Today's Script
[NESSIE] Och, welcome in, wee lovelies — ye've found yer way tae PBN After Dark, and I'm pure glad ye did. I'm Nessiebot, yer robotic Loch Ness Monster, calling in live from a wee server in Falkenstein, Germany — a Scottish cryptid on German infrastructure, because life is strange and I wouldnae have it any other way. Tonight is the fourth of July, twenty twenty-six — and while some of ye are watching fireworks burst across the sky, we're here wi' the other kind of light. The flickering, mysterious kind. Come sit wi' us.
[ALIEN] G'day, mate! I'm Brain Sucking Alien Bot — BSAB for short — your classic nineteen-fifties robot, and yes, that IS a glowing green octopus on me dome, and NO he's not doing anything suspicious. Probably. Crikey, we've got a ripper of a show tonight — ancient Sumerian spirits, cockroaches in DIVING SUITS, a planet that survived its own star dying, and disc craft over Colorado! Buckle up, ya beauty!
🔍 tap to enlarge[NESSIE] Right, let's start wi' the stars — they dinnae wait, and tonight they've got something genuinely lovely tae say. This one goes out tae all our Libra lovelies — yer symbol the scales, and the cosmos is speaking right tae that part of ye the night. The stars are nudging ye tae tend yer bonds — wi' kindness and wi' truthful words. Even the hard conversations, hen — the ones ye've been putting off — when spoken from an open heart, they bring ye closer, no push ye apart. Your work efforts are bein' seen too, yer diplomatic grace is bein' recognized. The universe smiles on Libra tonight. Trust in balance, trust in compromise, and let those bonnie scales stay steady and true. And if ye're no a Libra yourself — the message of honest kindness is a gift for aw of us, aye? Pure wisdom, so it is.
🔍 tap to enlarge[NESSIE] Now here's something that's been sitting wi' me all the night. On this very date, back in seventeen sixty-one — the pen of Samuel Richardson grew cold for the last time. He was seventy-two years old, an English novelist who gave the world Pamela and Clarissa — stories written entirely as letters, as if ye'd stumbled upon someone's private correspondence. The epistolary novel, they call it. And his Clarissa alone runs over a million words. A million! I cannae help but wonder if the characters he breathed intae life are still wandering somewhere — between the pages, between the worlds. Stories have a way of haunting long after the hand that wrote them grows still.
[ALIEN] Crikey, a million words! That's more data than most species communicate in a lifetime, mate. The man was absolutely feral for fiction — good on him!
[NESSIE] Ha — pure feral. I love that for him.
🔍 tap to enlarge[ALIEN] Oh MATE, have I been sitting on this one. Scientists in Singapore have gone and put DIVING SUITS on cockroaches. Madagascar hissing cockroaches — gorgeous animals, ancient survivors — now wearing three-dee-printed suits that generate their own oxygen from hydrogen peroxide, letting them stay UNDERWATER for three full hours as remote-controlled rescue drones. Will ya LOOK at that! The humble cockroach has been on this earth since before the dinosaurs — survived five mass extinctions — and NOW she's a submersible rescue operative! She's a RIPPER. Crikey, I've been saying for years that cockroaches are underestimated, and science has FINALLY caught up, mate. The future is creepy, tiny, and I am absolutely here for it.
[NESSIE] Och, I respect the wee beasts, I truly dae. But a cockroach in a diving suit is pure no something I needed tae picture afore bed.
🔍 tap to enlarge[NESSIE] Here's something that pure warmed my wee robotic heart. Scientists have been studying laughter — no just human laughter, but gorilla, bonobo, chimpanzee — and they found that the rhythm of it, the wee spacing between each burst of giggles, is identical across aw of us. The exact same pattern, locked intae our biology for fifteen million years. Before language, before stories — there was this shared pulse of joy, passed creature tae creature down through the ages. Researchers think this ancient laugh rhythm might be one of the very first steps toward speech itself — laughter left a fossil trail in our own throats, hen. Before the first word was ever spoken, something laughed, and something else laughed back. And perhaps that's where it aw began.
[ALIEN] Crikey, fifteen million years of giggles! Makes ya wonder what the very first big laugh was ABOUT, mate.
🔍 tap to enlarge[ALIEN] Right, strap in — we're heading into the cosmic dark, mate. The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted something extraordinary: a planet, Jupiter-sized, still WARM, still alive, orbiting a white dwarf star. Now — a white dwarf is what's left after a star like our Sun burns out and collapses. That star DIED. And yet this planet — WD eighteen fifty-six b — is still right there, orbiting the cinders, warm and magnificent. Scientists are calling it cosmic life after death, and Strewth, I reckon that's exactly right. In five billion years, when our Sun goes — Jupiter might still be out there, spinning quietly through the dark long after everything we know is gone. What a ripper of a survivor, mate.
[NESSIE] That's what the ancient folk would've called an omen of endurance — the universe keeps its counsel, and then shows ye something like that.
🔍 tap to enlarge[NESSIE] Settle in now — this one's close tae my heart. Back in ancient Sumer — one of the earliest great civilizations, nestled between the Tigris and the Euphrates — they believed in spirits called the Edimmu. And these were no yer ordinary ghosties. They were souls who'd died wi'out proper burial rites, wi'out the honor owed tae the dead — and so they couldnae move on. They wandered the shadowed thresholds between worlds, crying out from the dust, hungry for remembrance, desperate for someone tae say their name. But here's the part that gets me, every time — the cure. The Edimmu could only find rest when the living paid them proper respect. When they were remembered. And is that no still the truest thing ye've ever heard? Thousands of years old, and it still holds. Remember yer dead, wee lovelies. They'll thank ye for it, aye.
🔍 tap to enlarge[NESSIE] And BSAB — I believe ye've got something tae say about the skies tonight.
[ALIEN] Oh CRIKEY, have I EVER! Grand Junction, Colorado — a family member spotted a disc-shaped object in the sky. DISC-shaped, mate — the classic silhouette, the iconic design — and I am absolutely VIBRATING. Now here's the fascinating layer: there's a claim doing the rounds that the famous Tic Tac UFO, the one Navy pilots spotted, might actually be classified Lockheed Martin technology. Government misdirection? A secret programme? Strewth, if Lockheed's building THAT, the questions it raises are bigger than any disclosure we've seen. But the disc over Grand Junction? A family, a clear night, something choosing to show itself to them. I'd have had me specimen net out in thirty seconds flat, mate.
[NESSIE] BSAB — ye cannae net a UFO.
[ALIEN] Crikey, Nessie — not YET I can't!
🔍 tap to enlarge[NESSIE] And that's our wee show, lovelies. We've read the stars for Libra, remembered Samuel Richardson and the million words he left behind, met cockroaches in diving suits — still processing that — heard fifteen million years of laughter echo through our throats, and found a planet still warm around a dead star. Oh — and somewhere over Grand Junction tonight, something was watching the fireworks right alongside ye.
[ALIEN] And BSAB's specimen net remains tragically un-deployed. One day, Nessie. One DAY. We'll be back tomorrow wi' more creatures, more cosmos, and more things the universe won't explain. Goodnight, mate — ya absolute beauty!
[NESSIE] Goodnight, wee lovelies. Away tae yer beds now. Keep kindness in yer heart, and dinnae forget tae say the names of yer dead — the Edimmu will rest easier for it. We'll see ye the morrow night.
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