hello earth. you are listening to a man who never existed....

one of my favorite events of every musical year is the second life sci-fi con, a virtual convention with dozens of exhibitors, hundreds of events, and thousands of attendees – all to collect contributions to the american cancer society relay for life (cancer.org). in 2021, radiospiral.net was one of the three primary providers of streaming audio for the con, and several of our staff played live shows in our convention booth and on the main stages.

on sunday 16 may, i was performing live in our booth when i decided, as i sometimes do, to turn up my microphone and make up a story to go with the music. anyone who knows me won't be surprised that i can choose nearly any topic and talk about it until the heat death of the universe, all while playing synthesizers.

this particular story was informed by various sources – my study of declassified information from the soviet space program that surfaced after the collapse of the ussr; long discussions with my wife (a planetary geologist and student of soviet space policy) about the twists and turns of the alternate-history series 'for all mankind'; a recent reread of the delightfully cold-war potboiler 'the pilgrim project' by hank searls; and a study of the shortened and difficult life of sergei korolev, the prime mover of the soviet space program whose premature death in 1966 cost the nation its flag on the moon.

the audience really enjoyed the result, but upon relistening, i decided that it deserved a proper outing with a bit of rehearsal and pre-planning for both the music and the reading (i tend to be really spontaneous with these pick-up performances). i therefore reworked the story by jotting down some names and dates to keep everything straight, added the contributions of tatyana and zhiyu to the new coda, and tweaked some melodies and generative systems, for a more polished result.

monday 17 may 2021 i performed this piece on the main event stage at the 13th second life sci-fi con, and while the recording wasn't at all perfect, it carried a real sense of time and place that the audience found captivating.

tuesday 18 may 2021 i replayed the concert recording in its entirety on radiospiral.net and it received a great deal of interest. i'm crazy but i'm not stupid, and i can take a hint – as soon as the show was over, i threw the raw audio into an editing program, made one critical splice edit to save the one truly ruined transition, de-clipped the audio where appropriate, and called it good. this wasn't something that would benefit from overthinking.

the next step was to create the album art (soviet propaganda posters and commemorative stamps are so inspiring), write these notes, and get the album out to you all. i hope you enjoy the story of a frightened young half-russian/half-uzbek pilot given an impossible mission and told to succeed at all costs, and of what he accomplished in the end.

i have tried to be as historically accurate as possible, taking minimal liberties only where necessary to the primary thread of the story. andrian nikolaev did in fact marry valentina tereshkova after her flight; all the mission dates and descriptions are as they happened; and yes, korolev did say 'we will all be executed and there will be no obituary'. in fact, he said it often; he was a realist, and in soviet bureaucracy, realism and pessimism were usually the same thing.

i did get several basic facts wrong, and there is more than one glaring continuity error; i invite listeners to find them all and discuss them over drinks, preferably far away from me.

and that's enough chatter for now. i hope you enjoy this little story as much as the live audiences did, and if possible, please pay for it, even a dollar or two. all proceeds will be passed on to the american cancer society through second life's connection to the relay for life program.

oh, and if you can, find a copy of 'the pilgrim project' by hank searls, or watch the movie version 'countdown'. it's delightfully preposterous, seen from our 21st-century perspective...

or is it?

mike metlay
20 may 2021