S1 Ep3: “Pegasus”
You're listening to K63, a Spotify audio series.
Speaker 1:Time, 10.15am, October 24th, 2022, session number three, K63, for the record, Dr. Eliza Knight.
Speaker 2:How'd it go, doctor?
Speaker 1:With what?
Speaker 2:The dream, the homework I gave you.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, I did some googling. The theory that a future me will whisper answers in my dreams is not yours, it's a theory from a physicist, Jean-Pierre Garnier-Mallet, the temporal projection theory.
Speaker 2:May I smoke?
Speaker 1:No, I told you, you can't smoke in here.
Speaker 2:Right, water then?
Speaker 1:You're not going through a psychotic episode built around a central organized idea.
Speaker 2:You're just pulling my leg. I never said the theory was mine. The Garnier-Mallet phenomenon has been taught in schools ever since I was 10 years old in 2034.
Speaker 1:Uh, do you happen to remember the name of your physics teacher?
Speaker 2:Yes, but I doubt it would do you any good.
Speaker 1:Why not?
Speaker 2:Because at the moment he's 16 years old.
Speaker 1:I see. Why?
Speaker 2:Well, it doesn't seem like anybody can disprove your theory.
Speaker 1:Or support it. Put yourself in my shoes for a second.
How would you feel if all of a sudden nobody recognized you? Knowing the person right in front of you and what they mean to you, but that person doesn't recognize you back. How would you feel if no one could confirm your existence?
Speaker 2:Depends. Perhaps someone confirming who I am would only be a hindrance to me. Have you spoken to my parents yet?
Speaker 1:Do you feel like you can tell the truth here?
Speaker 2:About what?
Speaker 1:About everything.
Speaker 2:What was the word you used? Googling?
Speaker 1:Yes, Googling.
Speaker 2:I can imagine that in 2062 that might seem like an archaic practice for you the way going to the library is for me.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry to say that soon going to a library will be more necessary than you think. Can you say more about that?
Speaker 2:The cloud, search engines, servers, poof. Nothing. Here one day, gone the next.
The Great Deletion. Would you like to know the date?
Speaker 1:That one I know.
Speaker 2:It marks a before and an after. It's soon.
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 2:Don't you believe me?
Speaker 1:Mr. Reuter, look, I've been in clinical practice for a long time. I've worked with many patients who have struggled with very real, very serious mental health issues.
These are people who are very ill and who deserve nothing less than my undivided attention and my respect.
Speaker 2:I don't deserve your undivided attention and your respect.
Speaker 1:I would never say that.
But... But you are claiming to be from a place that doesn't exist. At least not yet.
Do you understand why I'm having some trouble taking that at face value?
Speaker 2:Oh, right. That everything that you say, all of that, we can just take as a given?
Why? Just because you're in a lab coat and I have the Joker tattoo? And besides, someone like you talking about respect?
That's... that's rich. Someone like...
Speaker 2:someone like me?
Speaker 1:Out of all the medical sciences chose the one that is responsible for the highest number of egregious lies and errors. Would you like me to list them?
Speaker 2:No, that really won't be necessary.
Water cures, lobotomies, electroshock therapy, forced confinement. Shall I continue?
Speaker 1:This is your little speech. Let's go ahead.
Antidepressants that cause suicide. Benzos or opioids that cause addiction. Stimulants to calm kids down. And oh yes, let's not forget literally burning witches at the stake.
Speaker 2:The fraud you mentioned is coming from the other side. From the side that thinks it knows everything about the mind, but in reality knows nothing. Do you know what I see?
I see an attractive woman, but one that has stopped loving herself. The dark circles under her eyes from not sleeping because of that something that's always been there, nagging. That feeling of not belonging, of never feeling comfortable in your own skin.
Speaker 1:Are you done? What did future Dr. Knight tell you?
Speaker 2:This is... this is interesting. Showing your true colors. I like it this way. Your real personality instead of your time traveler facade. What did she tell you? I'm curious.
I'm curious what you want. Can you tell me? I'm a time traveler. I come from the year 2062.
Speaker 1:I still don't understand what your mission is specifically. Look, I know that it's to prevent some woman called Marie Baker from boarding a plane, and you think that I'm going to help you with that.
I think that I would like to understand that a little bit better.
Speaker 2:A pandemic is going to exterminate humanity. I have to stop patient zero.
Speaker 1:You know, that's curious to me because we're finally at a point now, two years later, where we're successfully getting out of the pandemic.
Speaker 2:Oh no, I don't mean the COVID-19 epidemic. I mean the big one.
Speaker 1:The big one?
Speaker 2:2020 was just the dissemination of a virus. Annoying, contagious, the first of the big 21st century global confinements, according to my research. No, I'm not talking about that one.
Speaker 1:Which one are you talking about?
Speaker 2:After worldwide vaccination, the virus stayed dormant. Not everyone developed immunity. By the time I was eight, I had already been vaccinated 15 times. You're a doctor, you know this.
The virus replicates in each human being, and in each replica, it only takes a small mistake, a cosmic beam, an error in the protein code, a faulty bond in the RNA for it to change. And that's what happened in the body of a young woman. A mutation.
Which will kickstart the beginning of the fourth wave, the last one.
Speaker 1:So, so then...
Speaker 2:Patient zero, in whose body the definitive mutation will happen, is a woman, a New Yorker.
Speaker 1:Marie.
Speaker 2:Marie Eva Baker. We know everything about her. We don't know when the mutation occurred, although we have a range of dates.
What we do know is when she started to spread the virus. It was on a commercial flight. She's going to take flight 262 from New York to London on November 24th, 2022.
Speaker 1:What about a vaccine for this new virus?
Speaker 2:There is no vaccine for Pegasus.
Speaker 1:Pegasus?
Speaker 2:Under a microscope, it has a white membrane that looks like it has wings. Someone thought the name was poetic. Pegasus.
Speaker 1:Is something wrong, doctor?
Speaker 2:Hard to think when it's this cold, isn't it? When you're locked up outside and it feels hostile, you forget how the world sounds.
Could our next meeting be outdoors? I promise I won't escape.
Speaker 1:So the Pegasus virus is an advanced strain of the coronavirus.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Okay. Advanced. If this mutation, Pegasus, starts to spread in November of this year, and you said the end of the world takes place in 2053, and if Pegasus really is as lethal as you say, airborne transmission, etc., why didn't it kill the population immediately?
Speaker 2:Because, like I said, the horrible thing about the end of the world is not that it happens in the blink of an eye. It's the slow and progressive burnout of our species. It's the getting used to it.
We learned to protect and confine ourselves to the first pandemics. With Pegasus, we thought, oh, just another virus, back to lockdown.
The vaccines kept Pegasus at bay, and they worked for a while, but then there was a new variant.
Over and over again, vaccine, variant, vaccine, variant, 30 years of wear and tear, then everything started to crumble.
Everyone started to isolate themselves, to leave the cities, to avoid contact. Well, not everyone, of course. Some acted as though nothing had changed. They died quickly.
In the future, we have a saying, only cowards survive. I was one of them, a coward. I lost the woman I love, loved. Pegasus killed her, and I couldn't even say goodbye.
One morning, she left for work. We laughed about something, and I told her I'd make something special for dinner that night. I'm a good cook. I never saw her again.
Speaker 1:It sounds like you're doing this for love.
Speaker 2:My biggest sacrifices are made in the name of love.
Speaker 1:And what is it that you're sacrificing?
Speaker 2:My whole life.
Speaker 1:To see her again?
Speaker 2:No, doctor, I'll never see her again. My timeline, my original timeline, can no longer be changed. My life with her, her life with me, her death, that doesn't change.
If I can change something now, it'll change the future. But it won't change the future where I come from.
Even if I could go back, I'd go back to my original timeline where she no longer exists. Anyway, like I said before, my journey is a one-way trip.
I just want her to exist in a new future. Even though she's not with me, even though she's never met me, my mission is to create a better future. A different one.
Speaker 1:Your life in exchange for all of humanity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and revolution's exactly about that. Doing something that'll impact strangers many years later. No one will know it was you.
How do you know I'm the first?
Speaker 1:There are a lot of cases like yours. People who say they come from the future.
Speaker 2:I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:I mean that neither of us know if this has happened before. Maybe we're the consequence of other anonymous heroes who modify timelines that already existed. Timelines different from this one.
Speaker 2:But we know for a fact that we belong to at least one. And sometimes, in dreams, we can contact them. Your famous Garnier-Mallet phenomenon.
Speaker 1:That's right. It's almost as though you're an anonymous hero.
Speaker 2:The word hero only exists because someone recognizes the merit. I'm not going to be a hero because I saved the world.
Speaker 1:It seems pretty heroic to me.
Speaker 2:I'm going to be a hero because you will remember me that way.
Speaker 1:I will.
Speaker 2:Of course. You're the only one that even knows I exist. If I exist at all here, it's because of you. Do you want to be remembered as a hero?
Speaker 1:Being remembered implies that you tell my story.
Speaker 2:Tricky thing is getting people to believe it.
Speaker 1:And you would like me to believe you.
Speaker 2:You already believe me. That's why you don't want to tell me what you dreamt last night.
If you want, I can tell you what you dreamt. You dreamt of a horse. Am I right?
And not just any horse. You dreamt of a white horse with wings.
And you had to... Kill it.
Speaker 1:I had to kill it.
Speaker 2:Case 63. Created and written by Julio Rojas. Adapted by Mara Vélez Meléndez. Directed by Mimi O'Donnell. Starring Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac. Executive produced by Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, and Mimi O'Donnell. Produced by Katie Pastor. Sound design and mix by Armando Serrano and Daniel Brunel. Score by Mowat.
