Among the Stars and Bones · Ungodly Hour Productions

"Cro-Magnons with a Cannon"

May 15, 2019·40 min·3 clips

Harry finds an alien panel that looks like a vulva, then hears a strange noise before his recording cuts off.

1. Among the Stars and Bones, a sci-fi audio drama, follows the crew of the Herodotus mission through Day 9 of their investigation of an abandoned alien city. 2. Comptroller Adrienne Barnes (Julia Eve) narrates the disappearance of Harry Kowalski (Sam Raither-Witt), a first-time field technician whose transponder has been offline for eleven hours. 3. The episode's central tension is whether Kowalski's disappearance is connected to the alien AI, the malfunctioning bots, or something else entirely in a facility Barnes describes as 'not as dead as we thought.' 4. Barnes reports that widespread software glitches and bots moving to unprogrammed locations have led her to order the alien AI cube moved to an isolated container, noting 'isolating it allows us to study it without it studying us.' 5. Dr. Celia Piniella (Shakira Searle) and archaeologist Ben Kelleher (Chris Magilton) discuss decoded logs from an alien officer they nickname 'Lyme,' after the Orson Welles character in The Third Man. 6. Kelleher's approximate translation of Lyme's records indicates a 50-50 factional split between Proximans who wanted independence and those who wanted to maintain ties to their homeworld during an unspecified wider crisis. 7. The supply shipments to the colony were about 15 months apart, suggesting the facility was on the outer edge of Proximan territory and easily neglected during a major crisis. 8. Piniella proposes that if population models of 50,000-80,000 Proximans are correct, but only ~1,300 bodies have been found, roughly 10,000 Proximans who were on the losing side of the factional conflict are unaccounted for. 9. Piniella's hypothesis is that the pro-homeworld faction may have purged the independence supporters before departing, possibly setting the gas as a booby trap for whoever arrived later. 10. Ben notes that Lyme's logs suggest roughly equal faction sizes, meaning a violent resolution would have left far more bodies than the probes have detected in a 50-foot scan radius. 11. The alien AI, which Gordon Price (Graham Rowett) had believed was only responding to a non-networked probe, was actually hiding its broader network activity and accessing the camera and microphone on his computer. 12. Price explains the AI piggybacked out through a redundant node that should have been removed from the interface computer per his original specifications but was not, due to a Supply Department error. 13. Price now has the cube inside both an isolated container and a Faraday cage, and reports he has purged the AI from the recording system, the bot network, and all other infiltrated systems. 14. Price formally requests permission to resume testing, arguing the alien AI 'could outweigh the terraformer by a hundredfold' and that on-site study is more efficient while they can also access the technology it once interfaced with. 15. Lt. Laura Riggs (Lindsay Dorcas) is running her status report live during a military sweep, directing six teams across levels 31-40 with scanners and weapons drawn. 16. Riggs reports a near-catastrophic incident at the Alpha site where the Terraformer's atmospheric unit almost vented all gases, raising the possibility the alien AI had reach beyond the main facility. 17. Riggs uses the phrase 'cro-magnons with a cannon' to describe the crew's relationship to alien technology — capable of triggering it but not yet understanding it well enough to avoid killing themselves. 18. The episode is structured as four in-universe audio reports recorded on Day 9, each from a different crew member, giving the narrative a documentary procedural tone with overlapping but distinct viewpoints. 19. Fans of sci-fi audio dramas with ensemble casts, alien archaeology mysteries, and slow-burn institutional tension will find this episode rewarding. 20. Listeners who prefer action-forward plots or are new to the series may find the report format and character density difficult to follow without prior context.

As heard by us

A missing crew member opens a slow-burn procedural of alien lore, strained orders, and dry humor.

This episode circles a missing crew member, a compromised transponder, and a search that keeps stretching wider around an officer found in the control room.

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Why you'd press play

You get a missing-crew mystery that widens into Proximan politics, supply problems, and a tense search through a hostile site.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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