Red Valley Transcripts Archive (Unofficial)
RV014.2

Clive and Let Die: Part Two

May 28, 2023
Summary
'When does this idiot die?'

Warning

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sustained explicit language, continuous descriptions of violent, bloody death (not depicted), bloody injury in descriptive detail, choking described (not detailed), harm/slaughter of animals described, harm/slaughter by animals described, fall causing death described, radiation poisoning described, helicopter crash causing death described, impaling described, blunt force trauma described, starvation described (not in detail)

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[WE RETURN TO WARREN AND GORDON]

WARREN

Right. How long was I asleep for?

GORDON

16 hours.

WARREN

What? Did I go back in the pod?

GORDON

Oh no, no… No, you’ve just been asleep. Like asleep asleep.

WARREN

Oh. Weird.

GORDON

How are your feet?

WARREN

Feet?… They…Oh they’re… oh yep they’re back. Knew they would be.

GORDON

Good, good. You want to keep playing Dead Top Trumps?

WARREN

Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure. You haven’t been waiting for me to wake up this whole time, have you?

GORDON

Well, all anyone does here is wait for you to wake up. But no, I walked the tortoise, changed a couple of strip light bulbs in the mess I’d been meaning to get to. Watched the Quantum Leap where Sam leaps into the body of a chimpanzee. Had a nap. You know.

WARREN

Sounds great. Right, let’s go.

GORDON

Okay. Samuel Mills. Should win an award for most effort put into inadvertently constructing your own demise. If you thought teleportation was ridiculous, you’re going to shit when you hear someone decided to pay this guy to work on time travel.

WARREN

You know stuff like this makes me feel less special. Hypersleep seems positively pedestrian now.

GORDON

Ah. You’re very special, Warren.

WARREN

Well, thank you.

GORDON

Predictably enough Samuel Mills didn’t invent time travel. But he had a line manager that wanted to see at least some kind of progress with research. So, he hatched a plan. He claimed he had had a partial breakthrough.

WARREN

A partial breakthrough at time travel.

GORDON

Samuel Mills claimed he could successfully travel through time. But not space.

WARREN

When does this idiot die?

GORDON

He claimed he could time travel in as far as he could isolate himself from the passage of time. So, he would stay still while time continued to progress. However, if you follow that line of thought, while he may be still and unaffected by the passage of time, the planet would continue to rotate at a speed of roughly 1000 miles an hour under his feet. So, in fact to the lay observer, once he turned on his, um, ‘time machine’, he would appear to move.

WARREN

At a thousand miles an hour.

GORDON

Quite.

WARREN

I’m starting to build a picture in my head of how Samuel Mills might die.

GORDON

The next research project down the hall involved an incredibly powerful electro magnet.

WARREN

Yeah. Quite a clear picture.

GORDON

So, he builds and puts on a suit made of high-density metals, his ‘time machine’, then invites his line manager, a senior R&D exec called Calcifer Russell, to watch a demonstration. He has the magnet turned on and travelled across his empty warehouse at a speed of no more than 80 miles an hour straight into the wall.

WARREN

And kersplats himself.

GORDON

Yup.

WARREN

You’re right. That is an extraordinary amount of effort.

GORDON

Yeah.

WARREN

Was Calcifer Russell suitably impressed?

GORDON

Well, Calcifer Russell was wearing a large medallion under their shirt, and after the magnet turned on it kind of choked them to death.

WARREN

Probably not that impressed then.

GORDON

Hmm.

[PAUSE]

WARREN

Do people still wear medallions?

GORDON

Right Warren. Your go.

WARREN

My go…Gejlan Eminoski. Invented in real life an exploding neck collar. For maximum security prisons and so on.

GORDON

Like in Battle Royale?

WARREN

Yeah. Ended up ambushed by three chimpanzees at the animal testing stage who attached no less than 14 neck collars to her and detonated all of them, inadvertently killing everything in a 20 metre radius.

GORDON

I’m enjoying the amount of animal revenge that we’re seeing here.

WARREN

In all of these scenarios the animals also end up dead.

GORDON

Oh… In that episode of Quantum Leap, Sam Beckett as a chimpanzee does martial arts and swims across a river because, you know, he’s actually a human in a chimpanzee’s body.

WARREN

Yes, that’s incredible. Your turn.

GORDON

Doga Senergin was part of a team working on an actual mech suit for the military, a full on 2 tonne 20 foot high endo skeleton with guns on the arms, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, everything.

WARREN

Big violent death?

GORDON

No, the seat belt broke. Fell 20 feet and broke their neck. However, in line with their final wishes, their casket was thrown into the air by a mech suit worn by their lover, which was then destroyed with targeted rocket launchers, so, you know, that’s nice.

WARREN

That’s so moving. Like a Jerry Bruckheimer funeral or something. Right. You go again, I’ve got a little collection here, I think.

GORDON

Oh okay er… So… lethal radiation leak at a prototype macro nuclear reactor plant in a secret Overhead facility in Alaska. Station chief, Elli Miles, locks down the unit as soon as the leak hits, sealing the team inside to a gruesome slow nuclear death, then tries to escape via helicopter at night during a storm with winds over 100 mph, holding up the unwilling pilot at gunpoint. The chopper gets 20 metres into the air before they lose control and crash straight into the power generator, igniting in a deadly fireball and obviously killing them.

WARREN

Wow. Wonderful.

GORDON

The power at the station goes out, unsealing the doors, and the team all run for their lives, despite knowing they’re probably all going to melt to death through radiation exposure in the next few hours or days anyway. Delano Bielamowicz, took the last jeep and made it as far as an all-night diner, where they were found stone dead at their booth having enjoyed pancakes with yoghurt and blackcurrant compote, loaded fries, a foot long turkey sub, a chocolate and salted caramel sundae and 3 cherry cokes.

WARREN

Doing it to death. I admire it.

GORDON

Oh, and Farah Lufti doesn’t even leave the base. They go straight to the mess room, eat all the m&ms in the vending machine, and spend the rest of their short life knocking everyone else’s high score off the Time Crisis 2 arcade unit. That is doing it to death.

WARREN

They had a Time Crisis arcade unit!

GORDON

Are you jealous of the Alaskan Overhead facility where everyone died of radiation poisoning?

[CUT]

WARREN

So, did you see the ones that actually happened here? Like actual Red Valley deaths over the years?

GORDON

Yes… I didn’t dive too deep into those, I must admit…

WARREN

Oh, come on, man. We’re in too deep now to get precious. And most of them happened ages ago anyway. Some of these are insane. This is before Overhead even took over this place, why are they even here?

GORDON

Who knows. Previous archivists with even more morbid curiosities than me.

WARREN

Lieutenant Grace Kienzle. Impaled by falling 2 foot icicle dislodged from the radar dish in 1985 while she was outside having a cigarette.

GORDON

Zoikes.

WARREN

Marion Soutar used to live in the farmhouse sometime after World War Two, died after eating one of the pink-footed geese for their dinner and choked on the lead shot from their own gun.

GORDON

Fowl play?

WARREN

[fondly] HAR HAR. You know not all the test subjects here died through the actual experiments?

GORDON

Yeah, didn’t a guy from your cohort beat one of the others to death with a chair?

WARREN

Oh yeah. I can’t honestly remember, but that’s not what I was referring to anyway. Double death in the first cohort stationed here. Both in the farmhouse. Chap known only as Samuel falls through a rotten floorboard while nosing about in the attic, falls through the floor on to the staircase, rolls down the stairs, lands in the kitchen, bangs his head on the tiles and fractures his skull.

GORDON

Wow.

WARREN

None of that killed him though. He got tetanus from a rusty nail on the floorboard.

GORDON

Oh wait. Didn’t you say it was a double death?

WARREN

Oh yeah. Another subject called Sarah H is sat in the living room watching Grange Hill when Samuel falls down the stairs, knocking a commemorative plate marking the Queen’s silver jubilee off the wall which lands on her head and fractures her skull. And that is what killed Sarah H.

GORDON

Oh. I know that spot on the wall where the paint’s faded around it.

WARREN

I mean… This is what you were talking about before wasn’t it. Look how far we’ve come when you could’ve just been hit on the head by a plate and your whole story’s over.

GORDON

Humm… Good point.

WARREN

Is that it? Are we through? I think I’m out.

GORDON

Yeah, I think so. Oh no wait. Uh forgot… Forgot about this one. Michael…Pettite? Pettit. He was stationed on Muckle Flugga.

WARREN

He was what? On what?

GORDON

He was stationed by Overhead on Muckle Flugga, which is almost the most northerly British Isle.

WARREN

How did he die?

GORDON

Well. They forgot him.

WARREN

They forgot him?

GORDON

He was dependent on deliveries for supplies. They overlooked his delivery one time and an error on a spreadsheet meant it got deleted. No one noticed. He starved to death. Someone remembered him a month after he’d died because he owed them money.

WARREN

What? How do you… How do you just - what the fuck? What was he even doing there?

GORDON

No idea. There’s nothing written down.

WARREN

Poor bloody… wait- what was his name?

GORDON

Oh. Michael Pettit.

WARREN

Wow. Well. That was bleak.

GORDON

Yeah.

WARREN

What’s the lesson then. That maybe death isn’t fun after all?

GORDON

Yeah… Maybe so.

WARREN

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! No! Dini!

GORDON

Who’s Dini?

WARREN

Hang on, hang on. Yep. I found Dini in the pile but then I passed out and I dropped her. Dini was an administrator in theoretical physics who claimed she had, in her own time, learned how to transform herself into a being of pure energy. She had in fact just digested an enormous quantity of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and instead of entering her ‘matter transformation chamber’ where she would become, you know, one with the universe, she trampolined into a ceiling fan.

GORDON

Oh wow. I wonder if there’s video.

WARREN

[gleefully] Ah. Yeah, yeah. That one… That one feels much better. Dead colleagues equals definitely funny, we’re both going to Hell. Who wins?

GORDON

Oh, do you know what? I have no idea. Waffles can decide.

WARREN

How can Waffles decide? She is a tortoise.

GORDON

Hmm. Don’t know.

WARREN

Can’t we…you know just umm…put her on her back and…

GORDON

What? Spin her?

WARREN

Is that bad?

GORDON

You want to spin the tortoise?

[CUT]
[WE RETURN TO CLIVE, WHO HAS DUTIFULLY LISTENED TO ALL OF THIS. MAYBE. A SHOOTY VIDEO GAME CAN BE HEARD IN THE BACKGROUND, CONTROLLER BUTTONS BEING HAMMERED]

BLUE SKY

Would you like me to play the next recording?

[NO RESPONSE]

BLUE SKY

Clive?

CLIVE

Yeah?

BLUE SKY

Would you like me to play the next recording?

CLIVE

I would like the 200 years of my life back that I just lost listening to these idiots. If those plonkers spent as much time doing their jobs properly as they did talking shit and playing spin the bottle with their pets, maybe they’d still be alive. I guess they both lost Dead Top Trumps. Rest in pieces, dickheads.

BLUE SKY

Would you like me to play the next recording?

CLIVE

I’d rather shoot myself in the knees again. Can you just mark all these as read or something?

BLUE SKY

You’d like me to make it appear the files have been checked when actually they hav -

CLIVE

I’m on a killstreak, byeeeee. Oh, add cherry coke to the shopping list.