Send us a text

Dive headfirst with us into the decaying yet vibrant world of Mechania Archaica, a retrofuturist civilization that challenges everything we think we know about technology, memory, and identity.

Imagine a post-human society forced to revert to analog technology after digital collapse—where cathode ray tubes form cathedrals, sentient canals pulse with archived memories, and the very process of entropy becomes a contagious force infecting both machines and minds. This episode unpacks this richly imagined world through its most fascinating elements: the Oracle Twins who decode signals from lost civilizations, the mysterious Cog Blight that spreads like audible decay, and the three competing Archivist factions waging an ideological war over how history should be preserved—or rewritten.

The physical landscape we explore is equally compelling—canal circuits that can be "read" by those who know the code, the Dead Relay's sea of drowned tape recorders eternally looping emergency signals, and the Repeater's Spine bridge constructed entirely from discarded phonograph needles. We meet Unit VA7, a surveillance bot repurposed to preserve forbidden data, and Ren and Kor, who builds devices to listen for the voices of dead Oracles lingering in the network. Through these elements emerges a world where the boundaries between past and present, memory and identity, data and consciousness blur into something hauntingly unfamiliar yet philosophically profound.

What does it mean to be an individual when memory itself can be recorded, corrupted, or rewritten? How does society function when the past literally bleeds through time? Join us as we unravel these questions and more, providing you with the perfect entry point into this uniquely imaginative world. Got an equally fascinating fictional universe you'd like us to deep dive into next? Send your suggestions our way and keep those curious questions coming!

Support the show

can I pet that dawg songwriter / listen anywhere