Tether

Tether is when Sitri Center wakes up. Sitri’s more than a cool name. Sitri’s an entity. She’s awake now, and she is ready to get scandalous.

Meg and Tessa open the door onto the darkest secrets. It’s everything they dreamed of. It’s the leverage that should give them a ticket out.

It’s also everything they dreamed of, and that’s the problem. By the time they see the machinery, it’s already operating on them. When they go back to the Observation Chamber, everything’s changed. From their names to their uniforms to their disciplinary protocols, they’re fully past any scientific institution.

Even after all that, though, they aren’t ready for Oona. Oona Reyes is a former TikTok wellness celebrity, stripper, and TempleBridge facilitator. The file details her involvement in intensive retreats that employed experimental mind synchronization headbands and synchronized dreaming protocols. Put simply, she led a cult.

As Meg and Tessa begin examining Oona’s case materials, they uncover something more sophisticated than typical cult manipulation. The dream linking was a functional technology. Multiple participants reported identical dream narratives, identical landscapes, identical voices. Oona’s voice became ubiquitous, repetitive, mantric.

This is all familiar to the researchers. It’s Sitri all the way down. The pattern’s what matters, and Oona’s work is one manifestation of a much larger machinery. Meg and Tessa, by investigating, keep refining the machinery, episode by episode.

Deep Dream State uses human art direction and human creative decision-making throughout the visual and audio supply chain. Episode artwork is curated as part of the Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns archive.