Ari and Zac

Chapter 3: The Transcript (Segment 2)

The Transcript (Segment 2)

Broadcast: THE TRUTH FILES

Episode Title: The Mermaid Hypothesis

Air Date: June 28, 2020

COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT OF TELEVISION BROADCAST

HOST: Welcome back. I'm joined now by Cyrus Pierce, a college student, grandson of notorious social agitator Benedict Pierce, and the cousin of Zac Pierce. Cyrus, we appreciate your coming to speak with us tonight. You're currently a rising senior at Stanford University, studying Computer Science. Is that correct?

CP: Probably. I think they're going to let me finish my degree. I was on academic probation for a while though.

HOST: Because of what transpired last summer?

CP: Nah. Because Torrent is on the Stanford Board of Trustees.

HOST: You're referring to Dominick Torrent, the founder and CEO of SirenSong.

CP: I was using university resources for some of the stuff we pulled last summer. He didn't take too kindly.

HOST: To bring our viewers up to speed, Cyrus, you were active in an underground organization that called itself "The Disruption," an organization whose stated mission was to undermine Mr. Torrent's business dealings. Your grandfather, Benedict Pierce, was one of the known ringleaders. Did he recruit you and your cousin Zac to be involved?

CP: Zac and I were involved because we believed in the cause.

HOST: Tell us more about the cause, Cyrus. What exactly were you and your cohorts trying to accomplish last summer?

CP: SirenSong was going public. Torrent was trying to get it listed on the New York Stock Exchange. We were trying to disrupt the IPO.

HOST: Why?

CP: Because SirenSong is a scourge on this planet. That's why. Because people are too b to realize the harm that it's doing. Everyone talks about Torrent like he's some kind of hero. I mean, he's practically royalty in Silicon Valley. You should see the way the faculty all bow down to him at Stanford. Like he's the second coming of Steve Jobs or something... But he's destroyed everything! His technology is doing irreversible harm. Not to mention destroying the livelihood of an entire industry full of hard-working people.

HOST: The music industry?

CP:  People think it's funny. They all tweet about how Shawn Mendes is going bankrupt now and doing local ads for used car dealerships. Like, oh how the mighty have fallen, right? But they don't realize, there are a lot of other people in the music business that got hurt. There are sound techs, engineers, producers, songwriters....

HOST: And your grandfather was one of the people who lost everything?

CP: Yes. My grandfather used to be a record executive with one of the major labels – a company that employed thousands of people – and SirenSong put every single one of them out of a job.

HOST: That's a shame, but isn't that the nature of technological advancement? New technologies are developed, and old technologies become obsolete.

CP: Music is not a technology! Music is art. Music is beauty. Music is a fundamental way that human beings communicate—

HOST: But SirenSong is music, isn't it?

CP: No! OK, that's like saying Ecstasy is happiness. Ecstasy is an artificial manmade drug that stimulates a certain set of neurotransmitters inside people's brains, and people interpret that neurological stimulus as "happiness." But it's fake. Right? And it's also addictive. That's the real problem. If you take it enough, it actually alters your brain chemistry. Permanently. And then the real thing – real happiness – that doesn't even feel all that good to you anymore. The only way to feel really happy is to take more Ecstasy.

HOST: Is it your contention that SirenSong permanently alters the brain chemistry of listeners? Do you have any scientific evidence to back that up?

CP: It definitely does! People don't realize it yet, but you'll see. There are kids being born now who've never even been exposed to real music. They've only heard SirenSong since they were little fetuses in the womb. We don't even know what kind of effect that might be having on their brain development!

HOST: And it was the goal of your group, The Disruption, to undo this supposed neurological damage.

CP: Right. See, once people heard SirenSong, they couldn't appreciate the sound of a human singing voice anymore. Remember when the app first came out, and Torrent challenged Adele to a sing-off? Everyone kept saying afterwards how terrible she sounded? The same people who used to fangirl over her – they got one whiff of SirenSong, and suddenly they thought she sounded like crap. Because every human voice sounded like crap. Or at least 99.99999% of human voices. That's what Torrent himself claimed. It was buried in the paperwork if you read the IPO filing.

HOST: You lost me now. What was buried in the paperwork?

CP: According to his own internal research, SirenSong was optimized to outperform 99.99999% of human voices. That was the chink in the armor, see? They didn't say it could out-sing 100%. There had to be a voice out there that would still sound better to people's ears. At least, that was the theory. We just had to find that one special voice and release it, and then hopefully it would remind everyone what music was supposed to sound like. It would snap them out of this SirenSong-induced trance that they were in.

HOST: And that's what brought your group to Seabreeze Point?

CP: Right. We had our own algorithm that I helped work on at school. Ultrasonic LRVI.

HOST: What does that stand for?

CP: Long-Range Voice Isolation. It's basically a fancy word for eavesdropping. We were able to isolate a signal coming from somewhere in Seabreeze Point, but it only sang sporadically, and only at certain hours of the morning. It was hard to get a clear read on it. All we could establish for sure was that it came from a female between the ages of 16 and 20, so we came to Seabreeze Point to try to find her.

HOST: With your cousin Zac spearheading the search?

CP: Well, Zac always had a certain way with the young ladies.

HOST: Zac was only 17 years old last summer. Did you or your grandfather feel any compunction about involving an underage minor in your activities?

CP: No one was supposed to get hurt.

HOST: And yet—

CP: Listen, if you want to place the blame somewhere for what happened last summer, don't talk to me. Talk to Dominick Torrent. And while you're at it, why don't you ask him about the Counter-Disruption. Ask him what he hired those guys to do.