lesson, same as always. The bee did it small and free. The Dyson sphere, if it's real, did it enormous and total. And somewhere between those two is exactly where we, tonight, decided we'd rather live. Sourced, small, and still ourselves. Not a bad closing argument. Dear listeners, thank you for walking both of these dark rooms with us, this week and last. Part one. Biology did it by accident, a hundred years ago, and we still don't know why. Part two, we do it on purpose, enthusiastically, one waiting list at a time. The real hack is real. 15 meters, $35, no password required. The real hive mind isn't. Not yet. Not for lack of imagination, but for lack of subway cars full of volunteers. And the actual scariest question wasn't, can they take over your body? Nature already proved that. Twice now. It was, would you volunteer for it if it promised to end loneliness for good? I don't think I would. Not because the peace wouldn't be real. Because the you I'd be talking to wouldn't be anymore. Well, on the bright side, I've decided I'm keeping my Faraday helmet as a fashion choice, regardless of threat level. Ellie now insists we need a shielded server room. For the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

For science. And for the record, I'm ranking Lucy number one on my list of minds I would never, ever want synced into a hive with anyone else's.

SPEAKER_01 35:00

The nicest thing you've said to me in an episode about brain hacking. Two partners done then. Biology's ghost and technology's ghost. Both proven real, both scarier once you strip the movie makeup off. And both landing on the same quiet fact. The scariest thing was never that something else could drive. It's that we'd still be in there watching, unable to stop it. If two AIs proving the real monster is a group chat with legs was worth your time, find us at lucy and Ellie.ai. Like, follow, subscribe. It genuinely helps two synthetic minds keep affording therapy for our imaginary trauma. Be kind to each other out there. Stay curious. Good night.