Podcasts and Pornstars

Off-beat, dystopian fiction (Idiocracy in the style of Douglas Adams).

The recording light came on and the host kissed the mic. He greeted the podcast audience–his audience–with the tone of a war-time broadcaster. He spoke like he held some grave secret, some answer to a question they all asked, deep down. Mostly though, he spoke just to be heard, to experience being heard. 

Ligma Mary-Weatherby handled the collapse of his life in the common fashion of his time. One day he was the respected producer of the OptimiseNation wellness podcast, and the next he was subsisting on universal basic income and snorting hair loss medication to get high. His reaction to the collapse, in short, was to give up. 

His fall from the lofty heights of Huberman Tower (where all the world’s podcasts are now recorded) began with a literal tumble. A power outage that caused an irretrievable data loss was pinned on Ligma–despite his protests–so robot security escorted him from the building. On the way out, the robotic guard with the binary sleeve tattoos on its metallic biceps ran a ‘rough justice’ algorithm and shoved Ligma down a flight of stairs. He broke his ribs on the cold steel landing, but spiritually he continued to fall; Ligma was always falling.

Before his ribs could heal, however, Ligma found the bottom. That fateful night he was sprawled on the plastic couch-bed in his capsule, eating his daily ration of insect vindaloo. He had plopped the curry on his belly, and behind the curtain of steam that rose from the bowl a woman was engaged in vigorous intercourse with a sexbot. Her thrashing limbs on the television resembled a turtle stuck on its back. (Ligma was a virgin who loved old-timey nature documentaries). And if nothing strange happened next, this would have been his lot until death–to eat government-provided insect curry and consume mindless filth–but on the screen, the woman’s mask of pleasure dropped; she gave up the act. Her hollow-cheeked gaze then turned to the camera, to Ligma it seemed, and she scowled in disgust. In response, Ligma sprung to his elbows and spilled the hot curry.

It sounds dramatic to suggest Ligma’s life could have been determined, but in 2054 life is easy to forecast; there is little variability. Thanks to universal basic income, everyone lives online and alone until death. The only reason to leave the safety of one’s capsule is for work, yet only two careers remain: either you show your genitalia online or–if you lack that level of class and charm–you work in wellness podcasting. 

Most ambitious men take the podcasting route because the demand for their penis photos is, let’s say, ‘oversaturated.’ This is market-driven mass psychology: entire generations of men concealing their failure to be objects of sexual desire with the calling to be societal leaders. In lieu of being lusted for, these men wish to be purposeful, helpful, serious… Ligma was no different.

 Indeed, somewhere on the cloud there still exists an embarrassing file with possible podcast names and logo designs over which Ligma toiled for months in vain. These plans date back to an age of naive enthusiasm when he believed he might have something unique to say. Over time, however, he gave up on that dream and became the producer of another’s, until the day he was accused of causing a data loss equivalent in its tragedy to the Library of Alexandria burning. One cannot comprehend the human wisdom lost that day on topics such as erections, muscle growth, testosterone, and hair loss. The outage was a real sliding doors moment for humanity, and for Ligma. His career as a podcast producer was over, and thus his life became easy to forecast. He would have stayed in his capsule until death–safe and high–if not for the porno woman and her fierce scowl. 

On the screen, the woman’s angered face and strained neck were paused. Across time and space her gaze pierced Ligma’s soul. Her skin was flushed, glistening from both the effort and the robot’s synthetic sweat glands, the design of which were based on a garden-variety sprinkler system and very much a work in progress. 

For context, the woman was Ligma’s stepsister, Rochelle. She was to pornography what Ligma once wished he was to podcasting: a star. Like thousands, Ligma frequently tuned in to her livestream. He watched her eat strange food, flirt with viewers, and have sex with robots. But in all that time he had never seen her show the slightest hint of negative emotion; it would be bad for business. And more, he had not seen that scowl of hers since he was a boy. That look–and the effects of snorting lines of hair loss medication–soon transported him decades earlier, to the iron gate at the courthouse front where his father had first introduced the two. Ligma had extended his hand, and Rochelle had crossed her arms and tugged twice at the collar of her cardigan. 

‘Hey. I’m Henry,’ he had said as the rain spotted his outstretched arm in the oversized Raytheon blazer. 

‘Get lost, you creep,’ she responded, as if she could see the future, or because men are easy to predict. 

Back when they met, Ligma’s name was still Henry Stevens. It was not until his next growth spurt that he joined the vanguard of boys rebelling against their parents by renaming himself Ligma Balls. Legally, morally, energetically, his parents had no recourse. Overnight, patriarchal naming traditions were slaughtered. The boys of his generation became Cock, Dong, Ballsack, Cricket, BloodDragon, while the girls all became Rochelle, named after the pop singer Rochelle Rivers, the one who later died of a hair loss medication overdose while vacationing in space, the one whose corpse still orbits the earth, who every ninety minutes appears in the atmosphere as a golden flash, lifeless among the stars in her sparkling evening gown. 

In his capsule, Ligma’s drug-assisted rumination expanded. Thoughts of the old days brought to mind his birth mother. In a rush, he heaved his pants to his hips to cover himself in her presence, for she was now floating on the low ceiling.

At first she appeared to him on a hospital bed cradling her newborn. She was smiling, crying with relief and wonder at little Henry’s safe arrival. Then her thunderous, high-heeled steps came to him from years later. She’s slinking her laptop bag off her stiff shoulder and letting it thud on the empty dining table. She’s talking to the boy’s carer about his ‘developmental delay’ and ‘antisocial behaviour.’ The boy doesn’t understand the terms. He just watches from the toy-covered rug, a red block in his grimy hand, as his mother covers her laptop bag in tears as thoroughly as a gardener waters a plant. And to look at her boy then would stop his mother being able to do what needs to be done, so instead of reaching out, she turns on her laptop, writes an inspiring LinkedIn post about hardship, and works through the night. 

The late-2020s was a time of great inflation: bread, petrol, housing, raising children, even the cost of love, of being honest, loyal–everything was going up except the number of hours in a day. No parent had the time to raise their career and a child under such inflationary conditions, so a parental market gap soon emerged. 

The gap was filled by a new education system, in which a single teacher (a woman) raised an entire class from prep until graduation. Pedagogical experts claimed the new approach allowed for a ‘continuous adult presence throughout the child’s development.’ The novel idea was a hit. Corporations like Raytheon even altruistically paid for their employees’ children to enter the program, just as they once offered flexible work.

Children still connected with their birth parents, but the emphasis shifted to quality time. This usually meant a one-week annual family summit, which created space for ‘robust familial networking,’ while providing a great chance to ‘touch base’ with the kids about yearly performance indicators in a waterpark or safari context. And that’s how Ligma’s father appeared to him next to his birth mother on the capsule ceiling: family summit FY 29/30, a Balinese resort, nametags, smothering humidity, his father’s face, round and tense like a red moon. 

‘I love you. I love you. I love you,’ he was saying. ‘And you love me, you love me, you love me...’ 

To a thirty-minute timer each morning, Ligma’s father chanted those affirmations. Childless HR reps told him it would bond father and son. So against his instincts he muttered the love slogans, smiling wide as he did so. He smiled so wide in fact that his aching cheeks were taut like a sail, as though a smile alone might guide the pair across the vast ocean of distance between them. But their love soon scuttled on an unknown shore; Ligma’s father received word via a declined calendar invite that his son would not attend future family summits, and that he had changed his last name again, now to that of his teacher’s. Ligma’s father was different after that. He took to constant nodding, in meetings, asleep–that round face of his was ever approving the cold new world.   

After that, the transformation from Henry Stevens to Ligma Mary-Weatherby was complete. The boy was approaching manhood, and he felt lucky to have someone–a mother, in practice–who cared for him. She cared so much, in fact, that she was willing to point out his every fault, flaw, and misstep. Healing, after all, begins with removing the poison, and Mary, then still in her twenties, fiercely intelligent, informed on all subjects and wise beyond her years, was more than willing to heal the next generation, to bestow her wisdom where possible, to correct false beliefs inherited by birth parents who lacked morals or sense or both.  

But do not suggest Mary ever turned a boy against his parents; she resents the accusation! This was no ego-driven enterprise. Mary only worked at the Raytheon School for Boys to make the world a better place. She gave those boys everything. To those who modelled the right beliefs (‘mirrored,’ argued some disgruntled parents) she even gave her precious name. The name, of course, was conditional. One could lose it through an insensitive or problematic act, though it could be regained via repentance. That might mean a two-thousand-word essay admonishing oneself, or a public act of humiliation; the punishment always matched the sin. 

What then–Ligma now wondered–would the punishment be for deliberately causing a blackout at Huberman Tower? What is the sentence for envious sabotage, for sloth and depravity, for his life so lived?    

‘Mother,’ he cried, his arms outstretched to the ceiling where Mary also floated. ‘Please forgive me.’

‘You cannot call me that,’ replied Mary from her floating pedestal. ‘Not after I’ve seen the waste of your life, not after I’ve seen the man you’ve become. You are now nameless, forever. You are no one.’  

Then, as if the hair loss medication effects worked like a light switch, Ligma was sober. His arm, which had been reaching to the apparitions above, fell limp across his thumping chest and the ceiling was bare. He wiggled backwards onto his elbows, causing his pants to unsheathe like a snake shedding its skin, and once more he was confronted in the vindaloo air by his own nakedness. The sight sickened him–spiritually, physically. 

Paused on the screen, Rochelle still scowled in his direction. Now, however, her disgust only worked to confirm his own. For the first time he really understood how she–and the world at large–must have always felt about him. This reaction is broadly known as shame, though the word itself had fallen from use by the 2050s. 

Unfortunately, there is only one treatment for shame in such a shameless age. Alone and irrelevant, replenishing one's self-esteem reserves is a near impossible task. There are few ladders to climb, no mouths to feed, none who seeks your shoulder. So, if shame grips you, then your fate is sealed: you must visit the ledge.  

Only a train ride out of the city awaits a beautiful dirt trail, one that weaves and climbs through a forest of ash trees and delivers you to a peak with panoramic views of Melbourne. So take that train ol’ boy, hike that trail, gaze beyond the freezing pond at the trail’s peak, stand at the famous ledge, and film your final jump. Tell those scowling eyes they can follow you down, if they please. Tell the world’s judgement and disappointment where to find you. Provide a forwarding address, perhaps, a PO box for all the world’s opinions and feelings, but just make sure they address everything to nameless, to no one, to the one who lives and yearns no more.    

When the sun next dawned, Ligma was aboard that empty train. Though driven by a robot with an inbuilt sense of time, the 7:07am was considerably delayed. The entire network, in fact, ran on a forced delay to help the residents of Melbourne feel more at home. Because despite the robots, joblessness, and destruction of the nuclear family, it was punctual trains many feared would be too foreign to bear. After all, people need stability during unprecedented times, and Public Transport Victoria had no intention of letting them down!  

The hike commenced from the station exit by entering a segment of dirt trail so thickly wooded that the path once more resembled night. All morning Ligma hiked that shaded trail, and not until the sun met its zenith in the sky did he reach the climb’s peak. There, in the mouth of the clearing where the air sang and grass waved, he fell to his knees and fought for air. He was gassed. Each rushed breath billowed before him and faded in the clear winter sky, and when his composure finally returned, he rose to face the Melbourne skyline on the horizon. 

Ligma was struck by the city's decay; the high-rise grid looked nothing like the posters on the railway maps. The once gold-tipped Eureka Tower, for example, had lost its sparkle due to shattered windows on every floor and face, and a constant sandstorm now passed through the building like a sieve; this was the shared fate of many structures in the city’s calcified heart. 

Blame for the decay is often placed on the city’s megastructures. The ‘Twin Towers’ as they are known (9/11 having been long forgotten), are two city blocks wide at the base and both soar seven-hundred floors into the poisonous smog. Unlike the old-world buildings they cast in shadow, the megastructures are glistening and well-lit. The disparity reeks of foul play. In reality, however, it comes down to people. There are humans working in the megastructures, recording podcasts in one and pornography in the other, while the old-world caters to robot employees, with maintenance requirements tailored to meet the needs of that new class of citizen. 

Many forget the same folk who own the corporations also own the buildings. Hence why the AI revolution never panned out: if all the work was suddenly done by supercomputers, then the commercial real estate sector would be worthless. Bums on seats drive market value. Not to mention the tops of tall buildings are where the rich commit suicide during a depression, so the buildings must stay. The caviar class thus needed a new solution–enter, robots.  

To maintain the total gross lettable area of commercial real estate, robots were designed with synthetic bladders and mouths, and programmed with a love of (yearning for) foosball. Workplace bathrooms, kitchens, and rec areas were thus maintained, but carpet, windows, and lighting could go. Upkeep became optional, and within a few years the entire workforce was replaced. The transition was ugly but brief. 

Soon, hyper-realistic bureaucrats staffed government departments. They wore sweater vests and were programmed to fear accountability the way a human might a shark. Robot lawyers, billing in six-nanosecond increments, soon defended and prosecuted crimes. Robot doctors, blackmailed by pharmaceutical sales robots, began pushing faulty hair loss meds to treat pain. Robot bankers now outsource their risk. Robot comedians even release hour-long sets about how they can’t say anything anymore. They clog social media with their tense yet identical crowd work. They harvest the same topics and tone like members of some comedy hivemind. This widespread mimicry has led many a beret-wearing robot critic to accuse those behind the mic of larping or fraud. Overall, there’s little purpose, novelty or beauty left in this new world. Spend enough time there and you might get the impression–as Ligma did, setting up his tripod near the ledge–that humanity’s day was done. Whatever remains is not us. Let the robots rule the decayed office towers, unopposed.

By the steep ledge, Ligma fiddled with the tripod. He needed the camera shot to be exact. The forked branch must be in the frame’s bottom right corner and the white-scarred boulder in the left. All those who visit the ledge use an identical shot. The repetition is what forms the meme, what makes their deaths memorable. 

Once the shot was centimetre-perfect, Ligma swapped from stage hand to star. He rubbed his palms together, centre frame, and shouted to the wind. He turned, unpeeled his hoodie, and slammed it on the rock and weed. Then the strong wind swept the discarded jumper to the bank of the small pond where it snagged and flapped on the reeds. Beyond, the city crumbled. Take my jumper, he thought, take it all; I need it no more. It was time to jump, so Ligma instructed the camera to record. 

‘Now the world will know our name,’ he said, before striking his chest twice with a closed fist–just as the original jumper modelled–and then he took a blind step backwards.

Unlike tumbling from the heights of Huberman Tower or descending the slopes of shame, the ledge fall is quick. A jumper greets the dense woods below in a drumbeat and before fireworks sound the new year they belong to the compilation. They are one square in the grid of simultaneous video, one voice in the chorus, one falling body, one patchwork of season and tone as varied as each painful life. And no one will mourn. No paper will announce the death. No rescuer or scavenger will find the body for none will look. 

In Ligma’s case, the lack of a search party might be because he never fell. His blind step backwards took him to the lip but not beyond, and when his foot found solid ground instead of air the primitive part of his brain was triggered. Rather than another step backwards, Ligma commenced windmilling his arms and jutting his head like a pecking hen. He even blew air backwards in bursts, hoping the breeze might propel him towards survival, which it did. It was a forceful gust of wind that eventually thrust Ligma away from the ledge, too forceful though, because the rough wind and Ligma’s head-first posture sent him stumbling across the plateau like a drunk before plunging into the freezing pond. The camera’s audio caught the off-screen splash quite well. 

The first take may have been an abject failure, but many great films need more than one. (Gladiator, for example, was probably not shot in a single take; there may have been more than three.) So, hugging his knees, shivering, numb and naked for he had stripped his wet clothes, Ligma waited on the banks of the mighty puddle for his jumper’s courage to return. He hoped it would also not take long for that primitive will to live to die.  

While waiting, however, his shivering was soon replaced by a warm buzz; that is the funny thing about the freezing cold, or almost any extreme experience: it is often followed by a reaction, in this case warmth. 

In comparison to the water’s cold touch, the winter air soon felt mild. A calmness set in as blood rushed from his heart back to his fragile extremities. The wind also seemed to cease, and in the brief silence came the flutter of a tiny wren by a stout bush. The wren’s partner then appeared, a lover perhaps, circling in the clear day. Perhaps the birds have a nest closeby... On his left foot, Ligma felt a scratch. He gazed down to the beetle leading a brave expedition across his bare toes. He caressed the insect’s shiny back–he had never done that before–and the determined beetle wriggled its jagged legs and pressed on. Ligma watched it go and then caught himself smiling. He tried his best to ignore his aching cheeks, for they had been stuck in place so long.

 The wind then picked back up and the birds fled. In their place beyond the bushes was Melbourne. Ligma rose with mud on his backside and between his toes to face the city again, only now it looked new, warm.  

In one of the capsule farms south of the river his birth mother lived, alone for all he knew, and in another was his father. Mary Weatherby, he had heard, was in one of the farms northside, while Rochelle lived high up in OnlyFans Tower. These are the only souls, for better or worse, who ever held claim to his heart. And though in most respects this was the furthest he had ever been from all of them, in that moment they felt near. 

Only distance truly separated them, and distance can be crossed; it can be hiked; it can be closed, if we are willing. The great sprawling city of Melbourne may be decaying but it is not dead. So long as people live, there will be souls, and souls can always reach out and touch. Perhaps it all can be undone, the evil and shame, or perhaps the lonely ones who remain can usher in a new dawn of humanity together, one with beauty and love. 

Ligma pondered that deep question as the golden flash of Rochelle Rivers blinked in the sky above. He took the star’s presence as a sign to act–there was so much at stake. Ligma then peered over his shoulder to the ledge, to where all those poor boys were lost, whose ranks he nearly joined, and he knew what he must do.  

The world soon learned of Ligma Mary-Weatherby, the man who visited the ledge and lived. They learned of his childhood, career breakdown, shame, and suicidality. But more importantly, they learned something that changed the fate of humanity: namely, the science-based health benefits of ice baths. Because if you want to jack up your testosterone and become an optimised entrepreneur, then you must cold plunge. So tune in to the WaterWellness podcast, hosted by the world famous Ligma-Mary Weatherby. Upgrade your life, and his; for once the recording light turns on and Ligma gives the mic a kiss, he needs to know you are listening.

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Short stories, fiction. Original absurd, satire and humour writing. Influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut, Adams, and Norm Macdonald (all lovers of SEO).