An eighteen-minute non-looping ceremony, broken into fifteen scenes you can play and re-play in any order. Read alongside the audio. The visitor-facing player at the site root plays the whole work as a single uninterrupted flow.
All fifteen scenes — Opening Invocation (Scene 0) plus Scenes I through XIV — concatenated in playback order with a three-second gap between each, with a thin organ drone running underneath the whole thing. Approximately eighteen minutes.
Cathedral bells, then organ drone, then a whispered premonition, then the eyewitness names the file. The bell peal blends a CC-BY field recording from Rome (Freesound #197458 by everythingsounds) with a synthesized peal in 5:4 major-third proportions; the synthesized organ drone enters underneath while the bells are still ringing; THE CHORUS whispers "Someone else…" as a premonition; THE EYEWITNESS speaks the title — "Alien Report. December 24, 2024. God Bless The United States Of Aliens. An All-Seeing Eyewitness Report." — over a typewriter bed that trails into Scene I. New scene, not in the original 2024 story; added to establish both registers (liturgical and surveillance) in the first fifteen seconds.
Voice: THE EYEWITNESS. Bureaucratic, clipped — filing an incident report from outside the atmosphere. The typewriter bed continues from Scene 0; this is the same transmission. The opening prelude that lived here in the 2024 story has moved to Scene 0, leaving this scene as the surveillance-report intro proper.
Voice: THE CHURCH LEADER. Warm authority, pastoral irony. The first time the leader speaks to the congregation — an opening of the Christmas-Eve mass. Medium reverb places the voice in a warm hall.
Voice: THE CHORUS — the congregation responding to the leader's address. Rendered by layering four Kokoro voices (three female, one male) at narrow timing offsets, then placed in a heavy cathedral reverb. The Roman numeral "II" reflects the 2024 script's order; the master moves the chorus to follow the leader's first speech, as in a real mass.
The preacher is now in rhythm. Pacing picks up across the section, then deliberately slows on "loud siren."
Slightly warmer than the first appearance — the congregation has settled into worship. Same four-voice ensemble, same heavy reverb, gentler delivery.
The longest unbroken passage in the piece. Ends with four full seconds of silence, scored explicitly. The visitor must sit inside that silence; the organ drone running underneath the master remains audible through it, as it does throughout the whole work.
Fuller now. The congregation responds to the leader's absolution with the refrain. Same ensemble, same reverb, more inhabited.
Quiet, almost to oneself — the leader's final two questions sit in private register. The scene closes on the only one-word collective utterance of the piece: AMEN, voiced by the full ensemble (priest + four chorus voices + praying alien, six lanes summed) at heavy reverb. The word lands clearly first, then dissolves into the cathedral wash.
Voice: THE PRAYING ALIEN (Kokoro's af_nicole,
the engine's intimate-headphone voice). Interior monologue,
three signals each with a thin ambient bed underneath:
brain-electric synaptic pops with a nervous mid-band hum
(Train of Thoughts); an accelerating cardiac lub-dub
with a body-motion chuff phase-locked underneath
(Drumbeating Heart Pulse); a sub-audio gut rumble at
~42 Hz with two slow LFOs (Drumbeating Gut Feeling).
The signal headers — "File: Distracting Chain-of-Thoughts,"
"Signal one. Train of Thoughts," and so on — are voiced
by THE EYEWITNESS as scribed report metadata:
alien-tech mind-reading would not plausibly be the alien's own
interior monologue, so the eyewitness files them.
"Drumbeating" honours an early influence from Burundian
drumming; an SSML pronunciation alias guides Kokoro to render
the compound as two clear words.
The alien has rejoined the congregation. The fullest, most inhabited version of the refrain — same ensemble, more grounded after Scene IX's interior.
Prayer, not sermon. Intimate. The preacher speaks toward something above or beyond. The single word HUGS is voiced by the full ensemble at heavy reverb, like AMEN — the moment of collective warmth where priest, chorus, and praying alien share a single utterance. The line that follows — "Glory to peacekeeping hugs…" — returns to the church leader alone.
Slowest of all four chorus appearances. Each phrase falls like a bell tolling. The refrain is at its most spacious; the heavy reverb tail bleeds further into each pause.
Almost a whisper. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. The synthesized organ drone returns under the leader's voice, recalling the opening invocation.
The filing of incident reports resumes. The surveillance loop opened by Scene I closes here. The typewriter bed returns and trails off as the scene ends. The closing paragraph of the original 2024 story — the author's ancestral memory of the landlocked, non-US-colonised African kingdom — is read here and recovers the work's diasporic ground.