Raise | Vale Four: Tell Cycle
Everyone in Vale Four is getting read for filth. They deserve it.
FaceTrace is reading microexpressions before subjects know what they’re thinking, but June and Elle know they can’t afford a tell. So they’re practicing on each other, mapping their own blind spots before the real sessions begin.
Ava’s already figured out she’s being measured, and she wants more.
Cast & Crew
Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Co-Directed by: Bliss Blank
Principal Cast
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- Dr. Zev Talcott (Z): Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
- Dr. June Lowell: Bliss Blank
- Dr. Tessa Finn: Ring of Kees
- Dr. Meg Aerin: Bun Li
- Naia Anderson: Dizzy Dollie
- Elle Lawson: Echo Doll
- Iris Vale: Swirls and Twirls
- Cael Yupp: Jericho Caine
- Hespa Apate: Syndi Rella
- Hilton: Tickled Panda
- Astoria: Dakota Dream
- Ava: Kitten Azazel
- Synthserv 3.0: Valentina Vallay | IMDb
Explanation
Raise is the Tell Cycle’s most intimate entry and its most technically precise. The writing whisper device that carries June and Elle’s real communication underneath the performed neutrality of the FaceTrace sessions is the audio drama equivalent of the system they’re trying to beat: a layer of meaning running underneath the visible surface, audible to the listener but invisible to the apparatus watching the characters. June and Elle are doing in the monitor room exactly what the show is doing to its audience. The question Raise poses is whether awareness of a system’s mechanics protects you from it, or whether knowing the pattern is just another way of being inside it.
Ava’s answer arrives in real time during the Check scene. She identifies that she knows what’s being measured, knows what the images mean, and knows that her continued engagement is technically cheating. She keeps looking anyway. This is not weakness. It’s the most honest thing anyone says in the Tell Cycle: that understanding the mechanism doesn’t dissolve the want, and that the want was always more real than the methodology surrounding it. The machine registers this as optimal performance. Ava registers it as something she’d rather do alone.
The villain lair scene establishes that Meg has caught June and Elle gaming the sessions, and that Z already knew and finds it the most useful data they’ve produced. Perfect compliance is a dead system. June cheating isn’t a threat to the experiment. It is the experiment. The Softplay seduction that follows, Meg handing June access codes she frames as recognition, is the episode’s cleanest piece of commerce horror: a longer leash on a better-documented subject, delivered as a compliment. June calls it a trap. Meg says it isn’t. The episode doesn’t resolve which of them is right because both of them are.
Full Summary (Caution: Spoilers)
Hilton and Astoria open from the balcony, filling their assignent as Muppettes.
Vale Four is deploying FaceTrace, a system that reads microexpressions before the subject knows what they’re thinking, and the holdfasts inside can’t afford tells. Astoria tracks the logic cleanly. Hilton presses every button available while screaming. They arrive at the correct read together: whatever comes next depends on whether anyone inside can keep their face neutral under a system built specifically to prevent that.
In the monitor room, Ava walks in on June and Elle mid-session and announces that something is definitely wrong with this. June and Elle cover their prior activities. They then fold her into the protocol as a witness, and run a FaceTrace sequence with her.
Ava identifies the monitor as a confessional, and she’s not wrong.
She describes the feeling of always knowing someone’s watching and needing to do it right. Elle and June pass written notes to each other in the writing whisper layer underneath the performed clinical neutrality, their real conversation running parallel to the session they’re staging. When an elevation sequence produces an image Ava recognizes as herself being chosen, her voice breaks. She tells them she knows what they’re measuring now, knows what the images mean, and that she’s still looking.
She asks if she can run solo sessions after hours.
In the conference room, Meg presents footage showing June and Elle coaching Ava through the FaceTrace sessions. Iris diagnoses the cheating as stage fright rather than sabotage: they want to look good, they want Ava to trust them, they want to be liked. Z already knows and finds it the most productive data they’ve generated. A fully controlled system produces nothing worth studying. June is predictable under perceived autonomy; she’ll do exactly what they want as long as she believes she chose it. They decide to let her run.
Meg visits June’s basement office and hands her access codes valid for every lab and system in the facility. She frames it as recognition of June’s value. June identifies it immediately as a trap. Meg says it isn’t a trap, it’s recognition. June takes the codes, despite her best instincts.
Alone with Synthserv 3.0 after hours, Ava submits to a compliance correlation sequence: positional instructions, image responses narrated in real time, each description more precise and more revealing than the one before. The machine tells her she never disappoints. Ava thanks it. The machine’s learning her. She’s learning the machine.
By the time Raise ends, the distinction between those two things is trivial.
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Human Made Art
The poster image for this arc is from Sunrise Forever on Pixabay, under the Pixabay license. Layer art overlays are used to vary each iteration of the image. Deep Dream State uses human art at every stage of the creative supply chain.
Consent Declaration
Deep Dream State is a desire horror audio drama written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns. It explores psychological fiction at the boundaries of control, identity, and complicity. The elements depicted are fictional and intentional. All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context. ISNI 0000 0005 2877 6254
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