I'M YOUR HOST - Story Treatment
Names, locations and minor details are subject to change.
Episode 1 - Troubleshooting
Daniel Chiang interviews his old therapist and revisits his struggles with podcasting and mysterious auditory events.
After getting laid off by a cybersecurity tech company, software engineer Daniel Chiang is ready for a big change. He splits up from his partner, moves into a small flat in Manchester, and, in a textbook example of midlife crisis, attempts to launch a new podcasting career.
It does not go as planned. Daniel confides that he’s always been self-conscious about his voice and accent, especially since emigrating to the UK at a young age. He lacks confidence as a host, struggles to find interesting stories, and, to make matters worse, his recording sessions are increasingly interrupted by mysterious auditory events.
Undeterred, Daniel presses on. He consults a therapist, gets his ears checked and attempts to locate the source of his hallucinations. One night, as he fails to record yet another podcast intro, a sudden, unknown voice makes him jerk back from his desk, accidentally unplugging his headphones; the voice is silenced.
Daniel understands that his headphones double as speakers, somehow sending audio signals that appear to play directly inside his head. There is one problem: the headphones belonged to a former colleague who has vanished without a trace.
Episode 2 - Phantom Channels
Daniel contacts Eric Ho, who hired Alexandra, a missing voice actor. He visits his friend and podcast producer, Aaron, to inspect Alexandra’s old headphones and investigate their unusual features.
Daniel interviews, Eric Ho, a former colleague who has relocated to Seoul. They reconstruct the timeline of the disappearance of Alexandra B. Eric had hired Alexandra to become the voice of an app at the company on the merit of her pronunciation, which could appeal to the everyman without sounding too synthetic. She's the one who wore the headphones.
Eric claims that Alexandra’s behaviour quickly became erratic. She would often stare absent-mindedly into the distance or fail to answer simple questions. Halfway through a session, she walked out of the recording booth and never came back. Eric tried to reach her to no avail. Her online presence had been purged. HR couldn’t wire her last payment. The only trace left was her headphones, which sat unclaimed in an office locker for months.
Although they never interacted, Daniel was vaguely aware of Alexandra’s work. He had noticed her headphones, which he describes as retrofuturistic, like something from a 70s sci-fi novel. The day he was laid off, HR handed him a box of personal items. Other people's stuff had been thrown in by accident. In a spirit of protest, he decided to keep it all and ended up in possession of the headphones.
Daniel visit his friend Aaron H, producer of the podcast. He inspects the heapdhones and confirms their unusual construction. Aside from standard noise-canceling technology, they also appear to broadcast a looped pre-recorded signal in a frequency range usually imperceptible to human ears. Aaron cannot hear anything, but Daniel claims it sounds like a muffled voice repeatedly saying, “Can you hear me?” in multiple languages.
Episode 3 - Brainwaves
Daniel locates the source of the headphones, which points to a shady clinical trial. He contacts a science reporter who provides a theory.
A reverse-image search of the headphones points to a year-old forum post from an anonymous user who goes by HB. He asks about a company named NeuroBeats. Daniel contacts the poster, who is based in Leeds and wishes to remain anonymous. They agree to meet.
Daniel interviews H.B, who recounts his unusual religious upbringing, teenage emancipation, and descent into the world of online conspiracy theories. A chance encounter, however, forced him to self-diagnose with ADHD. His attention soon refocused on compulsively researching everything there is to know about neurodivergence.
H.B fell into a rabbit hole of pseudoscience: God frequency, 420 Hz theory.. His social media feed was soon flooded with ads for products claiming to “solve” ADHD. Sceptical, but curious, HB signed up for a paid medical trial. After answering hundreds of questions about his medical history, he received the headphones, which supposedly worked by blasting “thoughts cancelling” brainwaves in the form of ultrasonic pulses.
HB followed instructions to wear the headphones in different states of mind: tired, focused, relaxed in order to target multiple “brainwaves”. A few months in, it became evident the headphones were a dud. HB, who has since managed to get a proper ADHD treatment, tried to contact NeuroBeats, but the company seemed to have vanished. He is now dedicated to fighting for better regulation against social media scam ads, which he says are too profitable to be policed internally by tech companies.
Daniel is disappointed, but determined. He is adamant that the headphones must produce some kind of effect. He contacts Zoe Cormier, a Toronto-based science journalist who specialises in psychoacoustics.
Zoe has an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of pseudoscience and sound therapy, but concedes that, if primed properly, the brain’s auditory prediction systems could “fill in” missing speech when hearing specific frequencies. The human brain is highly plastic and can adapt to interpret new types of sensory input, which would lead to pareidolic hallucinations.
A few weeks later, Daniel receives a message from HB, who has dived into open source intelligence communities on the darkweb. He managed to track down one the co-founder of NeuroBeats, who won't answer his messages, but is linked to an address in Bangkok.
Daniel packs his bags.
Episode 4- Trojan Horse
Daniel meets the co-founder of NeuroBeats, Dr Thanom, who helps him identify the source of the voice. He is introduced to strange prototypes.
Daniels arrives in Bangkok and confronts the Neurobeat employee at his house. He is called Dr Thanom, and is reluctant to answer any questions until Daniel presses him about pareidolic hallucinations.
Dr Thanom suddenly opens his home, which doubles as a makeshift lab, and reveals that NeuroBeat was founded with his former colleague Dr Hào Rán, a fellow doctorate from the National University of Singapore.
The company was secretly a data brokerage, profiting from seeking customers' medical information to the highest bidder. The trial payments were merely a customer acquisition cost. It was trivially easy to set up a sham company, which was Rán’s creative way of funding their research. Thanom laments the “publish or perish” pressure of academia and regrets his involvement in the unethical scheme, even if he considers it harmless. At worst, he says, the placebo effect would act in their favour.
Thanom describes his former colleague Hào Rán as pathologically shy (he had a debilitating stammer growing up), secretive and manipulative. He used Neurobeats to conduct his own, somewhat unethical trials, confiding in Thanom that the only way to get quality results was to run “Trojan horse” experiments, trials inside of trials performed without the subjects’ knowledge. He hoped someone would get in touch about the headphones, but NeuroBeats found itself in the crossfire of regulators. The project was quickly swept under the rug.
Daniel is invited to tour a gallery of Thanom and Rán’s strange prototypes, including “The Dummy”: an electronics-filled automaton – a bust about the size of a CPR mannequin or model used to teach medical students. Thanom demonstrates how the dummy records audio and rearranges its prosthetic facial features to reproduce a speaker’s voice with uncanny precision. He says it’s just a gadget - AI could achieve the same results these days.
Daniel presses Thanom about the scope of his research, and the doctor lays bare Ran’s goal. During their studies, his former colleague had identified a game of cat and mouse between internet users and copyright owners. If a piece of music is available online, it can, by default, be saved on the users’ computers. Their pitch was to create a perfect DRM (digital rights management system) solution: audio that can be recorded but only heard by "enabled" people. They would license the rights to music publishers, who could then sell the technology to paying customers.
The technology, however, was a bus and their partnership soured. Thanom says Rán’s research into audio spying technology drove him increasingly paranoid. He had not heard from them for months.
Unbeknownst to them both, Hào Rán is recording the whole exchange. He would soon get in touch with Daniel.
Episode 5 - Contact
Daniel finally meets Alexandra and reveals what happened to him in Bangkok after meeting Thanom.
Daniel arrives on a farm near Porto. He is there to meet Alexandra, the voice actress, who finally tells her side of the story. He says he will explain how he found her in a moment.
Alexandra confirms that, like HB, she had self-diagnosed with ADHD and was targeted by a NeuroBeat ad. She had joined the trial, less to “fix” what she sees as a quirk of her personality than for the monetary incentive: a way to fund her dream of living an off-grid, alternative lifestyle.
Her behaviour at work, which had been branded as “erratic”, was explained by her working overtime and a lack of interest in a corporate career. One morning, she checked her bank balance and had achieved her financial goal. She walked out, leaving only the headphones behind her. Daniel is incredulous that she would ignore her last payment, but she claims that’s the definition of a true alternative lifestyle: knowing when you have enough.
Daniel now reveals how, after meeting Thanom in Bangkok, he was contacted by Hào Rán. Communication was established via a series of elaborate, bizarre and somewhat theatrical tests: at one point, Daniel was asked to log into an online chat room using an IP address scribbled under a park bench. At another, he found himself typing his questions on a blank text page on an offline laptop in a public library.
Throughout these tests, Daniel caught glimpses of Ran’s psyche – a generational talent consumed by paranoia, both because of his knowledge of audio spy equipment and a neurotic fear of having his ideas stolen by competitors.
Still, a deal was struck. Daniel agreed to collaborate with the volatile doctor in exchange for information to help him conclude his podcast. Ran delivered his undercover recordings along with Alexandra’s address.
Episode 6 - Broadcast
Daniel reveals Hào Rán’s master plan.
Daniel explains that for the last few months, he has been following Hào Rán’s voice commands, which are transmitted to him via a battery-powered speaker. The instructions are played on a hidden frequency that only he can hear – an experience he describes as strangely comforting.
A breakthrough came earlier in the year when Ran established that your earwax type (dry or sticky), defined by the ABCC1 gene, influences the results. The pair later confirmed another hypotheses: the audio encoding was effective on Daniel because of his shifting levels of attention while recording the podcast. Rán is convinced that carefully placing triggers in periods of passive and active listening is key to enabling listeners.
After embedding the triggering frequencies in various media, Rán concludes that a podcast series is the ideal delivery vehicle for controlled attention states.
Daniel reveals that if you’ve been listening this far, there is a high chance you may have been enabled – proof that the technology is within reach. You should not be alarmed because the effect is only temporary, but...
[The episode ends abruptly]
Epilogue
Throughout the game, players are drip-fed audio of a one-sided conversation between Daniel and an absent person. It’s never clear whether Daniel is on the phone or hallucinating, and it is implied several times that Daniel tends to lie or bend the truth to tell his story.
As the podcast is restored, players become "enabled". An untranscribable, synthetic voice emerges from the silent recordings: Hào Rán's (note: the voice is recorded in Rán’s mother tongue, which varies depending on the localisation. Daniel always answers in English).
The voice appears to guide Daniel through numerous audio clips when you revisit them, sometimes directly putting words into his mouth. It is not clear whether Daniel realises the influence Hào Rán has over his decisions. The line between his inner voice and Ràn's appear troublingly blurred.
The host explains that the podcast was never released. It's unclear whether it was intercepted, sabotaged or abandoned. Still, the host made it their mission to see the experiment through, this time in the form of a crude video game puzzle designed to enable players.