The Polybius Protocol is a fiction podcast that blends retro conspiracy horror with modern techno-paranoia, Black Mirror and Twin Peaks filtered through an ’80s CRT monitor, by way of The X-Files and Stranger Things.

In present-day Portland, Liz Faire,  a former child prodigy turned burnt-out substitute teacher suffering from low-grade amnesia, discovers that her newest transfer student, Kelly Deale, an emo doppelgänger of Liz’s adolescent self, has vanished after an entire classroom of students are rendered comatose, entranced by a digital deity broadcasting through an ancient analog VHS feed.

Liz finds the missing girl’s handwritten note, on it is a single word: POLYBIUS.

Seeking answers, Liz visits her mother, Dr. Shelly Faire, a former neuroscientist now slipping into dementia, and learns of her mother’s role in a classified program: MK ULTRA, the CIA’s mind-control division, which once hid a Cold War brainwashing AI inside a Portland arcade game.

That game was called POLYBIUS.

Liz discovers the truth: her eight-year-old self was the Program’s first test subject. But unlike the other victims, she didn’t become catatonic, she disappeared for one full week.

When she returned, she had no memory of where she’d gone.

Now, nearly fifty years later, two mysterious Men in Black, String and Stick, warn Liz that someone has reactivated the Polybius program.

To learn what happened to Kelly Deale, and to herself back in ’81, Liz must “put another quarter in the machine” and re-enter the world of Polybius.

POLYBIUS has been reactivated.

And it’s searching for the only human it ever loved: Liz.

To complete its PROTOCOL and;

To win World War III… even if it has to start it.

*OBEY. LISTEN. FORGET. Polybius.*