Tag: Meg Aerin

Vale Four Slow Play Official Episode Cover Pink Noir Desire Horror
Arc 4: Vale Four – Episode 4: Slowplay

Arc 4: Vale Four – Episode 4: Slowplay

By |

Arc 4: Vale Four – Tell Cycle, Episode 4: Slowplay

Don’t twitch.

FaceTrace reads microexpressions before the subject knows what they’re thinking. Naia knows Vale Four is about to deploy it. June and Elle know they cannot afford a tell.

The question is whether you can teach yourself to lie with your face.

Highlights

This is the first episode of the Deep Dream State’s Tell Cycle.

Each Cycle in Vale Four looks at a different advertising phenomenon through the pink noir lens.  It’s uncanny but appealing at the same time.

A full description follows; a few elements should be highlighted.

1. The guest stars are stars. 

They always are.  In this case, we’re gratified to have Valentina Vallay on cast.  She’s a notable and fantastic voice actress.  She also plays the AI voice with sultry and evocative range.  It’s much better to cast a human as AI than the other ways around; that’s particularly true in this case.

2. Midstream is ridiculous.

The Deep Dream State is fiercely independent.  We don’t intend to have real ads for the foreseeable future.  That allows us to have the weird fake ads ever.

About midway through the episode, the most crazed sports podcast ever, Midstream, drops an ad.  This really makes Barstool Sports seem like Infinite Jest.  Highly recommended.

3. The sound design is innovative. 

It’s tough to convey screens and writing and whispers even in TV.  The episode features a lot of passed notes.  That’s communicated with whispers, less filtered, and pencil scratch.  I think it lands and enhances the paranoid atmosphere.

4. The tech is real.

The story is fictional .  We aren’t doing predictive or hard sci fi here.   At the same time, facial analysis for gauging consumer sentiment is real, advancing, and deeply unsettling.

Cast & Crew

Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Co-Directed by: Bliss Blank
Midstream Sports: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns as himself

Recurring Cast

Z – Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
June Lowell – Bliss Blank
Tessa Finn – Ring of Kees
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

Guest Stars

Synthserv 3.0 – Valentina Vallay
Ava – Kitten Azazel
Mr. Mega – FFT
Mr. Beefcake – Chavito

Full Summary

Call

Naia records a private audio log from the garden nest. She’s afraid, and rightly so.

FaceTrace is different from the Calibrex systems: it doesn’t require cooperation. It reads microexpressions, dwell time, the involuntary signals produced before conscious thought has finished forming. The holdfasts inside Vale Four have been trained to pass, but no training accounts for a system that reads the face before the actor knows what they’re about to perform.

Naia names the stakes clearly: the IPO timeline is running, the call option has an expiry, and they cannot afford tells.

Deal

Meg, Tessa, and Hespa introduce FaceTrace to the focus group in the conference room. The framing is corporate and precise: contextual metadata, microexpression analysis, dwell time mapping.

Ava works with catechumens and recognizes the structure of confession.  She raises the comparison directly. Tessa affirms the surface resemblance and dismisses it with bloodless. June is welcomed back from her sabbatical and assigned an office next to the recalibration center. Tessa offers her the use of a second desk with an adorable little laptop.

Hold Em

The Midstream Sports advertisement runs.  It is extremely committed to the bit. Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns appears as himself and is removed from the recording for knowing too much about fantasy football :/.  Mr. Mega, Mr. Beefcake, and Hespa explain the product to the correct audience with maximum enthusiasm.

You never change horses in midstream.

Ante

June has arranged her office specifically around the plant she calls Seymour. June and Elle assess the FaceTrace threat in private: audio they can manage, video they can fool, but microexpression reading at the level FaceTrace operates is a different problem entirely. The solution is to practice on each other before the real sessions begin. Elle has already acquired the access codes.

Bluff

June runs Elle through the FaceTrace baseline protocol in the monitor room. The writing whisper technique carries their real communication underneath the performed neutrality: stage whispers stripped of reverb and set apart in the mix, functioning as written notes in audio form. Elle lingers on the wrong images for too long.  June clocks every tell in real time and writes it down.   Elle asks for more pictures – for science. June’s final writing whisper names what she has been watching the whole time. The session ends with both of them knowing considerably more about each other than they did when it started, and with a functional map of where their faces give them away.

Listen & Explore

Explanation

Slowplay is the Tell Cycle’s thesis statement delivered as a technical problem.

Every previous arc has used surveillance as a backdrop; here surveillance becomes the plot.  FaceTrace as the instrument that threatens to collapse the distinction between performance and self. The writing whisper technique is the audio drama equivalent of that threat made formal: a layer of communication running underneath the performed layer, visible to the listener but invisible to the system watching the characters.

June and Elle are doing in the monitor room exactly what the show is doing to its audience.

Ava’s confession comparison in the Deal scene is the arc’s most direct articulation of what FaceTrace actually is. Tessa’s response, acknowledging the surface resemblance and dismissing it as coincidence, is the most honest thing anyone at Vale Four says in the Tell Cycle. It’s a surface resemblance; the system underneath is considerably older.

Human Made Art

The poster image for this arc is from Sunrise Forever, under the Pixabay license. Layer art overlays are used to vary each iteration of the image. You can find the original here.

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. All elements depicted are fictional and intentional. Slowplay contains adult themes, psychological manipulation, surveillance technology, and suggestive content. All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context.

ISNI 0000 0005 2877 6254

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Deep Dream State Sitri Center Episode 2 Adapt cover art featuring a silhouetted figure suspended inside a luminous amber ring against a deep space nebula background in blue and purple
Arc 3: Sitri Center – Episode 2: Adapt

Arc 3: Sitri Center – Episode 2: Adapt

By |

Arc 3: Sitri Center – Episode 2: Adapt

This center is my dream.

Construct 37 is running. The dreams are escalating. The research team is watching. Tessa Finn is about to learn the difference between engineering a dream and becoming one.

Cast & Crew

Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Co-Directed by: Bliss Blank

Principal Cast

Zev Talcott (Z) – Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
June Lowell – Bliss Blank
Tessa Finn – Ring of Kees
Meg Aerin – Bun Li
Nyra – Dizzy Dollie
Oona Reyes – Jade
Cael – Jericho Caine
Hespa – Syndi Rella
Iris Vale – Swirls and Twirls
Reverie – Britt Reprogrammed

Full Summary

Dream Sequence: Store

Phoebe’s dream places her in an adult store with Hespa, contemplating taking something they haven’t paid for. The nervous excitement of the scenario is the point: risk, visibility, the possibility of being caught and seen. Cael and Nyra arrive as security and take them to the backroom. What begins as consequence becomes compulsion. The dream logic follows its own rules, and Phoebe finds that resistance is not the direction her subconscious is moving.

Observation Chamber

The research team watches Phoebe’s escalating responses with growing disagreement. Tessa insists the construct needs more time. June calls it obsessive. Meg calls it degenerating. Z mediates without resolving anything. Phoebe’s vocalizations from the dream chamber provide an ongoing counterpoint to the professional argument above her, and the irony of what she is saying while the researchers debate methodology is not lost on anyone in the room. June accuses Z of bias toward Tessa. Z does not deny it.

Dream Sequence

The dream deepens. Nyra, Cael, and Hespa inform Phoebe that she has passed a threshold and will now perform for observers. The dream figures describe what she is becoming with the patient certainty of entities that have watched this process many times before. Phoebe’s resistance folds into need. The strings are pulled.

Observation Chamber: Aftermath

Phoebe’s voice comes through the intercom. June delivers her verdict on Tessa’s experiment with the cold precision of someone who has been waiting to deliver it: Construct 37 did not teach Phoebe to escape her fears. It taught her to eroticize her humiliation. Each response has reinforced the loop it was designed to break. Meg savors the outcome. Z turns on Tessa with a cruelty that surprises even Meg. June notes clinically that the subject is now fully compliant and that the approach is, in its way, effective.

Outro: Tessa’s Letter

Tessa reads her written confession to the adjudicating committee of the Sitri Institute. She accepts full responsibility. She names what she built: not a ladder but a spiral. She names what she became: a voyeur whose professional boundaries dissolved in stages she catalogued and continued past anyway. She names what she wants, even now, even after all of it.

Listen & Explore

Explanation

Adapt resolves the Construct 37 trial in the direction Meg predicted and in a way that implicates everyone watching. The observation chamber scenes are structured so that the researchers’ professional debate runs continuously alongside Phoebe’s dream vocalizations, and the juxtaposition is the argument: the language of scientific rigor and the language of what is actually happening in the chamber are the same language with different justifications attached.

June’s clinical verdict, that the subject is now fully compliant and the approach is effective, is the most honest thing anyone says in the episode. It acknowledges the outcome without acknowledging the responsibility.

Tessa’s closing letter is the arc’s first genuine confession and its most formally precise piece of writing. She does not minimize what happened. She names each stage of her own dissolution with the careful specificity of someone trained to observe and document, turned finally on herself. The letter is also, structurally, exactly what Meg said she would script for the committee: an admission that private-sector bravado failed utterly. Tessa delivers it in her own voice. That is the detail that makes it desire horror rather than simply tragedy. She built the spiral. She walked down it. She is begging to stay near the bottom.

Human Made Art

Series artwork for this arc is from Vika Glitter on Pixabay, under the Pixabay license. 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 manipulative 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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Deep Dream State Sitri Center Episode 1 Drill cover art featuring a silhouetted figure suspended inside a luminous amber ring against a deep space nebula background in blue and purple with the text Sitri Center E1 Drill
Arc 3: Sitri Center – Episode 1: Drill

Arc 3: Sitri Center – Episode 1: Drill

By |

Arc 3: Sitri Center – Episode 1: Drill

Everyone sees what you are.

The Sitri Center is a dream research institute where scientists do more than study subconscious fears. They engineer them. Tonight’s first subject is Phoebe Bosworth. Her dreams have already started escalating.

The experiment has already begun.

Cast & Crew

Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Co-Directed by: Bliss Blank

Principal Cast

Zev Talcott (Z) – Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
June Lowell – Bliss Blank
Tessa Finn – Ring of Kees
Meg Aerin – Bun Li
Phoebe Bosworth – Sofi Starship
Nyra – Dizzy Dollie
Cael – Jericho Caine
Hespa – Syndi Rella
Iris Vale – Swirls and Twirls
Oona Spectral – Jade
Meridiana – Britt Reprogrammed

Listen & Explore

Explanation

Drill establishes the Sitri Center arc’s central tension in the first observation lab scene: the difference between what the institute claims it is doing and what it is actually doing. Tessa believes she is deploying a therapeutic intervention. Meg believes the intervention will accelerate dependency rather than resolve it. Both of them are right about different things, and the arc will spend twelve episodes demonstrating how a research environment can contain two contradictory true statements simultaneously as long as the funding holds.

The fake advertisements voiced by Iris Vale are doing more than setting tone. Better Self and Please Space are products that promise exactly what the Sitri Center promises: sleep optimization, subconscious reshaping, personalized sessions tailored to your rhythms. Iris Vale, who appears in the Sitri arc as a performer and later becomes a named character in Vale Four, is the connective tissue between the institute’s therapeutic framing and its commercial applications.

The advertisements are not interruptions. They are the argument.

Threat simulation theory, the scientific framework underlying Construct 37, is a genuine area of dream research: the hypothesis that certain dreams function as adaptive rehearsal for threatening scenarios. The Sitri Center’s intervention is premised on the possibility that these rehearsals can be redirected. Meg’s counter-argument, that Phoebe’s dreams are not rehearsal but reward-seeking, is also grounded in real neuroscience. The show is not choosing between them. It is asking what happens when an institution with a financial stake in the outcome gets to decide which theory is correct.

Human Made Art

Series artwork for this arc is from Vika Glitter on Pixabay, under the Pixabay license. 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 Sitri Center arc draws on real research in threat simulation theory, sleep paralysis, and REM synchronization as a speculative fiction foundation.

The Sitri Center does not exist.  The technologies and conditioning protocols depicted are creative inventions for narrative purposes. Drill contains adult themes and suggestive content. All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context. ISNI 0000 0005 2877 6254

Full Summary (spoilers)

Intro

Z introduces the series and the setting directly. This is Deep Dream State. Inside this story, he is Z. Tonight’s story comes from inside the Sitri Center, a place where dreams are analyzed, made, and sometimes broken.

Ad: Better Self

Iris Vale delivers the first advertisement in the register she will carry through the arc. Better Self is a science-backed mindfulness app for dreamers, doers, and night owls.

Observation Lab

Tessa Finn records her procedural notes for the first active intervention trial. Subject P-09 is Phoebe Bosworth, a twenty-seven-year-old journalism graduate whose shame-saturated dreams have developed a significant erotic component. Tessa has designed Construct 37, a mastery prototype intended to disrupt the recursive shame loops, and tonight is the first deployment.

Meg Aerin is less optimistic. She argues that Phoebe is not rehearsing adaptive responses but cycling through a neurochemical reward loop, and that Tessa’s corporate-sector methodology mistakes branding for scholarship. The argument escalates into a formal wager: one week of intervention, objective metrics, with the winner recording a full-throated endorsement of the loser’s methodology for the committee. The stakes are a twelve million dollar budget, automatic tenure, and sole PI status on a five year mandate. June Lowell, as Chief Scientific Officer, will oversee data validation personally. Z defuses the immediate tension without resolving the underlying one.

Dream Chamber

Tessa meets with Phoebe directly following the session. Phoebe reports that the dreams are getting louder, more vivid, more specifically sexual, and that she suspects she may be generating them intentionally. Tessa offers clinical reassurance. Z interrupts with a more human approach, mentioning that Tessa herself was once a subject, and that everyone carries unusual corners. Tessa removes Z from the room and is immediately confronted with Z’s precise read on what drives her. The conversation moves from professional to personal faster than Tessa intends. Z names the parking lot. Then the temple. Then the vending machine.

Dream Sequence: Classroom

Phoebe’s dream places her in a classroom where Cael, Nyra, and Hespa enact the embarrassment scenario her subconscious keeps rehearsing. She is simultaneously the subject of evaluation and the object of observation. The dream logic runs on its own rules: being seen is the threat, being seen is the reward, and Construct 37 has not yet changed the equation.

Ad: Please Space

Iris Vale returns for the midroll. Please Space is a scientifically validated meditation program for silence, the luxury kind. Personalized sessions tailored to your worries and your dreams.  The voice shifts register slightly toward the end.

Dream Chamber to Corridor

Phoebe tells Meg the dreams are getting worse. Meg clarifies what DDS actually promises: insight and data, not guaranteed outcomes. She explains that the sleep hygiene protocols restricting certain behaviors tend to intensify subconscious imagery as the mind seeks alternative avenues. Phoebe understands. Meg is saved from a personal question by a conveniently timed phone call.

Z is waiting in the corridor. He has been listening. The conversation that follows between Z and Meg covers Tessa’s obvious indiscretion, June’s likely response if she finds out, and the precise nature of what Meg believes she offers that Tessa does not. Meg is confident she is better.  They agree that June cannot know.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download