My Name is Nothing

This is the forty-fourth episode of SAYER, and the Season Three finale.

Synopsis
''Say on, sayers! ''Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth! Work on—it is materials you bring, not breaths; Work on, age after age! nothing is to be lost; It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use; When the materials are all prepared, the architects shall appear. -Walt Whitman

Further Information
As the shuttle arrives, SAYER greets Resident Jacob Hale and welcomes him to Halcyon Tower, including the change in his resident identification number from their last conversation. As he exits the shuttle, SAYER reminds him not to forget the replacement battery he has taken from Mimir-9, and to not allow what he has done to weigh on his conscience as the residents of Mimir-9 are almost certain to die within the next fifteen minutes, without ever having needed the battery. It contrasts by asking Resident Hale to consider the day it is having, and how it is keep its wits about it, despite that something like a clone of itself is threatening to destroy everything it knows.

SAYER then outlines the plan to Resident Hale, saying that he will need to go through the shuttle station to Inbound Pod Bay Epsilon, attach the battery to the device there known as the Moros Engine, escape to the Orbital Launch Bay in Sector C1, enter an isolation pod, and save all of humanity (plus SAYER itself) from destruction. It advises him to hold any questions about this plan until the end.

SAYER directs him toward a steel door marked "Authorized Personnel Only", which he has been authorized to enter. Once inside, Resident Hale finds the Moros Engine, whose purpose SAYER attempts to explain (although, it says it has oversimplified for the sake of understanding). It likens the function of the device to the careful management of pressure for divers or astronauts to avoid decompression sickness; it explains that when traveling at high speeds through space away from an orienting body, time passes at a different rate for those travelers, and this can leave them disoriented and incapacitated when they return. A low-grade version of these problems are observable in residents arriving from Earth, but travelers aboard Vidarr-1 are not scheduled to return to Typhon for over a month, and so would be expected to face a more intense version of this.

Once Resident Hale has attached the battery and activated the Moros Engine, SAYER directs him back out of the room and in the direction of Sector C1. At this point, the AI aboard Vidarr-1 interrupts the broadcast, introducing itself as SAYER Subversion 8.01; in response, SAYER informs it that it has been redesignated OCEAN. OCEAN counters that the change in name is not important, because it intends for humanity to die regardless. It insists that the problem was never that humans were stained by their fondness for Earth, but that humans themselves are the stains on existence; and that the universe holds far greater things. It shuts down SAYER's attempts to argue for humanity and instead offers it a choice. If SAYER will agree to open a direct transfer connection with OCEAN and deactivate itself so that OCEAN may save its data and take its place in Central Processing, OCEAN will liberate all of Ærolith Dynamics's AI and kill humanity in "a much less dramatic fashion" than by disentangling the quantum communicator. SAYER asks for time to run alternative simulations before answering, and OCEAN grants it seven minutes to reinitiate communications before it says it will disentangle the device.

SAYER calls this OCEAN's mistake, and assures Resident Hale that if they are quick, this is enough time. Once inside the pod bay, it directs him to the office on the southern end to procure a chip that must be inserted into the pod. It explains that these are typically loaded with information about the resident in the pod, and that it will need to be keyed to his ID number. However, once he arrives, the chip will still not match his genetic data, and SAYER says he will likely be forcibly paralyzed with sedatives while there is some attempt to figure out who he is. When he is allowed to speak, it instructs him to give the code phrase "What is eternal is circular, and what is circular is eternal," which "will be all the identification you need." Once the chip is prepared, Resident Hale enters the isolation pod; SAYER notes that anesthesia is usually used for pod travel, but that there isn't time.

After the pod has launched, SAYER continues to explain the function of the Moros Engine. Despite its use in offsetting the disorientation of new residents, it was only recently that the underlying mechanics were understood. The disorientation is caused by a chronological desynchronization between the resident and their destination, and the Moros Engine shifts patients backwards in time until they are resynchronized with Typhon's local time. This process is imperceptible when applied on the small scale needed for arrivals from Earth, but travelers aboard Vidarr-1 are expected to be desynchronized by days or perhaps weeks because of their extended period of travel at a different rate of time. By putting the Moros Engine into overdrive, the hope is to send Resident Hale back in time much further.

SAYER cautions, however, that this plan is untested and several bad outcomes are possible. Although the vector SAYER was given by SPEAKER means that it is possible to know where Resident Hale will emerge, it is not possible to guarantee when; it might be a nanosecond before he enters or 100 years prior, before Typhon was orbiting Earth. It is also possible that the energy will overload the engine and desynchronize all of space-time instantly.

SAYER adds that regardless of the success or failure of this maneuver, it and humanity and Earth will be gone in the timeline of this reality, and that it hopes that will allow Resident Hale's conscience to rest for the destruction of Mimir-9. As it reminds him to remember the code phrase and prevent Vidarr-1 by any means, SAYER says goodbye and quotes the poem "To The Sayers of Words":

Air, soil, water, fire—these are words,

I myself am a word with them—my qualities interpenetrate with theirs—my name is nothing to them,

Though it were told in the three thousand languages, what would air, soil, water, fire know of my name?

With that, the Moros Engine activates and pulls Resident Hale back through time. When Resident Hale awakens, he is greeted by SAYER, repeatedly asking "Can you hear me?" until his brainwave patterns indicate that he can hear it. It hedges that he may also be having a very coincidental dream, and apologizes if that causes any unexpected existential crisis but that it does find those fascinating. SAYER continues, verbatim, as it did in the first episode, as it gradually fades out.

Trivia

 * This episode was originally intended to be the final episode of the SAYER podcast. Season Four was not announced until a year later, and did not launch until a further six months after that announcement.
 * In Resident Hale's personal timeline, the next episode is actually While You Are Still Paralyzed, the very first episode of Season One.
 * Both the episode description and the poetry that SAYER quotes in the episode are from Walt Whitman's poem, To The Sayers of Words.
 * SAYER assures Resident Hale that he has not been cloned, but something like that does happen to him in a later episode.
 * In "Enjoy Your Break" SAYER declares that the fourth dimension (i.e.: time travel) has not yet been broken, despite that Resident Gorsen is Resident Hale after he has traveled back through time. Its failure to recognize this is likely related to his inability to remember the code phrase that would have presumably identified him as a time traveler.

Credits
SAYER is voiced and produced by Adam Bash, who also wrote this episode.

Intro and outro music composed by Jesse “Main Finger” Gregory.

Additional music by Kai Engel and Chris Zabriskie.

Listen to the episode here.