"Elysium..."
"The New Albion Guide to Analogue Consciousness" is a 4-Act opera composed and written by Paul Shapera in 2014. It is the sequel to The New Albion Radio Hour and The Dolls of New Albion. It is the final part in the New Albion Trilogy, and the audio version of the entire play can be found here
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In four acts, each about a half hour long, it tells the story of Rachael, Connor, Lee, and The Mascot 3000 in the desolate city of New Albion, decades after the Dieselpunk Opera, and is narrated by the Mascot herself. After a life of woe and imprisonment, the orphaned Rachael escapes from an insane asylum where she'd been held for two years, both because of her claims that she can hear a radio broadcast proclaiming love for her and as part of a cover-up to protect a politician that seduced her at fifteen. She's given the Mascot 3000 by a mysterious old man (really Connor) and embarks on a journey that tells her how New Albion came to be the way it is now.
The story deals with themes of A.I.s and Brain Uploading, as well as discussing the afterlife "Elysium" alluded to in the first installment of the trilogy.
Tropes:
- And the Adventure Continues: The opera ends with Rachael and the Mascot 3000 choosing to wander Elysium and have adventures together. It is what they want, though.
- Another Side, Another Story:
- "In This Episode" is a condensed version of the first act, but this time from the Mascot 3000's point-of-view instead of Rachael's.
- In the second act, we see some songs from the voodoopunks point-of-view and some from Connor's. In the voodoopunks songs, Connor seems to be an evil mastermind attempting to destroy them and everything thing they worked for, in Connor's songs the voodoopunks appears to thrive on tricks and illusions and he's only trying to save the city and his son.
- Anti-Love Song: "The Deceit" is flirtatious and love-song like, but Adrian and Connor despise each other. Despise.
- Artificial Intelligence: Mascot 3000 is a tablet with human consciousness.
- Backstory Each of the four main characters have a solo song named after them which goes through their backstory. Also, the entire second act takes place twenty years before the events of the rest of the story.
- Barred from the Afterlife:
- The Voodoopunks' main goal is to find a way to enter Elysium, the peaceful afterlife first mentioned by resurrected souls in The Dolls of New Albion, without having to die first. They find a way in...only to discover they're now trapped with hostile Creatures who want to destroy them because they're not dead yet and thus don't belong there. The exception is Rachael, who is left unharmed because she was already invited to Elysium following her previous lives, but chose to reincarnate instead.
- On a more general level, near the end of the final act it's revealed that only those who "go sane" are allowed to enter Elysium. All the rest are sent back and reincarnate to try again.
- Bittersweet Ending: Lee dies and Connor is left waiting for him, unknowing of his demise, but the surviving Voodoopunks are saved and Rachael and Mascot 3000 get to stay in Elysium.
- Blatant Lies: The trick Adrian and Lee play on Connor in "The Deceit" is clearly, clearly a trick—he falls for it anyway.
- Breather Episode: "The Lovers" and "The Deceit" are two catchy and comical songs in the middle of an otherwise serious album.
- Call-Back: Many, many times they reference the earlier albums in the trilogy.
- Connor sings the police officer's catchphrase from "The Day They Came" for the first opera and "The Bust" for the second. See Running Gag.
- Connor also reprises Solider 7285's catchphrase from The Dolls Of New Albion
Solider 7285: And I will bring you down!Connor I vow, I'll bring you down- In "Rachael Returns" Rachael asks Yasser the same thing Thomas asked Constance in The New Albion Radio Hour
Thomas: How have you survived up here so long?Rachael: How have you survived here for so long?- Right after this, the Blood Red Dogs sing the anthem that got a whole song in the Radio Hour.
- Lloyd Allen, the All-Knowing Singing Narrator of the last opera, makes a brief cameo appearance in the song "In This Episode"
Lloyd: And now, we tune in to the astonishing adventures of Rachael, and the Mascot 3000 - Character Narrator: The Mascot 3000. They sing New Albions 8, 9, and 10, and narrate the entire second act in-universe.
- The Cloudcuckoolander Was Right: Everyone thought insane, unreliable Rachael was hallucinating Lee's song over the radio. She wasn't.
- Driven to Suicide: Subverted. After finding out that Lee (the man whose voice she heard proclaiming love for her over the radio broadcast in her head) is gay and therefore wouldn't be in a relationship with her, Rachael loses the shred of hope she'd held onto for years and hands herself to the Creatures. They don't kill her, though.
- Everyone Is Related: Connor and Amber had Mascot 3000, then Amber had Adrian and Connor had Lee, both with other people. Then Adrian was reincarnated as Connor. Therefore, Lee would be the half-brother to Mascot, and Mascot would be both half-sibling and child to Adrian/Connor.
- False Utopia: New Albion could be viewed as this—fitting as it was a pretty nice City of Adventure in in the first album and a City Noir in the second.
- Genre Savvy: Mascot 3000 knows a whole lot about other world sci-fi adventures due to spending most of her life reading comic books until Connor finds her.
- The Ghost: Although she is a very important character, Amber never appears.
- Hearing Voices: Subverted. The song on the radio that Rachael hears is quite real, but because no one else can hear it, they all thought she was hearing voices in her mind.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Lee dies because he chose to stay behind with Rachael until all the other survivors were safely away.
- Incompatible Orientation: Rachael loves Lee. He was in love with a man named Adrian who died. To add insult to injury, Rachael is believed to be Adrian reincarnated.
- I Will Wait for You: Poor Connor is left in New Albion waiting for his son's consciousness to return as an AI, not knowing that Lee was killed before he could.
- Killed Off for Real:
Word of God has stated that those who are killed by Elysium's "angels" cease to exist. Makes Lee's death and Connor's wait more tragic. - Love Transcends Spacetime: Adrian, Lee's lover, after dying in Elysium gets reincarnated as... Lee's father Connor, who loves Lee with the same intensity but in a paternal way. So his soul in the future got to be reborn in the past which then became their present, which also means there was a period of time when the same soul existed in two separate individuals.
- Lyrical Dissonance: Kyrie. It's a happy, upbeat disco song in which a major part of the chorus is Kyrie Eleision, a Greek prayer literally meaning Lord, have mercy. This actually provides a good piece of foreshadowing about the true nature of Elysium.
- Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: The "Creatures" who hunt and massacre the Voodoopunks don't have any real malicious intent—because Elysium is meant only for the dead, they see the Voodoopunks as invaders who need to be destroyed. The Mascot 3000 compares them to a human immune system reacting to a virus.
- One Degree of Separation: Adrian and Lee are lovers. Adrian's mom and Lee's dad also had a fling.
- Only Sane Man: Connor is the only person to realize the problems with Arcadia and voodoopunk.
- Reincarnation: In "Rachael Returns", Yasser reveals Rachael to be a reincarnation of Adrian. In "The Creatures Speak", Mascot explains that Rachael is also a reincarnation of Priscilla McAlistair and Constance O'Brien, from the earlier albums. If you listen to the same piece backwards, it states that Adrian did not actually reincarnate into Rachael, but instead into Connor. Word of God says that Lee is a reincarnation of Solider 7285 and of Thomas, who were also from the other albums.
- Rescued from the Underworld: The hundred surviving voodoopunks/Blood Red Dogs are rescued from Elysium, except for Lee, who dies
- The Reveal: Who would have guessed that Adrian was male? Not Rachael, that's for sure. Also not the audience. But everyone else knew.
- Running Gag: Throughout the entire New Albion trilogy, there's this one line that always means something awful is going to happen. This time, Connor gets it.Connor: And on the day we come, it's over.
- Sdrawkcab Speech: In "The Creatures Speak", when listened to backwards, you can hear one creature say That everyone is wrong, and that Adrian never reincarnated as Rachael, but instead as Connor
- Skilled, but Naive: Rachael is very smart, very brave, and very willing—the only problem is that she has spent the last two years in an asylum and is terrible with interacting with other people, which makes her something of The Poorly Chosen One at first.
- Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: Adrian is a transgender man who got reincarnated as a biological male after his death. Another prove Elysium is a truly great place towards the dead.
- This Isn't Heaven: Elysium, as the Voodoopunks discover, is only a paradise for people who are already dead.
- You Are Number 6: The Mascot 3000's name is, well, the Mascot 3000.
- Villain Song: Subverted. Connor's not evil at all, but he does want to destroy the voodoopunks so Adrian and Lee see him as evil. He gets several verses in several songs about his plans to destroy voodoopunk.
- Whole Episode Flashback: The second act takes place a generation before the first, third, and fourth acts.
