July 24, 2015: Open Lines
The time traveler line delivers callers ranging from entertaining to chilling. A man born in 2078 describes being moved backward through time in five-year increments by a mysterious agency. A caller from 2085 reports three percent of humanity has vanished and a fascist global state requires citizens to be physically tagged. A motorcyclist claims he rides through a projected doorway into the past, losing his bike to Confederate soldiers who melted it for gun metal. Most unsettling, a man says the black-eyed children have enslaved him, each forced trip erasing more of his identity. Between calls, a New Mexico listener recounts witnessing a full Native American ceremony on an Anasazi ruin that left no trace by morning.
A night that captures exactly why Art Bell's open lines format remains unlike anything else in broadcasting.
Key Moments
Anonymous as internet citizenship: A caller with deep Anonymous knowledge frames the collective as a shared pseudonym and meme for people whose citizenship is the internet.
Anonymous as hive mind: The caller gives Art a compact definition: Anonymous is a hive mind and an emergent phenomenon of the first generation born on the internet.
Born in 2078, moving backward: A time-traveler-line caller claims he was born in 2078 and that his family is part of an agency experiment moving backward through time in five-year increments.
2085 and the tagging census: Another time traveler claims that by 2085, after three percent of the population disappears, the UN begins a census program requiring people to be tagged.
Ceremony vanishes from Anasazi ruin: A New Mexico caller describes witnessing a nighttime Native ceremony, then finding no tracks the next morning while standing on an Anasazi ruin.