LYS Podcast Episode 8

-Intro-

AMANDA MORRISON’S NARRATION/VOICE OVER (AM V/O): Last time, we left you with a bit of a cliff-hanger. Although we were unable to find the name of Patient 80, we did find the list of two people we believe may have visited them in the hospital. We’ll get back to Patient 80 in a moment, but right now Colin has some news.

COLIN ORRY (CO): I found something I think you’re going to find very interesting.

AM: What is it?

CO: Ok, well right around the time Dr. Weylen Taylor disappeared from his locked bedroom…

AM: Yes?

CO: He was looking into connections between a group of people.

AM: What group of people?

CO: A handful of other scientists, an artist, a poet, a novelist, a mathematician and some others.

AM: And…what do they have to do with what we’re looking into?

CO: They’re not only all directly connected to Dr. Taylor, but they all had contact with something else.

AM: What?

CO: The Bolchester Alliance!

AM V/O: You’re listening to The Leap Year Society. I’m Amanda Morrison. Stay with us.

-End of Intro-

AM: Ok so, how are these people and Weylen Taylor connected to the Bolchester Alliance?

CO: Taylor placed a number of ads and queries looking for a very specific type of person.

AM: What kind of person?

CO: He was looking for people with extremely high IQ’s; artists, scientists and the like.

AM: Back in Episode 3, Lizzie Max told us she believed Taylor was looking for ‘young people of significant interest’.

CO: These criteria seem to fit his MO.

AM: That Taylor was looking for specific things in his patients or subjects.

CO: Yep, and it looks like he may have been filtering some of his results, at least in this batch of experiments, through another matrix.

AM: What do you mean?

CO: I mean the only people who made this list all had referenced contact with another group.

AM: The Bolchester Alliance.

CO: Exactamundo.

AM V/O: I’m going to jump in here to let you know that we’re not going to be naming those people who may or may not have taken part in Dr. Taylor’s experiments. This is because we’ve been unable to contact them or another secondary source to confirm any of their connections to Dr. Taylor. So first of all, how are these people connected to Dr. Taylor?

CO: Ok, I so I’ve found a list of participants in what Taylor referred to as a ‘preliminary test screening’ and, kind of by accident, I cross referenced that list with another I was looking into at the time.

AM: What do you mean ‘kind of by accident’?

CO: I mean I had one list on my laptop and the other printed out on my desk. That’s when I noticed a few of the same names.

AM: What was the other list?

CO: A list of names I’d been compiling that might be connected to the Bolchester Alliance and/or The Leap Year Society.

AM V/O: So, maybe Dr. Taylor wasn’t just interested in possession and sleep-pattern research. Maybe he was looking for something else…but what? What did the Bolchester Alliance have to do with Weylen Taylor’s sleep experiments? Well, I thought the best way to find that out would be simply to ask them directly. It turns out; asking them directly wasn’t so easy to do. Their website was cryptic and finding a physical location to visit or call was impossible. But we did have another method of access: we had Mitch.

MITCH SORENSEN (MS): You want me to set up a meeting?

AM: Yep!

MS: That hasn’t been how things have worked so far.

AM: Well, maybe it’s possible to change things up?

MS: Maybe?

AM: You don’t sound convinced.

MS: It’s not that, I just don’t want to rock the boat, you know?

AM: I get it. It feels like we’re moving closer to uncovering something…significant and pretty strange.

MS: Yeah. Yeah.

AM: Well, how do you think we should proceed?

MS: Well, what’s the main goal here?

AM: To find out if the Bolchester Alliance is connected to Dr. Weylen Taylor and if so, how?

MS: Ok. Ok. I’ll text the number I have and ask for a meeting.

AM: Thanks.

MS: No problem.

AM V/O: While we’re waiting for Mitch to set up a meeting with the Bolchester Alliance, we’re going to go back to where we ended last episode: Patient 80. Last time, we heard from one of two visitors listed as having possibly visited Patient 80 in the hospital. The voice you heard at the end of our last episode belongs to a man named Michael Sail. We found his number and called him at his home in Joshua Tree.

MICHAEL SAIL (MSa): Of course I know the patient’s name. I’m the person who checked him into the hospital.

AM: Would you be willing to share his name with us here on the podcast?

MSa: His name is Jan Hoke.

AM: What else can you tell us?

MSa: I found him wandering the streets in December of 2012. He wasn’t lucid but I could tell that he wasn’t homeless. He was wearing expensive clothes and jewellery. So I brought him to the hospital. They told me at admission that he was going to walk out and there would be nothing they could do. They gave me the address of another kind of institution so I took him there.

AM: Can you remember anything strange about him? Did he mention something called ‘The Bolchester Alliance’?

MSa: Everything was strange about him, but I don’t remember him mentioning any organization or anything like that. He just wouldn’t stop talking.

AM: What do you mean ‘everything was strange’? What was he talking about?

MSa: I mean, he would slip into other languages at random and he’d stare off into space intently for a few seconds every now and then.

AM: What other languages?

MSa: I have no idea. German, French, Russian, it was really random. Or at least it sounded random to me.

AM: Did you go back to check on him after you dropped him off?

MSa: Yeah, of course.

AM: And what was he like the next time you saw him?

MSa: There wasn’t a next time.

AM: What do you mean?

MSa: I wasn’t allowed to see him. After I dropped him off the second time, I never saw or heard from Jan Hoke again. The next time I heard his name was when you called me.

AM V/O: So, we had a name but not much else. I called Colin to see if he might be able to help.

CO: Nothing on Jan Hoke.

AM: Nothing?

CO: Nope. I’m going to try a few other places but I’m not optimistic.

AM: Thanks for trying.

CO: No problem. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything new.

AM: You’re the best.

CO: Yes I am. Thanks.

AM V/O: So, with Mitch looking into the Bolchester Alliance and Colin looking further into Jan Hoke, I decided to go back to the recordings we received from that anonymous source. The audio files titled ‘Patient 80’.

- Recording -

WEYLEN TAYLOR (WT): Would you be willing to talk about your visitor?

PATIENT 80: Which one?

WT: The one who came to see you today.

80: What would you like to know, Dr. Taylor?

WT: What did you talk about?

80: She didn’t tell you?

WT: She’s only willing to speak with you, I’m afraid.

80: Are you?

WT: Am I what?

80: Afraid?

WT: No. Do you believe I have a reason to be afraid?

80: Maybe.

WT: And why is that?

80: Because there’s something in here with me.

WT: What do you mean? I can’t see anything. It’s a small room, I can see it all, every corner. And all I can see is you, I’m afraid.

80: Oh, you see…that’s precisely the problem.

WT: What do you mean, what’s the problem?

80: You’re looking in the wrong place.

WT: What are you talking about?

80: What am I talking about?

WT: Yes.

80: It’s inside my head.

-end of recording-

AM V/O: We’ll get back to Patient 80 soon, but right now we’re going back to Colin. He just left a message asking me to call him. He said he found something.

AM: Your message sounded urgent. What is it?

CO: It’s the video.

AM: You found it!

CO: I had it…for a second.

AM: What happened?

CO: The server was taken down.

AM: Did you see any of the video’s content?

CO: Just a brief clip.

AM: The artifact?

CO: It appeared to be some kind of strange material, possibly stone or metal. It was hard to tell.

AM: Anything else?

CO: There were three people in the video; one of them was holding the object. It looked like it was shaped like some kind dodecahedron.

AM: Um…what’s that?

CO: Have you seen twelve-sided dice?

AM: Um…

CO: It’s a twelve-sided solid geometric shape.

AM: Got it.

CO: Mmhmm.

AM: Just looked it up. Anything else you can tell me about that video?

CO: It was just a second or two.

AM: Where did you find it?

CO: Reddit.

AM: And there’s nothing there now?

CO: Nothing, but there are a few of us trying to find it. I think if we can get enough of a hive-mind working on it, we should be able to track it down. Maybe torrent bits of it and bring them together.

AM: Keep me posted.

CO: Of course.

AM V/O: We’ve come a long way since our first episode. Back then, all Mitch and I wanted to do was find out if something called ‘The Leap Year Society’ actually existed, and if so, were they somehow responsible for the fact that our original pilot show had been pulled from the schedule by our new podcast network. Which was then itself shuttered under strange circumstances. Well, I have an update on that side of things. One of the producers of that show, the woman who was going to be running the brand-new offshoot of that well-known podcast network, agreed to speak with us on the record and do her best to explain what she believed happened to the first version of this show. Her name is Catherine Eastman. She’s a public radio producer. She’s the person who, along with Mitch, convinced me that my degree in journalism wasn’t only something I could use to pitch stories to outlets while I was working on a book. Podcasting was taking off and Catherine and Mitch had been auditioning both voices and ideas for a few months. I had just quit my job as a researcher and occasional segment reporter for an NPR affiliate and was looking for something new; when Mitch and I decided we’d try and take our passion for mysterious secret societies mainstream. Catherine is tall and thin with thick black glasses, curly red hair and an impeccable sense of style.

-Interview-

AM: Do you mind if Mitch sits in with us for this?

CATHERINE EASTMAN (CE): No, not at all. Is she here?

AM: I’ll text her to come in.

CE: This place is great, you guys are doing it!

AM: Thanks!

MS: Hey it’s so good to see you!

CE: You too! I was telling Amanda this place is fantastic.

MS: Thank you, it’s like a proper studio. Well, smaller.

CE: It’s great, I love it. Can I work here?

MS: Anytime.

CE: I might hold you to that.

AM: Ok, so why don’t we just dive in and see what happens?

CE: Sure.

AM: What we’re looking for is the reason behind the sudden shuttering of that subsidiary podcast network and the cancellation of our show.

CE: Well, like we told you at the time; it had nothing to do with the quality of the show; it was a mandate from above. We just didn’t have the money we thought we were going to have to handle all six of the new shows.

MS: Couldn’t you just have cut the number of new shows?

CE: Well, not really. Everything was predicated on a combination of public support and ad sales. We needed the inventory to sell and we just weren’t seeing the right numbers.

AM: That’s it?

CE: Yeah. I mean, we did lose support for the new offshoot when we lost our champion to the competition.

AM: Right, I remember and his replacement wasn’t all that keen on expanding.

CE: Exactly.

MS: That was Nancy Robins?

CE: Yes.

AM V/O: So, that was that. It was simply a case of budgetary concern meeting a lack of faith in expansion. Or was it?

MS: This is for real?

AM V/O Something Catherine Eastman had said during our interview led me into another research deep-dive into the Leap Year Society. It remained incredibly hard to find anything related to the Leap Year Society online. Throughout this entire podcast, I’ve been encountering blind alley after red herring after blind alley. I was just about to give up altogether, when I found exactly what I was looking for.

MS: Where did you find this?

AM: I went back through everything looking for a connection between Nancy Robins and the Leap Year Society.

MS: For our listeners, Nancy Robins is the woman who took over for our old boss at our previous employer, the rather well-known podcast network.

AM: Right. I was positive I’d seen her name mentioned in relation to the Leap Year Society in some document somewhere.

MS: But, it turns out that wasn’t the case.

AM: That’s right, I was wrong. I hadn’t seen Nancy Robins name connected to the Leap Year Society at all.

MS: But, you had seen her name.

AM: Oh yes, but I’d seen her name in connection with something else.

MS: And what was that something else?

AM: That something else was the Bolchester Alliance.

AM V/O: While Mitch and I were uncovering this information about Nancy Robins and the Bolchester Alliance, Colin had uncovered something of his own.

CO: I found it!

AM: The video.

CO: Yeah.

AM: Did you email it to me?

CO: Not exactly.

AM: What do you mean? Did the torrent method work?

CO: No, it turns out the torrents are encrypted and connected via a blockchain security routing system.

AM: Ok?

CO: So it means we’re going to have to access it another way.

AM: You said you found it. What does that mean?

CO: It means somebody is showing it.

AM: Who?

CO: I have no idea, but it looks like it’s being shown at an exclusive screening somewhere in San Francisco.

AM: Where?

CO: We won’t know until an hour before.

AM: What do you mean by ‘we’?

CO: People with access to a deep web proxy-locked website.

AM: And you have access?

CO: Not exactly ‘officially’, but I can see when others access the site.

AM: Is that legal? When is the screening?

CO: One week from today.

AM V/O: You’ve been listening to the Leap Year Society. (Rest of usual outro.)

END

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NOTES get confirmation that Patient 80 / Jan Hoke’s female visitor is a real person and is different to “The Passenger” referenced in previous episodes
 * We