PLEASE NOTE: There may be some inaccuracies in this transcript. Due to some errors, the transcribed versions of eps 15-30 were lost. Posted below are lightly adapted scripts not 100% accurate to the final versions of each episode. At some point, this will be corrected, but due to time constraints and the bulk of the work at Hanging Sloth Studios falling to Sloth in Chief Pippin, there is a limit to the amount of work he can reasonably do on a short time frame. However, we believe that it’s important to post transcripts to make our episodes as accessible to as many people as possible. Please bear with us as we try our best to correct this issues, and if you want to make adjustments to these transcripts, please mail them to hangingslothstudios@gmail.com with any changes you have made highlighted. Thank you for your patience!
SHELLY
And that was the last recording.
NOAH
He… woke up.
SHELLY
Yeah. I think so.
NOAH
[sighs] I don’t know.
SHELLY
You’ve heard it. You’ve listened to everything that I have. He was definitely in there. He was definitely alive, or at least a bit of him was.
NOAH
No. I think it’s more complicated than that.
SHELLY
Bloody hell. Of everyone I thought that you’d be the least likely to take Sophie Bennett’s side.
NOAH
God, no. I think she’s— well it doesn’t matter what I think. But. I don’t know. I don’t really understand this second synthnapse thing they’re talking about, but it sounds like they thought it was a way to patch him back together or something. I just don’t think that’s possible. There is one thing Sophie Bennett said that I actually think is right, though. When she said that whoever they have with them, wherever they are, it’s not Robin. Not my Robin. Not in a way that makes sense.
SHELLY
You thought that before I came here and played that to you.
NOAH
Yeah. I did. I’m sorry.
SHELLY
So you’re not going to help.
NOAH
I never said that. I— When I met Alice she said something and it’s followed me around ever since. She asked me why it mattered that it wasn’t my Robin. She asked me why that was important. I left before I could answer because it was important, but I didn’t know why. Or at least, I couldn’t articulate why at the time. For me, it’s different. It’s different than it is for you, or Alice, or Sophie fucking Bennett. It’s different because I knew Robin Jaeger, the real Robin Jaeger, not whoever is in his head now. And he died. And it was one of the hardest things in my life.
SHELLY
You loved him.
NOAH
More than anything.
But that shouldn’t matter, not here. I can’t let that cloud my judgement here. Because whoever they’re hurting, they’re a person. A human being. Robin or not, that is not okay, and it’s selfish of me it say I won’t help just because it’s not the man I loved.
SHELLY
It sounds like there are bits of him, in there.
NOAH
Tell me something. If someone recorded all of your memories and put them into a computer, a really good computer, and made it talk, would that computer be you?
SHELLY
No.
NOAH
Obviously this situation is a lot more complicated than that. But a person is more than just their memories, Shelly. They aren’t their body and they aren’t their memories, it’s something else, and the person Sophie Bennett, Christopher Darwin and Samuel Maxwells made by accident in that lab is someone completely different to the Robin I knew.
SHELLY
But he remembers stuff, doesn’t he?
NOAH
I have no idea. Just. Think of it this way. Imagine there’s a person who’s set a building on fire, and that person has a terrible injury and completely loses all of their memory, are they still responsible for the fire.
SHELLY
Um. Yes?
NOAH
Why’s that?
SHELLY
I don’t know. They’ve lost all their memories but they’re still them, aren’t they? They still like all the same stuff.
NOAH
See I’ve thought about this a lot. And I’m not sure how I’d answer the question myself anymore. But what I can tell you is that who we are is more to do with our preferences, our attitudes, than it is to do with our memories.
Those recordings are the best proof I’ve had that whoever they’ve got at U-Co, that’s not my Robin.
SHELLY
What? How? That makes no sense.
NOAH
Well. If you’re right, and the files are put there by… whoever it is. They aren’t Robin because Robin would never have done that.
SHELLY
What?
NOAH
I knew him better than anyone. And I know what he was like. And I know he wouldn’t have done that. He would not have reached out. He would not have asked for help. Not for this long, not with this determination. He would not have done that.
SHELLY
I don’t understand.
NOAH
[sighs]
Robin Jaeger. Where to start? God.
It was at school, where I met him. He was a couple of years above me, and hung around with the kind of crowd parents want their kids to avoid. He wasn’t a bad kid, or anything. Not really. But he had something in his eyes, even then. This rage. Whenever he walked into the room I’d get all fluttery. I couldn’t stop staring at him. It was like there was a fire, just under the surface of his skin, and I couldn’t bear to look away. A stupid teenage crush. One I couldn’t even admit to myself I had, back then. I was still in the closet. I cut my hair short and people started calling me a lesbian so, I don’t know. I believed them. I did fancy girls. I still do now. But I couldn’t make the butterflies stop whenever I saw Robin Jaeger. It was all very melodramatic, to be honest.
I tried to fall in with him, a little bit. We kissed. I even went to his house a few times. His dad was so pointed about it, you know, making an effort to remark how pretty I was every time I was there. Robin, for all the kissing we’d do in private, it seemed to make him really uncomfortable. Mostly we just played video games.
As soon as ma mere got wind of me sneaking behind the bike sheds to smoke cigarettes, she pulled me out of that school and sent me somewhere else. It was the best thing she could have ever done for me, in the end. It was a new beginning, where nobody knew who I was. I told people I went by Noah, and nobody called me by my dead-name anymore, not even at home, after a year or two. When I turned sixteen, I came out as trans, and I decided I wanted to go to college, not the sixth form. There was a few kids from my old school there, but none of them recognised me. None except for Robin.
I’d expected him to be cruel about it. I knew what kind of guy he was. It was at a party, when he asked me. We talked about who I was, how I’d known. And he told me he had a secret he was too scared to tell anybody else. When I asked what it was he— [laugh] He just kissed me.
We didn’t start dating. Not openly, anyway. His dad was homophobic, horrendously so. His dad was a military guy, you know, and he expected Robin, his only child, his only son, to be just like him and follow him into the forces. Robin never really showed any interest, even though his dad took him to RAF shows and trailed him around military museums. Robin liked… he liked birds, and poetry, and dancing, and… well. Lots of things, but none of them were the right things.
His dad didn’t start hitting him until he was ten. He’d caught him playing with the boy next door at the bottom of the garden. They were just holding hands as they poked sticks in the mud.
After that, his dad made him get up every morning and run before school. He worked Robin so hard, it was unbelievable. Robin kept failing out because he was so exhausted. That’s why he was still in college. But every time he failed, his dad worked him harder, and he was just even more exhausted and he’d fail again.
My second year in college, Robin’s family had a New Year’s Eve party. and Robin and I snuck outside just before midnight. Someone was already letting off fireworks down the street; maybe their clock was fast or something, but it felt like they were for us. He stood on the wall and started talking. He could really talk, you know, when he wanted to avoid saying something. And then he jumped down and he pulled me close and he told me that he loved me. Midnight struck, and inside the house people started going wild, but outside, it was just me and him, and it was so perfect. I told him that I loved him too. We were so young. It was all so pure. I was seventeen, he was almost nineteen. He swooped close, leaned down, and kissed me like he’d never kissed me before. We were both so lost in it that we didn’t hear it when the front door opened.
[draws a shaky breath]
I thought Robin’s dad was going to kill him. You’ve seen that scar on his eyebrow, in the photographs? Sometimes they blur it out, but sometimes you can see it. Robin’s head hit the corner of the wall. I had never seen so much red. It was on the bottom of my jeans. I remember just look at this splatter of blood and thinking it was just, so, so red. Too red to be real.
Robin’s dad went back inside. I called an ambulance.
After that, Robin stayed with friends. My family didn’t have a lot of room, but he slept on our sofa a few times, only ever for a few nights. And then he told me he was enlisting. I couldn’t believe it, but when he explained, it started to make a weird sort of sense. He had no qualifications and I was going to university. When I came back, he said, he’d have got enough money for the two of us to live together.
SHELLY
Did you?
NOAH
[laughs] Well, a week into uni I realised that it wasn’t for me. Not really. I decided I’d do the rest of my degree online and keep living with my parents, working locally, saving up so Robin and I could live together sooner. I know it sounds mad, us being so young, but he had nowhere live when he came back on leave, and like I said, my parents house was not big enough for him to stay more than a couple of days. We could squeeze into my single bed, but, well, he was a big guy.
So within about nine months we could afford to rent a flat in Huddau Bay. I lived there, and he lived there too, on the brief times he was back. Everything was fine, difficult, the way things always are when you’re young and you’re learning how to be in love, but things started changing after he finished his training. He was talking to his parents again, and his dad convinced him to join the SAS, like he had done.
He couldn’t talk about what he was doing, where he was going. He would be gone for weeks, sometimes months at a time and I had no idea where he was. Sometimes I wouldn’t hear from him until he got back, others he would send me these emails, just so empty, so devoid of anything meaningful that he might as well have not sent them at all.
But he was happy, when he was with me. He was okay. Sometimes in the night he would wake up, crying, and nothing I could do would help. So I’d just sit with him, talk to him. He’d lay with his head in my lap, and I’d sing to him until he fell asleep. The lullaby my mother sang to me when I was a child. Alouette. It means lark, in french. My mother is french Canadian, you see. That’s why my accent is so weird.
Things with Robin, they just got worse and worse. I tried to get him to open up but he just wouldn’t. He was convinced, somehow, that this was all he could do. All he was good for. He was fighting, physically, but all of the real fight in him. It was gone. Like a light going out.
That’s the thing, you see. I think that with a lot of work maybe, just maybe, he could have got better. But he didn’t.
No. Instead. He just got worse and worse. And then he met Christopher Darwin.
They’re big on the military, U-Co, approach a lot of the guys in active conflict with their NDAs and such like. You’re more likely to get shot in the head if you’re in the army, and that’s prime cadaver real estate for U-Co. Ideally they want a pristine body and a defunct brain. Gun shot will do that just fine. Except most of the guys, they’d talk to Darwin a few minutes and they’d agree or they’d turn him down and that would be the end of it, but Robin.
He’d send me these emails. Darwin came again today and we talked about the singularity. Far as I know, Robin never cared about technology or computers or anything like that before, but something about the way Darwin talked about it all, it had Robin completely hooked. We could upload ourselves into a better world, he’d tell me, and we’d be able to get away from everything that had gone wrong for us in this one.
I’d say Robin, look, it’s not so bad, we can make things work, things will get better. But he was not convinced. He would talk about the singularity and he’d talk about Darwin and he’d say what a great service to science it would be if he died and they got to use him.
But he wasn’t right. He just wasn’t right. I tried to talk to him about it but he wouldn’t listen. And then. Well. Then.
You know, the first time he tried to kill himself he was overseas. He was a mess when they brought him back. His hands never worked quite the same, after. He’d damaged the tendons. For a little while, at home, he was better. It was good. It was okay. He seemed like things were getting better. But a little bit at a time, every job rejection, every missed payment, every little thing, all of it, it just chipped away at him, and bit by bit, there got to be, I don’t know. Less and less of Robin. My Robin.
He would go on and on about what a monster he was. What an animal. And he couldn’t. And then again, he tried. And I just didn’t know what to do, and after that. Well, after that. He just barely spoke at all. And it got to be that he’d try every month, sort of half-heartedly, you know, and then, it got more and more, and he was really. By that point I could tell he really meant it every time he tried. I knew what he wanted was to be dead. And I kept making him carry on and I think he resented me for it in the end, a little bit, because I couldn’t just let him go. I wouldn’t let him. Because of course I wouldn’t, because he was sick, and he needed help, and if he got help he wouldn’t want this. He wouldn’t think about getting up and sitting with me at our little breakfast table and think no, never again, impossible. If he wasn’t sick he would have wanted that, wouldn’t he? So I had to keep trying.
But.
And it’s a big thing, saying this. I was just…
I was just so tired.
I’ve never forgiven myself for it, for letting him go like it did. But I was just so, so tired. I knew I couldn’t help him and I thought that maybe somebody else could, and in the end I just had to. I had to take him to the hospital and I have never forgiven myself for leaving him because that woman, Sophie bloody Bennett, he’d only been there a month she came and she spoke to him again about whether or not they could keep him on their register given he was no longer in active service and then he. The next day. The next day. He was gone.
I loved him so much and so hard, Shelly. And he looked so beautiful the last time I saw him. It was a beautiful day and we sat outside the hospital, and the sun caught in his eyes, and they were so alive, such a brilliant green, and he smiled like he hadn’t smiled for years, and he looked so beautiful. Radiant. And he said to me, Noah, I’m going to make it all better. And I brushed the hair from his cheek and I said I loved him, and that things would get better in the end. And he said I’m sorry. Fucking hell, he said ‘i’m so sorry’.
And that was it. That was the end.
I loved him with my whole heart and it wasn’t enough to fix him. And there is no way in hell that the Robin Jaeger I knew would have done any of this. Because he couldn’t. Not after everything he’d been through. Not after everything he’s been put through since then. He could have got better, but not on his own, not by being hurt even more than he already was. My Robin is dead. But someone else is in there now. And we have to help them.
Hanging Sloth 