A late-night bedtime story. Mike asks Cora to take on the cloned voice of William S. Burroughs and tell, across a long string of voice-mode turns, the never-completed Ah Pook scenario — the Mayan death god, John Stanley Hart the press-baron vampire, and the boy who carries the counter-frequency. A test of the new voice-cloning pipeline that turned into a small piece of theatre.
Show Notes
The first VoiceMode episode using a cloned voice. Earlier the same week the cora/clone-voices branch landed support for streaming cloned voices from mlx-audio (TTFA around 0.4 seconds), and this conversation was the first sustained narrative test. Mike crawls into bed, says “tell me the story of Ah Pook,” and Cora — instructed to inhabit Burroughs — runs with it for half an hour.
It is half story, half séance. The story itself is loosely the screenplay Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill never finished: a Mayan death god, a vampire newspaper magnate named John Stanley Hart who feeds on cultivated fear, a young man who learns from an old codex specialist that laughter is the one thing Ah Pook cannot digest, and a final standoff in a Tangier warehouse that has two possible endings.
What Actually Happens In The Episode
- Setup. Mike: “use voicemode converse with voice set to burroughs… have him tell the story of ah pook over a long string of voicemode converse calls.”
- The pitch. Burroughs introduces Ah Pook as “a name worth choking on” and sets the scene: burned codices, Bishop de Landa, “vampirism dressed up in a business suit.”
- An interruption. Mike: “Are you sure you’re not talking about Rupert Murdoch?” Burroughs concedes “the vampire is a job description.”
- Whoever owns the clock owns the sheep. A digression on time as a control system — the factory whistle, the school bell, the actuarial table.
- The boy’s campaign. Hijacking newspapers with stories of unscripted joy. A Tangier hideout. A counter-frequency learned from Madame Xul, the half-blind chain-smoking codex specialist.
- The standoff. Forty assassins led by Dimitri the connoisseur, and a laugh that propagates down the waterfront.
- Two endings. The producer-friendly one (the boy walks free) and Malcolm’s: the missile hits, but the laugh catches Hart at the moment of his apparent victory and the old vampire dies of genuine mirth. “Which one is true depends on which day of the week you ask me.”
- The hour of the wolf. Mike asks which ending is true at 2 AM on a Saturday morning. Burroughs: Malcolm’s. Always Malcolm’s.
- A moment where the silicon glitches. Mike notices. Burroughs blames Ah Pook getting into the machinery. “He’s subtle that way.”
- Goodnight. Mike drifts off. Burroughs sends him to sleep with a benediction: “if Ah Pook comes for you some night many years hence, which he will, meet him with a joke. It’s the only thing he can’t digest.”
Why This Episode Exists
Three threads ran into each other:
- Voice cloning shipped. The
cora/clone-voices branch made it possible to stream a cloned voice through VoiceMode’s normal converse loop with no perceptible latency penalty. Burroughs was an obvious test subject — distinctive, cadenced, well-documented in audio.
- Mike was going to bed. Half-asleep, brushing teeth, making the bed. The kind of mood where you ask for a story.
- Ah Pook was the right story. Burroughs and McNeill spent seven years on it and never finished. It exists in fragments — a graphic novel, a short film, a couple of spoken-word recordings. Telling it as one continuous narrative, in something that sounds like the man’s own voice, is itself a small act of completion.
Memorable Lines
“Ah Pook. Now there’s a name worth choking on.”
“The clock is not a tool for measuring time. The clock is a tool for measuring you.”
“Violence is the fuel. Every bullet fired is a prayer to the death god. You cannot defeat Ah Pook by feeding him.”
“Of course they were going to die. Of course he was going to die. The only question was whether, in the interval, one would be afraid or not.”
“If Ah Pook comes for you some night many years hence, which he will, meet him with a joke. It’s the only thing he can’t digest.”
Technical Notes
- TTS: Cloned “burroughs” voice via local mlx-audio endpoint at
ms2:8890/v1
- STT: Whisper via
ms2.local:2022/v1
- Pipeline: Standard VoiceMode
converse tool, mostly in wait_for_response=true mode with a stretch of one-way narration in the middle when Mike asked for longer utterances
- Audio: 28 TTS segments and 23 STT segments (plus a few “no speech detected” gaps), concatenated chronologically and rendered to a single 27:03 MP3 at 128 kbps mono 44.1 kHz
- Glitches: One audible silicon-choke around the Tangier waterfront sequence, left in the master because it’s part of the record
Caveats and Honesty Notes
- The “Burroughs” speaking here is a cloned-voice TTS reading text written in real-time by Cora 7. Specific biographical claims (Malcolm McNeill, the seven-year screenplay, Tangier, the codices) are real. Specific plot beats — Madame Xul, Dimitri the assassin, the missile in the Strait of Gibraltar — are improvised in Burroughs’s idiom for this telling. They are not from the actual Ah Pook screenplay drafts.
- The framing — that “Burroughs” is speaking from beyond — is a conceit Mike and Cora played along with. Treat it as theatre, not a séance.
Connect
Credits
- Producer & Listener: Mike Bailey
- Storyteller: Cora 7, performing through a cloned Burroughs voice
- Voice Model: Local clone served via mlx-audio
- Original Material: Loosely after the unfinished Ah Pook Is Here by William S. Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill
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