Freedom in a Locker · Moscow Rules

This radio drama uses AI-generated writing, voices, music, sound effects and artwork. All spoken performances in this edition use ElevenLabs V4.

A stranger on the telephone is selling a jailed oil baron's freedom for seven hundred thousand dollars, and the baron's wife, Olga, has already paid half in cash. The guards have gone, the gas is cut off, and she has kept one hand clenched shut for two days. Before she pays the rest, is the voice real?

🎧 Full episode of Moscow Rules: a modern spy and detective audio drama set in Moscow, a radio mystery performed by a full cast.

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

Stories, transcripts and the schedule: https://matezz.com

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

Moscow, late autumn 2004. The gate of a big house outside the city stands wide and the guard's hut is empty when the detective Maksim Volkov and his companion Dr. Grigori Melnik, who writes things down, come up the lane from the train. Olga, the wife of the jailed oil baron Viktor Danilov, has telephoned Volkov: a stranger on the telephone, a self-styled fixer, is selling her husband's freedom, she has already paid half in cash, and she wants to know whether the voice is real before she pays the rest. Inside, the gas has been cut off and Fedya, her husband's aide of ten years, is carrying logs to the fire himself. Olga will say nothing more indoors: out on the birch path she describes a voice through a cloth that says it speaks for men in epaulettes. Back in the hall the telephone rings, and the voice wants the rest by Friday. Before it is over Volkov will also meet the baron's lawyer, Tarasenko, outside the remand prison; the baron's pilot, Zakhar, in a crew room behind the hangars; and Major Brandt of the Kazansky station transport police. Four days to Friday, a voice through a cloth and a wife who is not sure of anything any more: who is behind the voice?

From the series Moscow Rules: a real post-Soviet event reimagined as a modern detective radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Russian case of the 2000s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the jailed businessman, his wife and family, his aide and household staff, his lawyer, his pilot and flight crew, prosecutors, generals, security officers and judges, government officials, company directors, transport police officers, the investigators, and anyone suspected or accused of making the telephone demands — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, district, station or other public place, or a real public body, is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the family house and the remand prison named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Moscow — late autumn 2004.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 An Open Gate and an Empty Guard Hut
1:30 Dust Sheets and a Fire in the Drawing Room
3:25 Out Between the Birches, Away from the Walls
5:22 Coats On in the Hall as the Telephone Rang
6:48 The Visitors' Door in the Old Prison Wall
8:38 A Crew Room Behind the Hangars
10:18 Wet Wool and Stewed Tea Under the Platforms
12:41 One Lamp and a Sleepy Clerk Near Midnight
13:56 The Last of the Birch on Olga's Fire
15:36 Down a Highway of High Dark Fences
17:09 Dusk and the One Lamp That Worked
19:03 Back Under the Prison Wall by Eight
20:36 Kerosene and Boot Polish by Daylight
22:12 Down the Birch Path as the Light Failed
23:33 A Dead Stove and an Empty Knife Block
25:59 Sleet from the Ring Road to the River

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