18 characters: Ex-mayor, Therapist, Lawrence, Announcer, Ahmadi, Renata, Saetang, Sergey, Marcus, Ambassador One, Peters, Sanders, Questioner One, Questioner Two, Marissa, Stone, Computer, Larissa
Click on a character's name to get their lines highlighted.
Stone (6 lines, 84 words, 2.41%) - [John Gaunce] Doctor Stone has become ever more wrapped up in his research over the years. Now he finds himself with a problem so fascinating and revolutionary that he becomes neglectful toward a patient. Basically hubris is at a high point and soon to crash.
Peters (1 line, 204 words, 5.86%) - [David Loftus] Salish Peters, chief mechanic. Great-grandfather was the first mission commander, and he never tires of telling people so and relating the stories of Earth he remembers hearing from great-grandpa. Sensible, direct, kind of average working Joe. Now about to turn 70, he has a husband and two grown kids.
Renata (18 lines, 274 words, 7.87%) - [Kathleen Li] Renata Mutombo is the mayor for 22 years now. Now around 50 years old. Ambitious and competent. No longer in campign mode, she should sound more natural and less practiced than before.
Ahmadi (30 lines, 354 words, 10.17%) - [Paul Knierim] Detective Arash Ahmadi is now 46 and married to Marissa Flint.
Saetang (17 lines, 193 words, 5.55%) - [Sova Reign] Detective Aranya Saetang has now been on the job for 22 years. Sometimes she's still a little annoyed about having to share the office with Ahmadi, but she tries to bury her resentment.
Ex-mayor (27 lines, 494 words, 14.2%) - [Roger Arnold] Mayor Renata Mutombo's father, a former mayor himself, really misses being in the middle of everything. At 80 years old, he's struggling to reconcile with his declining years and wants to find a way to matter again.
Therapist (7 lines, 170 words, 4.89%) - [Ahmad Joudeh] Doctor Tam Peters is the husband of Salish Peters and therapist to all.
Marissa (20 lines, 175 words, 5.03%) - [Virginia Hargrove] Communications Chief Marissa Flint is 48 years old and enjoys the responsibilities of her new job. She's now married to Arash Ahmadi... turns out there was some jealousy behind her previous spite for him, but they're still playfully combative at times.
Larissa (4 lines, 36 words, 1.03%) - [Lindsay Townsend] Chief Mech Larissa Flint is now 40 years old and much more experienced than last season.
Marcus (12 lines, 266 words, 7.64%) - [Glenn Hascall] Marcus Flint is the emotionally crippled absentee father of Larissa and Marissa Flint. He's 68 years old and realizing that he's failed at everything so far. He feels he needs a change of scenery to start over.
Lawrence (11 lines, 669 words, 19.22%) - [James Lorenz] Chief Lawrence heads up astronomy section.
Ambassador One (4 lines, 115 words, 3.3%) - [Azure] Centaurian.
Sanders (2 lines, 242 words, 6.95%) - [Erin Suminsby] Chief botanist Juliana Sanders is now in her 40s and mellowed, with dreams of revolution far behind her.
Computer (1 line, 4 words, 0.11%) - [Azure] The voice of 253 Mathilde's computer system.
Sergey (2 lines, 93 words, 2.67%) - [Alexander Grace] Sergey Kochergan is an ambitious young mission candidate who hasn't really decided what to be.
Questioner One (2 lines, 27 words, 0.78%) - [Alison Prophet] Random audience member.
Questioner Two (1 line, 21 words, 0.6%) - [CoreyVA] Random audience member.
Announcer (3 lines, 59 words, 1.7%) - [Erin Suminsby] Reads opening, closing and credits.
Script format: Margined | Marginless (for phone viewing)
Listen along as you read:
1 SOUND: eating lunch at marco’s, effects from ep 7
2 Ex-mayor: So, we’re down to two candidates who none of us has a strong objection to.
3 Therapist: I’m not really happy about either of them, but I don’t think there’s anyone I COULD be happy about condemning to total social isolation for the rest of their probably very brief life. Even when they insist they want it. But I think these two could handle it better than most.
4 Ex-mayor: I've wondered if we ought to be sending two people, to give each other company.
5 Lawrence: Why send two people to their deaths when we can accomplish the goal with one? And they'd go through the water and rations twice as fast, we don't have the mass margin to double them.
6 Therapist: So how should we pick which one, just put it to a quick vote?
7 Ex-mayor: No, we’ve got to be careful about this. Let’s interview them.
8 Lawrence: Look, I’m really busy with all the observations I have to make of the Tau Ceti system and the oncoming asteroid.
9 Ex-mayor: We can do them both at once, a three on two panel interview. Won't take long.
10 Lawrence: Well, I suppose.
11 Therapist: Agreed.
12 SOUND: opening theme
13 Announcer: Quiet Please dot org presents Two Fifty Three Mathilde. In the early 22nd century, the crewed asteroid 253 Mathilde left the solar system on an interstellar mission. Generations later, after a hundred and fourteen years, a new star system stretches out in front of them…
14 Announcer: Episode 11 - Natural Selection
15 SOUND: security room tone. door opens, footsteps enter.
16 Ahmadi: Mayor, to what do we owe the pleasure?
17 Renata: Have you two uncovered anything new about the artifact?
18 Saetang: A few things.
19 Ahmadi: We’ve determined it runs on gallium nitride transistors with trinary gates. Even leading experts on Earth would probably need years to understand the programming.
20 Renata: We don’t have years, we have three weeks before its friends arrive. Does it appear to have any offensive capabilities, besides electrocuting you Ahmadi?
21 Ahmadi: It’s peaceful.
22 Renata: You seem sure of yourself.
23 Ahmadi: I am.
24 Saetang: I’m not so sure. I think we should disable it.
25 Ahmadi: No! If you try to remove it who knows what could happen, it might blow up!
26 Renata: [mockingly] So it’s absolutely peaceful, but it’ll kill us if we try to stop it, have I got that right Ahmadi?
27 Ahmadi: I… well… all I know is we’ve gotta leave it alone!
28 Renata: Detective Saetang, have the antenna disconnected. Whatever it’s doing, I don’t think we need it coordinating with the oncoming asteroid any longer.
29 Ahmadi: You’re making a big mistake!
30 Renata: I also want you two to draw up plans to repel a potential invasion.
31 Saetang: It’d help to know what form the invasion will take, how many of them there are, what they’re armed with, what their goals are.
32 Renata: [wryly] Sure would.
33 SOUND: end scene
34 SOUND: small room tone with small reverb
35 Ex-mayor: And in your own words, and please keep them under a minute, what do you think makes you the ideal candidate for this mission? Sergey Kochergan?
36 Sergey: I have some medical training, so I’ll be able to recognize and treat some potential problems. I temped a while in hydroponics, so I’ve got a head start on growing my own food. And I’ve spent some time as a mech too so I can keep the equipment running. I’m kind of a jack of all trades, and that’s what you need when you can only send one person.
37 Ex-mayor: And you, Marcus Flint?
38 Marcus: I work hard, I don’t expect much from life, and I'm prepared for things to get rough. I’ve never really gotten along with people anyway, I can thrive on solitude. You can get along without me and I can get along without you. I’m old enough it’s no tragedy when I die but young enough I can handle the stresses and get along without any medicines for a few years.
39 Therapist: What I’d like to know is, why do either of you *want* to do this?
40 Sergey: [with awe at the prospect] Who could resist being the first person to explore strange new worlds? To discover new life, maybe even civilizations?
41 Marcus: What else is left for me? My daughters hate me, my boss barely tolerates me, nobody else gives me the time of day. I figure this is my last chance to make something of my life, and a sacrifice that can help make up for some mistakes.
42 Ex-mayor: Okay, thank you both for coming in. You can go now, we'll let you know by tomorrow. Remember, whichever of you isn't picked will continue training as a contingency option.
43 SOUND: the candidates leave
44 Ex-mayor: I worry Sergey hasn’t really figured himself out yet, he tries something and tires of it and wants to move on to the next thing. He’s young. He wants this right now, but how do we know if he’ll keep on wanting it?
45 Therapist: His zeal concerns me. I don’t think you can do a life-long mission like this because you’re excited about exploration and discovery, because the exploration and discovery are just the dramatized clips for the newsreel… the reality is going to be years of tedium and loneliness.
46 Lawrence: On the other hand, Sergey has all the skills he needs and an aptitude for learning more and a good attitude. I can see him handling unexpected situations and staying flexible. Flint… well, to be polite, Flint isn’t one of our best or brightest.
47 Ex-mayor: Hard to believe his daughters are related to him.
48 Lawrence: He’s barely been in their lives, that’s why they turned out okay.
49 Therapist: Flint is stubborn and jaded. But I don’t know, maybe that’d work to his advantage. His psyche is already scarred over.
50 Lawrence: But is he the sort of person we want representing humanity? I mean, this could be the only human some alien species ever meets… do we want to send somebody who’s kind of a jerk?
51 Therapist: Might be better than sending somebody who’s insane by the time he arrives.
52 SOUND: security room tone
53 Ambassador One: We do not have an arsenal, we cannot arm everyone. But we will share what we have on the condition that it all be returned immediately once the threat has passed.
54 Saetang: Let's hope they aren't bringing an army. At least we've cut their intel signal now.
55 Ahmadi: I feel the strongest intuition that the device was just here to monitor and keep things safe. Like, maybe they’re the galactic police.
56 Saetang: [scoffing] And you think that means we’re safe?
57 Ahmadi: Doesn’t it?
58 Saetang: Not if we’ve been breaking their laws, and them pulling us over suggests we have been.
59 Ahmadi: Breaking the cosmic speed limit?
60 Ambassador One: That might be exactly what we are doing.
61 Ahmadi: What?
62 Ambassador One: Think about it. The speed at which we are now moving makes us a weapon of mass destruction. If we wished to, we could destroy entire planets with just small chunks of 253 Mathilde. And there is no defense against us.
63 Ahmadi: Well, if that’s what they’re here about we should let them board so they can verify our good intentions. We need to prove our good faith, not point weapons at them.
64 Ambassador One: On Earth, when your police catch a citizen in possession of a nuclear weapon, do they let him keep it after verifying that he seems like a nice guy and says he will not use it?
65 Saetang: I’m with the ambassador on this one.
66 SOUND: end scene
67 SOUND: hoverball court
68 Renata: Your serve, dad.
69 SOUND: serve
70 Ex-mayor: *ten seconds of discrete movement grunts of jumping and diving that I can mix in*
71 Renata: *ten seconds of discrete movement grunts of jumping and diving that I can mix in*
72 SOUND: buzzer
73 Ex-mayor: Another one for me.
74 Renata: Have you made your decision yet, dad? Which volunteer to make our ambassador to Tau Ceti?
75 Ex-mayor: I think so, but I'm not sure if it really feels right.
76 SOUND: serve
77 Renata: [said while stretching for ball] What do you mean?
78 Ex-mayor: [said while running back and forth, so intersperse pauses to catch breath] On the one hand, I've got a highly enthusiastic, highly qualified young man who can handle anything we throw at him. On the other hand I've got a whiny old codger who sees the mission more as a penance than a reward.
79 SOUND: buzzer
80 Renata: Sounds like an easy decision. Game point, my serve.
81 SOUND: serve
82 Ex-mayor: [said while running back and forth, so intersperse pauses to catch breath] You'd think so. Trouble is, the more I think about it the more certain I am that we've got to send the whiny old codger.
83 Renata: [said while running and stretching for ball] Why's that?
84 Ex-mayor: [said while running back and forth, so intersperse pauses to catch breath] How can we condemn someone to permanent expulsion who doesn't really understand what he's getting into? Sergey thinks it's a fun adventure, who knows how he'll handle it when he discovers the endless hardship and it's too late to change his mind.
85 Renata: [said while running] I see your point.
86 Ex-mayor: [spoken while leaping] Speaking of which...
87 SOUND: buzzer
88 Ex-mayor: Game point to me. Ready to surrender?
89 Renata: Wasn't a fair contest, you have way more experience playing hoverball in natural gravity!
90 Ex-mayor: That was a long time ago.
91 Renata: Still, you remember how the ball moves and how to use the ceiling. I barely played before the acceleration kicked in. Took me a few years as mayor and a failed marriage to realize you need to play to let off steam.
92 Ex-mayor: Was easier back then, I'm exhausted.
93 SOUND: door opens and they stride out
94 SOUND: moderate crowd, spacous room tone like the debates in episode 7, spacious reverb on voices and they'll be talking through microphones
95 Renata: Thank you all for coming out today. I know many of you have questions about our Tau Ceti mission, please hang onto those to ask after the presentations if the presenters don't cover it. First, let me introduce astronomy chief Lawrence with a quick overview of the system we'll be exploring.
96 SOUND: smattering of applause and footsteps
97 Lawrence: Rather than just describe the Tau Ceti system, let me show it to you.
98 SOUND: hologram activation, same effect as episode 5
99
Lawrence:
What you're seeing is the grand overview: all twelve planets, 87 known moons, the dust belt, the scattered disk. Not to scale, or most of the planets and all the moons would be too small for you to see anything of. Each of these worlds is fascinating in its own right, and we could spend a lifetime studying any one of them. Unfortunately we can't, so we've prioritized the worlds that appear capable of supporting life -- including hopefully the life of our volunteer explorer.
Three of the planets are sub-Neptune gas giants. Let's zoom in on one of them.
100 SOUND: zoom noise
101
Lawrence:
The biggest of these moons you're looking at is Mars-sized, has a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere and what appears to be extensive plant life. It's outside the traditional conception of the habitable zone but appears to be kept just warm enough thanks to tidal heating and greenhouse gases -- a very high methane concentration which may have volcanic and biological contributions. We've named this moon Eddington. Because of the small gravity well, Eddington will be our ship's initial and hopefully final destination.
But if our volunteer judges the prospects of survival on Eddington as too dim, there's the super-Earth originally known as Tau Ceti f. We've renamed that as Miranda. At about 4 Earth masses, landing on Miranda is a one way trip, and the gravity will present problems for our explorer. Fortunately, everything else we've been able to gather about the planet has been promising -- there are oceans, continents, plant life, and several controversial pockets of light on the night side which may represent cities but might also be some sort of land-based bioluminescence on a scale not known on Earth. It remains to be seen what we'll find, and that's why we're going. So without further adieu I'd like to introduce you all to the one of us who'll be going in person, whose mission reports we'll be hanging on every word of. Please welcome Marcus Flint!
102 SOUND: end hologram noise on so without in above line
103 SOUND: some perplexed chatter, some applause
104 Marcus: I know none of you like me much. That's okay, you don't need to. I'm honored to carry this responsibility on behalf of the human race, and of course I'll be keeping you updated on everything I learn. I'm not one for speeches, so let me leave it at that and turn you over to Mission Specialist Peters, who's going to tell you a little about my ship and flight profile.
105 Peters: Thank you, Marcus. I've poured the last few years of my life into this ship, which is designed entirely around one principle: figuring out how to get our current velocity of three quarters of the speed of light down to almost nothing as quickly as possible. As quickly as possible turned out to be about a month and a half at an average acceleration of five gees. To achieve that, we've created a tiny ship which at launch time will dock with a gigantic tanker -- two orders of magnitude larger than the ship. The gee forces Marcus has to endure -- what we colloquially refer to as gravity even though it's a different phenomenon -- will gradually increase as the ship/tanker combo becomes lighter. We plan to insert the ship into an orbit around Eddington, then leave the vast majority of the remaining fuel up there in orbit -- a cache to use for a potential trip to Miranda later. Just the ship will descend to the surface of Eddington using aerobraking to limit fuel consumption, retaining just enough fuel to make it back to orbit if required. Now, to explain how we'll keep Marcus alive once he lands, here's Chief Sanders.
106
Sanders:
Thank you. Surviving the fantastic accelerations will be the easy part. The hard part will be staying alive on an alien world.
Water should be easy to source on Eddington or Miranda, but food is an entirely different matter. We don't know if what plants may be growing there have any nutritional value for a human, though we're including lab equipment to determine that and whether they're poisonous. Accordingly, we've given a lot of thought to a collection of seeds we're sending with him. We've included plants that thrive in various conditions and that fulfill varied nutritional needs in the hopes he can get enough of them to take root. Of course he'll have a searchable library of ebooks and holos to help him learn the farming skills he'll need. If some condition unknown to us prevents any of our seeds from growing, and the native plants aren't edible, then I'm afraid Marcus only has about eight months until the dehydrated ration packs run out.
107 Marcus: But prolly only a week before I'm totally sick of them.
108 SOUND: scattered laughter
109 Renata: We can take a few questions now. Yes, you in the second row?
110 Questioner One: Don't they say Miranda is too young to have developed intelligent life?
111 Lawrence: It's considerably older than Earth, but I think what you're referring to is that Miranda has only been in the habitable zone for around a billion years. Can intelligent life evolve in that short a time? Nobody knows, all we know is it took four billion years on Earth and the ambassadors say it took three billion on their planet. This is one of the big questions we're hoping to find the answer to.
112 Questioner One: What about Tau Ceti's huge dust belt, wouldn't that make it hard for complex life?
113 Lawrence: Tau Ceti is a very active system. With ten times the cometary and asteroidal material of Earth's sun, and no Jupiter-sized planets in the system, we expect Eddington and Miranda have been subject to many bombardments which could've complicated the evolution of life. Then again, nothing speeds up evolution like a crisis and humanity might never have evolved without the K-T event wiping out the dinosaurs... perhaps we'll find they've evolved faster because of their extinction events. Or maybe Eddington is sufficiently protected by its planet, or Miranda by its thick atmosphere... we'll just have to wait and see.
114 Questioner Two: This one is for Chief Sanders. Isn't introducing seeds from Earth to an alien planet a serious act of environmental destruction?
115 Sanders: You can certainly view it that way, but we decided keeping Marcus Flint alive is more important than preserving the biosphere the way we find it. The plan does call for him to land on an isolated island or continent in hopes that the rest of the world won't be affected. But really, we think native plants are likely to out-compete anything adapted to Earth, so the real problem will be keeping our crops from being overrun.
116 Marissa: This question's for Marcus Flint. Mister Flint, were you ever planning on telling your daughters you'd been selected or were you hoping to sneak away before we'd notice?
117 SOUND: crowd hush except a few laughs and scoffs
118 Marcus: [sarcastic] Thought I'd keep it a surprise until the presentation so I could see the look of pure joy and pride on your face right now.
119 SOUND: end scene
120 SOUND: security room tone
121 Ahmadi: If we must treat them as a threat, our defense should focus on protecting the generators.
122 Saetang: Why's that?
123 Ahmadi: If they knock out the generators, our air and heat go out and they've won.
124 Saetang: I suppose. But I think it's more likely they'll want to capture us undamaged, or they'd just keep their distance and destroy us with relativistic kinetic weapons.
125 Ahmadi: I think it's more likely they don't want to hurt us at all, but we're not allowed to plan for that scenario. They could disable the generators temporarily to force a surrender, if we don't defend them.
126 Saetang: Okay, you have a point there.
127 SOUND: door opens, footsteps enter
128 Ahmadi: Can we help you?
129 Ex-mayor: Thought I'd come help you strategize our defense.
130 Ahmadi: [sarcastic] Gee, thanks.
131 Ex-mayor: If we get overrun by a superior force, we'll need fallback positions with good cover to hide a while and regroup.
132 Saetang: Hard to hide on an asteroid where so few places have oxygen.
133 Ex-mayor: There's the storage levels. Bit of a labyrinth, lots of containers to hide behind or inside. Area B12 is a good strategic position. You should consider caching some weapons and ammo there just in case.
134 Saetang: Do we have enough weapons to be caching some?
135 Ex-mayor: It's mainly extra power packs and explosives we'll need to cache, we'll bring the laser rifles with us as we retreat. A few extra rifles in reserve would be smart too though, considering how likely it is that we'll be overpowered. Either we'll stop them by the airlock or we'll be fighting an insurgency, there's not much chance for something in between.
136 Saetang: Not a bad idea.
137 Ahmadi: I'll go take care of it.
138 SOUND: Ahmadi walks out
139 Saetang: [perplexed] I didn't mean right this minute...
140 Ex-mayor: Is it my imagination or is Ahmadi acting stranger than usual lately?
141 SOUND: medical, door opens, footsteps enter
142 Stone: Marcus Flint, you made it quick!
143 Marcus: What’ve I been sent here for, Doctor?
144 Stone: Drop your pants please.
145 Marcus: Excuse me?
146 Stone: I have your first injection ready, needs to go in your posterior.
147 Marcus: Injection of what?
148 Stone: I thought somebody would’ve told you.
149 Marcus: Apparently not.
150 Stone: This’ll help your body cope with the extreme gee forces of your last month of deceleration. You’ll be getting one every other day, I'll be sending a supply with you to inject yourself after launch.
151 Marcus: Oh, I was kinda wonderin' how I was gonna survive that.
152 SOUND: unzips pants and pulls them down, sound of injection needle primed
153 Marcus: *soft grunt from injection*
154 Stone: With that other asteroid coming after us, you might be the only one of us who *does* survive.
155 SOUND: pulls up and re-zips pants
156 Marcus: [sarcastic] Thanks Doc, you always find that silver lining.
157 SOUND: security room tone, door opens, footsteps enter to middle of ongoing conversation. listener enters with Marissa.
158 Ex-mayor: [middle of an argument] But that's not how an invader thinks!
159 Saetang: [sarcastic] So glad you're here to provide me with perfect insight into the minds of aliens you've never met.
160 Marissa: Excuse me.
161 Saetang: [annoyed] Yes, what is it Chief Flint?
162 Marissa: I'm looking for my husband. He's not here?
163 Saetang: He ran off to some storage area to hide some ordinance for a fallback plan.
164 Ex-mayor: B12.
165 Marissa: Thanks.
166 Ex-mayor: [sfx: fading out and cut off by door close] So, detective, do you really think it's likely they're going to--
167 SOUND: footsteps remain centered, door closes, walk to elevator
168 SOUND: multicom activation beep
169 Marissa: Hey Larissa, what's up?
170 SOUND: elevator opens
171 Computer: Please state your destination.
172 Larissa: [sfx: processed] I heard dad got picked for the mission.
173 Marissa: Storage area B12.
174 SOUND: elevator movement noise
175 Larissa: What?
176 Marissa: Not to you. Yeah, I was there at the presentation.
177 Larissa: I hope he doesn't back out at the last second and leave us in a bind. Sergey better stay ready to step in.
178 Marissa: [stressing already at the prospect] You're so lucky. Dad being picked means it's going to be *my job* to talk to him all the time for months until we're out of range.
179 SOUND: elevator stops and opens, footsteps exit while centered
180 Larissa: That does sound awful.
181 Marissa: Gotta go, I'll call you back later.
182 SOUND: hangup, and a few more footsteps while approaching a noisy work area
183 Marissa: Arash, I wanted to... wait, what are you doing?
184 SOUND: crash from ahmadi dropping stuff being startled
185 Marissa: Why are you destroying those weapon power packs?
186 Ahmadi: Put your hands in the air, Marissa. Now.
187 Marissa: Honey, you're pointing a gun at your wife. You better have one hell of a pursuasive explanation, and have it NOW.
188 Ahmadi: I can't let you tell anyone about this.
189 Marissa: Wrong answer.
190 Ahmadi: Toss your multicom to the ground.
191 Marissa: Why?
192 Ahmadi: I don't want to hurt you, but I will if you interfere with my mission.
193 Marissa: Your mission?! But...
194 Ahmadi: NOW!
195 SOUND: marissa tosses her multicom to the floor, ahmadi shoots it
196 Ahmadi: They can't track you now. Let's go, you first, I have a place in mind.
197 SOUND: they start moving
198 Ahmadi: Down those stairs and to the right.
199 SOUND: down some stairs
200 Marissa: Arash, what's happening to you? It's like you've become a different person.
201 Ahmadi: I have a higher calling now.
202 Marissa: Sabotage and kidnapping are higher? I think you have your directions confused.
203 Ahmadi: By disabling the weapons I'm preventing violence, saving lives.
204 Marissa: Alien lives, maybe.
205 Ahmadi: In here.
206 SOUND: opens door
207 Ahmadi: Nobody comes down here, you won't be able to attract anyone's attention. I've got the door lock on manual and the area isn't hooked up to voice access systems, so it'll take them a long time to discover you.
208 Marissa: Especially with *you* leading the search.
209 Ahmadi: I'll bring you food and water every day, I have no wish to see you or anyone else harmed unnecessarily.
210 Marissa: [threatening] Arash, if I ever get out of here...
211 SOUND: perspective stays with Marissa as door swings shut and locks and ahmadi's muffled footsteps depart
212 SOUND: closing theme
213 Announcer: You've been listening to Two Fifty-Three Mathilde, episode eleven: Natural Selection.