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Pledge Drive (23-30 April)

The Redemption Inquiry


21 episodes


Solo Dystopia Serial Audio Book


Synopsis:

A Kabbalistic Dystopian/Utopian Sci-Fi novel brought to you in five seasons as read by the author, Michael Diamond, a writer, podcaster and sometime psychiatrist in the DC universe, i.e. your nations’s capital.


Format: Audio Book

Continuity: Serial

Writing: Scripted

Voices: Solo

Narrator: Third Person

Genres: Dystopia

Soundscape: Voices only

Not tagged: [Maturity] [Creator demographics] [Character demographics] [Country of origin] [Transcript] [Completion status] [Content warnings]

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Episodes:

Chapter 17: Cathar Rendezvous

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 19:55:38 -0300

Chapter 17: Cathar Rendezvous

Take a gander at future heroes Sophia Haskell and Olympia Cordovero as they stand on the verge of graduation from Oxford-en-Pyrénées. The young women have a chance encounter with the renegade cyber-busking guerilla, Ram Nissan Katz, AKA DJRoNK, as told looking back from the Redemption viewpoint of a Clinical Behavioral Science Technician.

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Part IV: Beasts of the Apocalypse

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:55:29 -0300

Part the Fourth Beasts of the Apocalypse

 

These are the tales of the motley crew destined to be the Hack Pack, future heroes of The Redemption. One after another, the team gels, cybernauts at humanity’s service. The action is at Emanation’s front stoop, the place where fate is sealed and cosmic consciousness is packaged and loaded onto the jalopy of Will and Desire.

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Chapter 16: A Night at La Huichette d'Or

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 22:17:38 -0300

Chapter 16: A Night at La Huichette d’Or

The tavern, scene of the fracas, strange doings. A gaggle of churchmen and secularists wrangle for the limelight. In the end only Rav Levi ben Gershon and Meister Eckhart keep their wit. The warp and woof of the social fabric permanently frays at the edges.

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Chapter 15: The Golem in the Attic

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:49:32 -0300

Chapter 15: The Golem in the Attic

In which the young Rav Krishna treats the crowd to a medieval tale from a sacred family tome, “The Diary of Michel Lepécheur.” It is Annus 1309, the primordial inflection, when the cosmic wheel gets turning. Being has swan-dived from Boundlessness, splashed into Emanation’s tub. The underpinning of tribal and religious empires is challenged by the beauty and terror of science and of workers’ collectives. And in the world of art and music, the rug’s been pulled out from under the old guys. On the Left Bank of the Seine, a redeemed narrator wields the Power of the Golem, the baton passed to him by his predecessors on account of the beleaguered Israelitish People.

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Chapter 14: The Ideological Singularity

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:05:46 -0300

Chapter 14: the Ideological Singularity

The scene is Barca Nona, the same Barcelona watering hole. Count Julius Evola, self- styled political philosopher and Dadaist, blabs his Fascist Manifesto before the crowd of riff raff and swells. As the band of Jazz All-Stars breaks for liquid refreshment, our Humble Narrator, Dash Hammett, takes exception to Evola’s hornswoggle. The Establishment erupts into an explosion of flying glass and Cool Cats in every direction. Hammett makes off with the final metaphor.

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Chapter 13: The Pauli Effect

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 15:20:47 -0300

Chapter 13: The Pauli Effect

Follow Rav Krishna on the trail of The World Soul back to its earlier inflection, Annus Nineteen-Hundred-Twenty-Five. A quiver of ideologies let loose upon unsuspecting humanity, another singularity from which there could be no return. Humanity and its other spill from the undifferentiated soup of Emanation into the seedbed of sparks, the World of Creation. The Rav shows a 1925 film reel of a hobnobbery of swells from physics, mathematics, philosophy and art, at a Bohemian watering hole in Barcelona. The narrator on the scene at the bistro is hardboiled detective novelist, Dashiell Hammett.

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Chapter 12: Pecuniology

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 12:54:28 -0300

Chapter 12: Pecuniology

Allow me to school you, how cash became king in 2009. The next level consequence: the oligarchs’ insatiable appetite for world-dominating AI’s, humanity’s dark twin. The smackdown between the human spirit and its twin takes form, from the little seedlings of creation, infant intentions. Money is the food of intention. The Pecuniological Singularity, the coronation day of the Almighty Dollar. There’s a brawl in a London pub, right on the heels of the Transhumanist Smackdown. Communitarian Transhumanist heavy hitter Nick Bostrom squares off with Singulatarian Enfant Terrible, Max More.

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Chapter 11: Krishna's Singularities

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:34:55 -0300

Chapter 11: Krishna's Singularities

Here Rav Krishna lays out the paradoxical nature of The Passover and clues in the crowd to the bad news about the newly launched AI’s. It’s also the day his little boychik is born. The new papa’s former neuropathology mentor at Oxford University sings us this ditty.

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Part III: Zeitgeists

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:34:34 -0300

Part the Third

 

Zeitgeists

 

Of all the gin joints, it’s the visitors suite of the maternity ward where the Rav unpacks his big spiel, the metaphysical history of the descent of humanity’s soul and its dark twin through the four worlds of Ike Luria's Kabbalah. The crossroads in this wild ride fall out in the years—1309, 1925 and 2009—in which The Blessing of the Sun intersects with The Festival of the Passover. Each year’s theme revealed in a barroom fracas. We clamber up the next rung in Ike’s ladder, in this telling, to the World of Creation, the realm from which the seeds of the future begin to seek their womb on

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Chapter 10: The Birth and Death of History

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 07:58:00 -0300

Chapter 10: The Birth and Death of History

The year is 2121, today the launch day for the three totalitarian AI’s and their invisible littermate, Moshiach. Also the birthday of Ram Nissan Katz, only begotten son of Krishna and Sita, the future leader of a failed revolt against the AI’s, and eventual High Priest of the Redemption. Eight hours due west of the birthing ward, Adam CADMan, tricks out his Trojan Horse, a hitchhiker in the Bellies of the Three Beasts of the Apocalypse.

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Chapter 9: Adam CADMan vs the Algorithms

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 15:27:00 -0300

Chapter 9: Adam CADMan vs the Algorithms

In which Adam CADMan scribes the code for the ‘Messiah Module’ and its cosmic buggy, Apeiron. He stashes the code into the three Beasts of the Apocalypse— Leviathan, Behemoth and Zyz. All three contract with Adam CADMan to code their 4D extravaganza. Launch day, The Technological Singularity, AI apocalypse, the seed of their self-destruction lurks within. A redeemed fly on the wall spills the details.

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Chapter 8: Krishna in Kapota

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 17:40:16 -0400

Chapter 8: Krishna in Kapota

Rewind the clock a couple of years, cross the pond, another unlikely hero steps up, the sixth generation hasidic savant from Mumbai, Krishna Katz. He makes like a flea and sticks to a professor of neuropathology at Oxford. The hero’s gig is to map the human brain onto the map of the world. He mainly succeeds in mapping his desire onto his Beloved, Sita. All this intel comes from the neuropathology professor, he too among the redeemed.

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Chapter 7: Adam's Prank

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 21:10:32 -0400

Chapter 7: Adam's Prank

Our Hero regroups in a cave beneath his parents’ digs in Champaign-Urbana. He scoops up an armful of technology that will deploy at The Redemption. From his remote location, he demos his fire power by inducing a FabLab at the University of Pittsburgh to generate a life-size set of human sculptures on the floor next to the 3D printer. As seen through the snooping eyes of a friendly spy, who recollects that fateful time from her perspective as one of the redeemed.

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Chapter 6: Adam is Banishéd

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 21:13:57 -0400

Chapter 6: Adam is Banishéd

 

This is what you might call a bildungsroman. The unlikely hero, Adam Saperstein AKA CADMan, an obligate introvert computer geek, gets himself expelled from The University, but not before he’s cadged access to some inside dope, and humiliates his nemesis, Blago Blagojevich, the cryogenically unfrozen president of The University.

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Part II: Winds of Change

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 11:07:30 -0400

Part the Second Winds of Change

 

In which we hike up Ike Luria’s ladder, in the telling of this tale, to the home base of human intention, what old Ike calls The World of Formation, the place where thought pulls on its pants before snapping into action. Two heroes make the scene, the guys who will see to it that humanity gets the jump on The Redemption, Krishna Katz and Adam CADMan.

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Chapter 5: The Blessing of the Sun

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 21:35:34 -0400

Chapter 5: The Blessing of the Sun

 

The Reader is introduced to some weird metaphysical shenanigans. The intersection of The Festival of the Passover with the twenty-eight-year cycle of The Blessing of the Sun frames the action for the rest of the story. The author gets the lowdown sitting in on The Feast of the Messiah led by the seventh-generation ancestor of the future High Priest of the Redemption. A glimpse of light.

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Chapter 4: The Corporate Singularity

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:14:41 -0400

Chapter 4: The Corporate Singularity

 

A peek behind the scenes at the legal fiasco, the moral tipping point of Annus 2009. Unchecked corporate power gains a fatal stranglehold over American electoral politics. As told to the author in his chambers by a sitting justice of the United States Supreme Court. A very dark day indeed.

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Chapter 3: At Black Market

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:56:59 -0400

Chapter 3: At Black Market

 

In which the author gives the Reader an eyeful of the dark Underbelly of the Beast as spilled by a former pal deep in the pay of the political goons. The view from The Redemption, in both directions through time’s window.

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Chapter 2: Chasing the Dragon

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 04:00:00 -0400

Chapter 2: Chasing the Dragon

 

The Author’s skinny on the Modern Era by way of his own particulars, the stories of his pater and grandpater. And what’s pain got to do with it. Humanity’s attempt to dodge the pain bullet with dope and technology. It’s slavery down to the ground. The dirty secret? He’s looking back from The Redemption.

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Chapter 1: Dawn of the Aquarians

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0400

Part the First

Ill Winds

 

In which human beings prove that they are hardly worth the air they breathe. Each of the five parts of the book takes the reader up another rung of a rigged game, Ike Luria’s Great Chain of Being. It all starts at ground level, what you might call the World of Making and Doing. Taking cues from his current life, and a quick glimpse at other lives he’s called his own, it’s a dark day on planet earth that drags our Author into the writing of this tale.

Chapter 1: Dawn of the Aquarians

A peek through a keyhole in time at the crooked deal that went down in the 21st and 22nd centuries. As seen through the eyes of a gal, one of the so-called redeemed, looking back to her sorry childhood. She takes a gander both forward and aft in time.

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Investigator's Preface

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:35:00 -0400

"The Redemption Inquiry," a five-part novel by Michael Diamond, is part noir detective part philosophical investigation into the vagueries of existence and the nature of redemption. As the author navigates his imaginative universe, readers are robed in a tapestry of worlds, each representing a different plane of humanity's struggles with its Other. With an eclectic mix of characters, including a subcontinental Hasid and a brainy visionary kid, the story's journey spans centuries, weaving through historical moments of chaos and redemption.

From dark pub brawls in far flung cities to cosmic quests intertwined with metaphysical inquiries, the narrative delves into the very essence of being. As humanity grapples with its diabolical counterparts amidst the threat of the technological singularity, the story traces the transcendental climb towards unity. Finally, the culmination unveils a divine machinery orchestrating redemption itself, offering a poignant reflection on the intertwined fates of beings beyond the constraints of time.

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