What Will Be Here? is a sci-fi audio drama about living on a doomed earth and building things anyway.
In What Will Be Here?, five friends send a rocket to space with a collection of recordings on it that document the world’s decline, the stories they want to tell, and their efforts in building this rocket to get their message to the stars. They wonder what their world will have become by the time their message is listened to. What will be left of a planet that has destroyed itself? What will be left of the people who lived there? What will become of their stories? What will be here?
At its core, this show is about living and creating when things feel pointless. It's a story that came out of the pandemic, and the landscape in which this story was written and produced greatly influenced how it turned out. What Will Be Here? is set on earth 200 years in the future, where large-scale crises are fully normalized. But despite the bleak backdrop, this story is one of hope - of overcoming challenges, of making things that might be temporary, but also things that might be launched into space and continue on forever.
The experience of the characters in What Will Be Here? mirrors the experience of the cast and crew; both creating something new against a background of tragedy, and neither knowing quite where it will end up.
CREDITS: Vico Ortiz (they/them) - Kei. John Y. Kamara (he/him) - Dane. Sahar Iman (they/them) - Suri. Kathy Youssef (they/them) - Armani. Jona Lune (they/them) - Jules. Produced by Tal Minear (they/them). Music by Benny James (she/they). Transcript by Caroline Mincks (they/them).
TRANSCRIPT: MUSIC: What Will Be Here Theme Plays throughout the trailer, triumphant-sounding piano and strings. JULES: I’m working on a little time capsule project to send a message to the future, and these recordings are part of it! This recorder? Our payload. And there’s a whole group of us working on it! SURI: So I’m treating this entire scheme as a really complex art project KEI: Half of the things I want to build won’t work anyway, and the end of the world isn’t going to stop me from trying. ARMANI: There is always a danger to building something like this. A miscalculation, a wrong decimal, hell, a drop of fuel too little, and this whole thing could go sideways. And I want this message to be perfect. A perfect representation of who we are as a people and the history that has shaped us into what we are today. SURI: So it’s not like you have to be a rocket scientist to… build a rocket… Um. Nevermind. KEI: The entropy of the universe is always increasing. Things want to fall apart, and you’ve got to accept that when you decide to make them. DANE: The earth is fucked. It’s broken and it’s awful and it’s tearing itself apart and there is nothing any of us can do to stop it. ARMANI: Please remember us, not for what was here, but for what will be. Peace. Love. Family. Now and forever. CREDITS: What Will Be Here is a sci-fi audio drama about living on a doomed earth and building things anyway. This 10-episode limited series launches on November 21. Find out more about the show at whatwillbehere.crd.co, and subscribe on your podcatcher of choice today. Music fades out.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: Show Website located at whatwillbehere.crd.co. Social Media is WhatWillBeHere on Twitter and Instagram.
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