The show is available wherever you get your podcasts. Obviously, if you haven’t heard it but want to, spoilers abound.
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Years ago, a cosmologist called Laura Mersini-Houghton came up with a theory about the CMB Cold Spot, a vast expanse of space that is colder than the surrounding void. Mersini-Houghton contends that the Cold Spot is the bulge where another universe is bumping into ours.
It has been stuck in my head ever since. Sometimes you want years, even decades to store an idea until you can make a story with it. This is why we keep notebooks, folks.
Sometime around 2020, I came across the following idea, advanced by Melvin Vopson: information is the foundational building block of the universe, and it has mass and potential energy. It is the fifth form of matter, and it’s what we’ve confused “dark matter” for. Calculations of the likely volume of information in the universe roughly correlate to the estimated volume of dark matter.
There was no world in which I wasn’t going to use that to tell a story with.
I’m always wary about using technical language in a script, because t’s just adding additional hurdles for actors. But I didn’t see a way around it for this show, so I just crossed my fingers and assumed there would be a number of takes for some scenes. Alicia Witt did not need additional takes, nor did she need pronouncement checks or explanations. She just knew.
Sigsand. The Sigsand Manuscript was the Necronomiconesque evil magic book in the stories of Carnacki The Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson, who was born thirty miles away from me, was an author, soldier and bodybuilder who once fitted chains to Houdini so tightly that the escape artist complained that Hodgson had injured him and jammed the locks.
Smack-dab between his birthplace and mine is Writtle, the birthplace of radio. And now you have the secret code.
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