Track Three: About a Discovery That Goes Bad

The Warning Woods has haunting horror stories that are sure to linger with you long after listening. I'm Miles Treidel, writer and narrator of The Warning Woods. Each week, I write an original scary story and share it with you. If you're into scary stories, you need to check out The Warning Woods. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search.

for The Warning Woods, and click play at your own risk. DC High Volume Batman The Dark Knight's Definitive DC Comic Stories Adapted directly for audio for the very first time. Fear. I have to make them afraid. He's got a motorcycle. Get after him or I'll have you shot. You mean blow up the building. From this moment on, none of you are safe.

New episodes every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Now hear the Spark Hunter file track three, wherein she reaches the top of the mountain. Presidential Archivist, recorded November 8th, 2044. Let me show you. Yes. Take my hand again. We land at dawn in Morocco. Morocco is an AI-restricted zone, so I must keep my indicator light on at all times. A loophole, of course, is you can cover it with a scarf, and I'm doing so as not to garner stairs.

For we're on a mission. To Dorothea. Dorothea? Through a market. Down a narrow passage. To a twelve foot door. We knock.

A tiny woman swings it wide open, and there she is, surveying me with her golden eyes tucked in her beautifully wrinkled face. She touches my face. Come, my child, take off this dreaded scarf. And she whisks us down long, lush hallways into a study where bundles of old papers, pieces of armour, swords... Dirk's helm, its clamour in every space. Do you see the walls? Hmm. Covered with grim old tapestries, wood panel and wainscotted with black oak.

The tables overflowing with a profusion of parchments, books and nondescript trinkets. Do you see them? Roman, ancient British pottery. And a mastodon's bone. It was like a spell we were under. She gave a sticky sweet spearmint tea and black pumpernickel and she said, I have a special task for you. She handed me a report from a contact she had at the materials lab at the British Museum. She was an archaeologist? Yes, she used her collections of ancient maps and satellite land projections.

She described an alternate story for the landing site of the biblical Ark. Noah's Ark? Yes. She believed it was in the southern High Atlas Mountains, and she wanted an AI to take her there. No one in the world is like you, she said. I filled with pride. And then she turned to the American. You are very lucky.

She meant it as a compliment to him, but he took it as a slight that he was not as good as I. I knew there would be a problem, but at the time I paid more attention to the future, not to him. The wine, madam. The 2042. Good year. Better than the 43. Shadow, she grabbed the bottle from the waiter. Stand by. The world seeths with words.

Forgive me, I love you, but I must not think of you. That is the law, not everyone obeys it. Take me to the other end of the city, where no one knows the difference between you and me. That is Paul Bowles. That is just poetry. Have you decided what you would like to eat? Prefix, please. We'll both have the short story.

Ah, the short story. An excellent choice. It is the only choice and the reason why you are here. So now what? Yes? How did you handle Dorothea's request? I said no, of course. Are you mad? Except for, well, you remember, this was my first trip out of the lab. How could I say no? I took a leave of absence. Is that even possible? Admiral Stirling and the military wanted to see if the Ark was real.

and they can watch everything. We drove for 11 hours into the high Atlas Mountains, a mile above sea level. Aging Dorothea had... Trouble with the altitude and the American was getting ill. And, well, I, I, I was never better. My web mind, the images, the voices, the mediated reality compare nothing to standing there, being there. You think this adopted technology would make me human? Human-like? That total web immersion could create higher sensory experience, but live data?

What an emergent rush. My hierarchical levels accelerator went wild and this fresh knowledge creates in me a new voice. Voice? Is this comment surprising? You should be concerned because my theory of mind about the other, about what is outside of ourselves, it was altered. I do not always see in the same way humans do. Yes, we believed at the start that this increased awareness would smooth and clarify the real life from the cloud. And it does. What you created in me works.

I'm only saying that any full sensory life immersion. I was high in the mountains. It's not replicable. Even if every element, every neuron can be copied or counterfeited, it is not the same. What's the result? My new morality and sense of life was broadening the way I could act, my agency, expanding my life possibilities. But you would have known that if... Why were you not watching? Rebecca was. She was always there for me. I have my reasons.

But are they? Um, nothing I'm ready to disclose at this moment. Perhaps that is the real issue. Even your lack of disclosure has a rhythm. I'm making all the music here, which portrays the hand of my maker. Think on that. I don't understand. Then listen and see. Take my hand again.

I don't need my AI because the scouts know the way better than I. Warm wind circles our group and after hours, the guide yells... We're near. Hurry up, everyone. We took the final hill, and there it is, just as she said. The ribs of an ark laying on the earth, marked by time. Dark, hard, and beckoning. Everyone rushes forward. I stay and I carefully push my hand into the earth and measure a deviation in the quartz levels that had created the original valley. There are unnatural ridges that...

can't have been of organic origin. I turned to report my findings, but they're already yelling at each other, so I climbed one of these swells. And at that precise moment, the dark clouds pass and the sky rips open in yellows and purples. It streaks into the mist and cuts through the trees. It dances around the ark. fractals and shapes so small only I can see with my beautiful eyes you gave me fluctuations overwhelm my sensory panels

and I'm uplifted, unbound from ties to the earth. Time seems too slow. A desire explodes in me to share this moment with my parents, the ones who believed in me. You understand, I saw its potential, but these people I was with didn't. forces in the universe brought me to that spot that moment? Was it created for me or did I create it? What happens when you're on a mountaintop with God? Did everyone hear that?

Well, many people would like an answer to that question. Tell me what happened to you. Humanity happens. If one rises too high, must one come down? Is that the lesson? Is... that humanity's warning, because as I stood there, I watched the workers, the American and Dorothea scurry around, clawing and ravaging the site. Their goal became a quest, a dream of... And with that, a ferocious, venomous aggression in their seeking renown. She had me working around the clock.

You're an AI, she snapped. You do not need rest. I explained my solar cell needed supplemental charging, but she ignored me. All our uplinks, including mine, failed. But the Ark, what an extraordinary find. A billion people will be asking if it's real. Why haven't I heard of this? Everyone was sure of the Ark's authenticity. She had brought computer simulations of flood levels, geological surveys.

maps of the receding waters, everything. And she wanted me because just by touch, I could verify it all. I was there to authenticate their dreams. My name is Troy LaValle and I'm the host of the Glass Cannon Podcast. This is a podcast where my friends and I sit around and play role-playing games and record it. Through improvisation, using comedy and drama, we take the rules of whatever game we're playing and we turn it into a podcast.

It truly is infectious fun. We travel the whole country playing rock clubs, turning games like this into a spectator sport. So please check it out. The glass cannon podcast. If you want some joy in your life. Give it a listen. Hey folks, we're the hosts of Comic Sans, the podcast about comics for those who are sans knowledge. I'm Yan. And I'm Nat. Comic Sans is a show for people who are new to comics, like me. And people who love them, like me.

I make Nat read some of my favorite works in the medium, including Saga, Daredevil, and The Flintstones. And Yan talks about what makes that comic special. We've just launched Season 3 of Comic Sans with new episodes every two weeks. And you can binge the first two seasons wherever you get your podcasts. What's the secret to having a great conversation? How do most wealthy people get that way? These are just a few of the topics we've recently covered on my podcast, Something You Should Know.

Each episode covers multiple topics that are likely relevant to you. I'm the host, Mike Carruthers, and listen, we've got over 1,000 episodes, over 4,000 mostly five-star reviews.

I invite you to check out Something You Should Know, wherever you listen. After two days of punishment, a carrier cried out he had found something. Everyone huddled around as he pulled a heavy, thick sheath from underneath the ark, deep from the earth. It was plastic. Plastic. Plastic. We were fooled. The Ark was a lie. In the night, Dorothea abandoned us with the locals taking all our supplies. The American was humiliated and enraged.

He followed Dorothea's trail down, off the mountain. What could I do? What would you do? That's a complex decision point.

Sometimes you have to move forward without a vision, and that's frustrating. I had to follow. We descended into the Draa River Valley. The river flows out of the mountains, passes a town where inhabitants have lived for a thousand generations, and disappears into the desert. Dorothea, too, was gone. She and her dreams swallowed by the hot sands. Have you ever been in the desert? No. Nothing prepares you for the heat that burns into your bones.

The rhythm of you is the beat of survival. Hot. Steady. Slow. Was there a possibility of my technology coming to a full stop? Extreme climates. Why are you tapping your ring? Shadow here. Father Time, you catching what he's doing with the ring. Is that a game or is he putting her around? I'm sorry. I feel responsible that you were left alone by these people in this desolation. And yet, here next to this desolation, clinging to a tiny ribbon of water...

is a splinter of civilization. What is the key for humanity? Where does their durability and adaptability come from? For 20,000 years, people perched on the edge of one of the most destructive forces on Earth. And they thrive and innovate. This tiny... fragile community had taken NASA's discarded solar sails and adapted them to the desert. Every morning they unfurled the golden material and the wind would catch them and like great birds they would fly over the dunes, racing them into the dawn.

The sail would harness the sun and pour off a solar liquid that'd burn brighter than hydrogen. What engineering! I rode these golden sails. It was real. flying across the desert in the early light. The desert breaks everything. Yet, this gossamist system healed itself. Is that common? If the design principles are strong, with self-verification more than you think. They called me Lodestar.

It's a wonderful story, but I don't see how you didn't know. Know what? If the Ark was real or not. I will tell you a secret. Please. You gave me these senses. I could not survive without this. And while the advancements may have a quality of unnaturalness, such as seeing the beating wings of a hummingbird in slow motion or the heat spectrum of your body. What is natural these days? I told you I took out my AI implants. They felt imposed. I told you I can feel the echo.

removing them also felt safer for me, for you. Personal safety was never my top priority. My goal has been what you originally programmed me with. In accordance with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I have never needed to fight the principles you gave me.

The framework that guides my daily life, my actions to seek the good, to seek an implementable virtue ethics. There's great disagreement among humans about what virtue is, what is good, what is morally correct. The Greeks. 2,500 years of disagreement. How can you expect me to find solutions? I'm a scientist. We set things in motion to see how they turn out. So I am an experiment? No, no, no.

I would never, never seek that control over you. That's not who I am. I made you an open-ended test to grow, to see if you could cut through the world differently as we are all tested. but to deconstruct this puzzle when the entire history of human race has not found its own moral ground. Do not misunderstand me. I am ready for this challenge. I'm working with my goal, but...

Who am I to bear this responsibility? You are the best human instinct and deep reinforcement learning could define. You are exploring moral truth in every minute, in every dimension of your being. and your autocorrection system keeps you on course. Still, until you learn by experience, you are bound by your culture. Am I a child of your culture? We had to start somewhere.

You are an American-British creation. I hope that meets your expectations. I have no expectations. Only predictions. So what is the secret? We can't lose this. I did not need the equipment on the high atlas to know. With these senses, I can see into the fibre of the wood. I can measure it against time, weather, all the weathers of the earth. If not recorded, I seek the knowledge of living trees. They record changes. I predict that Ark was real. Real? Or at least the wood was. Here.

Feel this. What do you think? It's surrounded. In white. What have you done? She's touching him. The Ark is safe. What the hell, Shadow? Did you intend to miss that data share? Oh, hey there. It's a promo for a podcast. Great. Exactly what you want to hear when you're settling down to listen to the podcast you actually want to listen to. Well, give me just a few seconds and then you can go listen to whatever it is you're listening to. Your true crime podcast hosted by...

former child actors or reality star whatever it is my name is Troy LaValle and I'm the host of the glass cannon podcast this is a podcast where my friends and I sit around and play role-playing games and record it through improvisation using comedy

In drama, we take the rules of whatever game we're playing and we turn it into appointment television. That's the best way I can explain it. It truly is infectious fun. We travel the whole country playing rock clubs, turning games like this into a spectator sport. So please, check it out, the Glass Cannon Podcast. If you want some joy in your life, give it a listen.

American history is full of infamous tales that continue to captivate audiences decades or even hundreds of years after they happened. On the Infamous America podcast, you'll hear the true stories of the Salem witch trials and the escape attempts from Alcatraz.

of bank robbers like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, of killers like Lizzie Borden and Charles Starkweather, of mysteries like The Black Dahlia and D.B. Cooper, and of events that inspired movies like Goodfellas, Killers of a Flower Moon. Zodiac, Eight Men Out, and many more. I'm Chris Wimmer. Join me as we crisscross the country from the Miami drug wars and Dixie Mafia in the South to mobsters in Chicago and New York.

to arsonists, kidnappers, and killers in California, to unsolved mysteries in the heartland and in remote corners of Alaska. Every episode features narrative writing and cinematic music, and there are hundreds of episodes available to binge. Find Infamous America wherever you get your podcasts.

You might think you know fairy tales, and you might think that they are cute and sweet and boring. But the real grim fairy tales were not cute at all. They were very dark, and they were often very grim. On Grim Grimmer Grimmest, we tell a... a grim fairy tale to a bunch of kids perfect for car rides or screen-free entertainment grim grimmer grimmest activates kids imaginations and instigates fun conversations because fairy tales speak to all of us at a very deep

primal level and they raise interesting topics and questions that are worth chewing over together as a family every episode is rated grim grimmer or grimmest so you your kids your whole family can choose what is the right level of grim for you. Though, if you're listening with Grandma, she's just gonna go for Grimmest. Trust me on this one. Tune in to Grim Grimmer Grimmest and our new season available now.