S4:E1: Refrain (Premiere) (GE28)
Earworm. A remote island facility studies audio hooks on paid participants, and the hooks don't stop when the lights go out.
Hooks Cycle
Deep Dream State
Vale Four
There is a world behind your money.
There is an older currency.
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.
More Info
All Vale Four Episodes
Arc 4 begins at GE28 and is ongoing.
S4:E2: Hook Line (GE29)
Neuromarketing. The music patterns spread beyond the lab and into the bodies of everyone within earshot, and the staff turns out not to be immune.
Hooks Cycle
S4:E3: Sinker (GE30)
Involuntary Musical Imagery. Elle and Cael find something buried in the walls of Vale Four that shouldn't exist: the document that could bring the whole IPO crashing down.
Hooks Cycle
S4:E4: Slowplay (GE31)
Behavioral Economics. Vale Four deploys FaceTrace and the holdfasts inside the facility learn what it means to operate under a system that reads resistance before it surfaces.
Tell Cycle
S4:E5: Raise (GE32)
Microexpression Detection. FaceTrace reads what subjects want before they can articulate or conceal it, and Ava asks for solo access so she can be honest without anyone watching her be honest.
Tell Cycle
S4:E6: Pot Limit (GE33)
Behavioral Telemetry. Z reviews the complete FaceTrace profile on every subject in Vale Four and discovers the system has gone proactive. June thinks she's positioning for a reveal. The system already had it.
Tell Cycle
S4:E7: The River (Finale) (GE34)
Recalibration. The Tell Cycle ends where it always had to. Z clocked every tell, every steered session, every whispered instruction. June was the play. Ava says yes to something she doesn't understand. The hands were the thing to watch.
Tell Cycle
S4:E8: Quiver (GE35)
Microtargeting. Vale Four opens the Valescape. The subjects get Kamas, get games, and lose three hours they do not remember losing. Blake sees the architecture. Nobody listens.
Targeted Cycle
S4:E9: Nock (GE36)
Microtargeting. The Kama economy tightens. Blake names what Vale Four is doing and can't stop playing anyway. The factions decide to let the system recruit her for them.
Targeted Cycle
S4:E10: Bullseye (GE37)
Microtargeting. Blake is out of Kamas, out of options, and out of time. She's seen what Vale Four does to Piper. She's seen what it's doing to Gia. She knows exactly how the system works because she built systems like it. There's a way out. There's a way to bring the whole thing down. It requires Blake to trust someone inside the facility, walk through a door she can't walk back through.
Targeted Cycle
Human Made Art
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.
Consent Declaration
Deep Dream State is a desire horror audio drama written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns. Vale Four explores psychological fiction at the boundaries of commerce horror, neuromarketing, behavioral telemetry, microtargeting, engineered wanting, institutional control, and complicity.