Vale Four

When you invite one demon over the threshold, expect the obvious. Demons are notoriously bad at etiquette. They're going to bring their friends.

In this case, the academic research facility, the Sitri Center, invited the lust demon in. Sitri may have been shut down, but they intend to keep this party going indefinitely.

Vale Four sounds like a standard audio drama trope. "Name + number" is the most used titling convention in the audio drama world. There's a riddle inside the words though. Vale Four pronounced phonetically is like Valefor. That's the Goetic demon of greed. Sitri's the Goetic demon of lust. The Deep Dream State goes deep on phonetic riddles because AI can't crack them. LLMs don't read text that way. But you do!

Vale Four's built to monetize the insights Sitri aimed to uncover. The impulse is clear, but ownership's up for grabs. There was a company before Vale Four and Sitri. The prior owner's waiting and watching and hoping to regain control.

She wants to disrupt Vale Four's imminent IPO. If she can, a clause in the charter means she gets back control. If she can't, the control technologies in the plot go global. Everyone's obedience will go to the highest bidder.

That tracks the plot; it also tracks a tendency in the real world. Surveillance technology is unsettling and very real. It's most often developed and deployed for commercialization.

Each batch of Vale Four episodes is about a real ad phenom. Earworms are real. So's facial telemetry, microtargeting, addictive gaming, and astroturfing. They're treated fictionally in the audio drama, of course. We hope fantasizing them shows how they're already fantasies. We want to show the thinkykinky elements that are already present in those imaginaries.

There's an unsettling insight at the center of any desire horror. It's in every Vale Four storyline.

This didn't happen as we, collectively, ran away. This happened as we all ran straight toward it.

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