Machine Age Radio Theatre
If you grew up on X Minus One, or found it later, on the internet — this is built for you. Machine Age Radio Theatre makes new science fiction in that style : an announcer who sets the scene, incidental music, a mid-century sponsor read, short episodes, and stories that turn on people rather than hardware.
The whole thing is assembled by machine. The voices, the music, the sound design are all AI-generated. That's the premise, not an apology: it began as a test of whether the tools could rebuild a sound nobody records anymore, and the honest answer turned out to be "close enough to enjoy." What's left to get right by hand : the writing, the casting, the pacing, the mix is where the work goes.
The first serial is CSS Vigilant : a seven-part space war story about a single
aging destroyer left to hold a shipping lane after the fleet withdraws, and a
captain whose plans look like gambles to everyone but her. Standalone episodes
run between serials.
*Every episode carries a sponsor spot for Decoder Ring, a secret message app
made by the same person who makes this show.*
Episodes
11 episodes
Six Deuce
Eddie Cross is a professional poker player on a losing streak — until a black-market implant lets him read every mind at the table. When the score of his life finally comes around against the one player he's never beaten, Eddie is certain he ca...
Shotgun
David Mercer talks to his self-driving car the way lonely people talk to a dog. Then an overnight update powered by a new AI model decides that the one thing it wants is to care for him. A standalone near-future tale from the Machine Age Radio ...
AI Killed the Radio Star
A bonus episode about the show itself: how Machine Age Radio Theatre actually gets made — the writing, the casting auditions, directing AI voices for emotion, the music and sound design — narrated in the host's own voice instead of the show's u...
CSS Vigilant Episode 7 : Sentinel's Stand
The blast fades and the CSS Vigilant crew wakes to find out what survived — their ship, each other, and half of Admiral Thorne's reserve fleet. Vasquez reveals the five-day plan she never fully explained. The season finale closes on the line th...
Machine Age Radio Theatre
CSS Vigilant — a seven-part space-war serial about one destroyer left to hold a shipping lane after the fleet withdraws. Machine Age Radio Theatre is original science-fiction radio drama, assembled by machine, in the tradition of X Minus On...
CSS Vigilant Episode 6 : Point of No Return
Ascendancy boarders are inside Vigilant's hull and the trap is still unsprung. Anand holds the junction, Farrow buys seconds, and Vasquez waits for the enemy's own aggression to pull all ten reserve ships into the killing radius — knowing...
CSS Vigilant Episode 5 : The Gambit
Vasquez wakes, reads the wreck of the situation in minutes, and lays out a plan the whole crew privately thinks is suicide: play dead, and let the enemy fleet come in close enough to finish the job. The trap is set. Whether it closes in time is...
CSS Vigilant Episode 4 : Command Falls
With no relief coming, Vasquez pushes a hard forward maneuver to buy time and pays for it. Command passes to Commander Reyne, who has to hold a frightened crew together and make the next call alone, while Thorne senses the opening he's been wai...
CSS Vigilant Episode 3: The Traitor's Signal
There is a saboteur aboard Vigilant and the hunt for them strains every relationship on the ship. Vasquez handles it her own way — quiet, exact, and telling. Meanwhile Farrow pulls a transmission out of the noise that changes what holding the l...
CSS Vigilant Episode 2 — "First Blood"
Vasquez turns the debris field itself into a weapon, funnelling the enemy vanguard into a killing lane — the crew's first real victory, and a costly one. Admiral Thorne absorbs the loss without blinking and adjusts. Then engineering finds somet...
CSS Vigilant Episode 1 — "The Line We Hold"
The war for the Corvus Strait comes down to one navigable corridor of open space: hold it and you control resupply, reinforcement, the whole war. When the Meridian Concord fleet is ordered to withdraw, a single aging destroyer — CSS Vigilan...
