What you are about to hear is actually different from the thing I meant when I started this sentence.

It is my pleasure to bring to you the Kakos Industries Corporate shareholder announcements. My name is Corin Deeth III, and I am CEO of Kakos Industries. At Kakos Industries, we help you to Do Evil Better. Shareholders, I have barely slept since you last heard from me. I am miserable. You see, the machine, or the contraption, or whatever you want to call it, has not yielded any indication of what it might actually be. I’ve been overseeing the project the entire time, and we have been working around the clock. Occasionally, the machine makes sense. Occasionally, it gives us useful information, but then as quickly as that, it is lost, and we end up with more garbage. Of course, we’re familiar with confirmation bias here at Kakos Industries, and we know that coincidences do happen, but you have to be near the device, you have to experience the device, to know exactly what is so alluring about it. We’ve already had one scientist murder another during a disagreement about how to interpret a specific verb the device used (I believe it was “Postulating”). Not to let good murder go to waste, we poured some of the dead man’s blood into the intake holes as though it were some sort of ancient sacrificial ritual. Surely if we had killed for the device it owed us something. An answer. A word. A fertile growing season. Anything. But alas, the blood only began to seep from the seams in the device and down onto the floor. It did not stop functioning. It just oozed. And then it asked for input once again. Worrying that we may have damaged the device, we unscrewed the chassis to try to clean it up. Inside, we found another metal box attached by small legs on all sides to the larger box. It also had a series of wires running from inside of it to various entry and exit ports, and also to the monitor. But this smaller box does not have screws. Nor does it have welds or openings any larger than for the cables to come out. It’s a mystery box within a mystery box, shareholders. And we’ve all been… having nightmares. What could possibly be in there? Some highly advanced technology? The processor from an old gaming console? Intelligent gas? We can’t say for certain, but I am not far from asking them to cut into the device. Also inside of the outer chassis, we found what appears to be a fragment of an instruction manual. It is, yet again, written in what we should assume is a made up language, but we cannot for curiosity’s sake. Our best linguists have been trying to decode anything in the manual. Anything at all. So far, they have merely found indications in graphical representations that one should not attempt to cut into the inner box. Except in the graphical representation, the cutting implements look like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Not even in the works of Geiger or Roddenberry. Also, the boxes are instead spheres. Yeah, that part got my blood boiling alright.

You’re receiving this broadcast on a small, portable, battery powered radio. They’re not going to all be creative, folks. The radios have been brought to you by Conevilience Radios. Um… Is that supposed to be an infixation of Evil into convenience? That is terrible. I’m starting to wonder if they have any creativity at all at this company. Conevilience. Conevilience. It doesn’t even sound good. What the fuck, guys? Soundman Steven is shrugging his shoulders. He would have come up with a better name. I know he would. Anyway, if you’re not a shareholder, this broadcast is not for you. Like, seriously not for you. Like, listening to it will cause bad things to happen. Oh, is that too vague for you? Bad things isn’t enough? Well, it’s like a lot of really bad things. Our team of Bad Things Guys will just come wreck your shit. They’ll just fuck it right up… Okay, you know what, we don’t have a team of Bad Things Guys. I made that up. I think. I’m just so fucking tired. You don’t understand what this fucking box has done to me. Bad things. Very bad things! Go away. Stop listening. I hate you.

The festival of Unimaginable Horror went pretty well. A lot of people were scared. Felix Moloch organized one of the darkest events ever. I mean, the walls were bleeding, there were new, more intense monsters behind every corner. A lot of people got eaten. It was scary. Yet… somehow not as scary to me as not knowing what’s in that damn box. Bleed on me all you want. Jump scare if you feel like it. Chew on my fleshy parts. Just don’t keep the contents of this box hidden. What is its fucking function? What does it do? We took it down to the festival and showed it to people. Most of them were just not impressed. They didn’t get it. They didn’t understand that what’s inside of there could change everything. Maybe they just don’t have the imagination for it. I’m just trying to get through to you guys just how scary this fucking thing is. What if there’s magic in there? Actual magic, huh? What if we have to rethink everything we know about everything? What if it’s a tiny little demon named Palbo trying to test us? Let me get back on topic here. Unsurprisingly, not many of you came out for the Festival of Unimaginable Horror. I mean, it’s not exactly appealing at the face of it. Others of you insisted that you weren’t easy to scare. We’ve sealed your accidentally released excrement to preserve it for if your ego ever gets too big again. Felix… really takes this stuff seriously.

Last year at this time we had the Big Black Hole Celebration, which is when we go and look at the explicitly unfathomable Big Black Hole where our New York location used to be. Well, after last year’s sudden depth change, we covered the hole and tried to forget about it. Some of us got to thinking about it, though, because of the time of year, so we uncovered it. It is once again unfathomably deep, which is good news, I guess. The rope holding our researcher was pulled up slowly. We were hoping to avoid any horror that might await us. But he was alive, shareholders, and still bound to the rope as he was before. He didn’t look malnourished, and his hair had been recently trimmed. This made absolutely no sense to us, so we asked him a number of questions. Here’s the gist: The end of the hole is in a nightclub in Costa Rica. He couldn’t leave because the knots were so well tied, but the operators and patrons of the nightclub saw fit to take care of him until the day we pulled him out of the hole. I cannot say why the end of the hole is a nightclub in Costa Rica, or if it is still a nightclub in Costa Rica, but I can say that you should be very careful when experimenting with the most powerful forces in physics. Sometimes you lose a building and send a man on a long vacation.

You must be wondering, then, what the next celebration is if it is not the Big Black Hole Celebration. Grace Rule has been studying this set of long lost rules. She has been pouring over it, reading it forwards and backwards, and tasting it for authenticity. She has already found several hidden codes and archived them for later use. In the mean time, she told me that the next festival is the Festival of Adorableness. I asked her if there was any chance she could have made a mistake. She said no, that the Festival of Adorableness comes up every once in a blue mooth. She has not explained to me what a mooth is yet. I’m assuming it’s a measurement of time, but you know what happens when you assume something is a measurement of time and it ends up being a measurement of distance or something. I asked her if there’s any chance the book could be a forgery, an elaborate trick being played on us. She denied the possibility. The book tastes too familiar, she said. Notes of tobacco, saltpeter, and sulfur, all ingredients in Kakos Industries Immutable Ink. Why not adoration, I asked. Or cuteness for that matter. Why Adorableness? She told me it was not my place to question these things, that they were put in place long ago by those we should respect. So, there you have it. We’re sending you the info. Bring the cute, fuckers.

Billy and Kara are still frozen, so that’s good. The lesbian couple we’re now following down in the Division of Dams and Water Management has been pretty cute lately. We haven’t done anything yet, but we like looking at them. They hold hands and talk and stuff. They’re mostly professional during business hours, which is too bad. We’re still working on a plan to make them like each other more. Or more interestingly. I don’t know. We’re definitely going to do something.

In addition to studying Kakos Industries Rules and Regulations Volume 11, Grace Rule has also begun to take care of Karawack Handy. We are still uncertain what has made her grow at such an alarming rate. She is still in the ballpark of three years old based on physiological cues, but she speaks… well she speaks some damn difficult truths, shareholders. She has insisted that we not call her Karawack, that she is now the Dark Mother Belladonnica. She wanders from division to division watching the work of our employees, and after a short while, she is able to point out the shortcomings in nearly any project. The child’s capacity for Evil has not been seen in a long time, shareholders. With a few simple words, she can take a project that the best minds in evil have been struggling to improve to a whole new level of pain and suffering. She is prodigious in every way. We’re currently testing her to see if there’s anything around the office that she could have picked up or that can explain any of this. Frankly, she’s kind of freaking us out. All of us, except for Grace.

I asked Belladonica if she knew what this mysterious machine does. She ran one finger around the edge of it, flashed me a knowing smile, and then ran off. That’s not funny. No one… no one laugh.

The Sexual Innovation Division has some news regarding the plans to teach penises to carry on relationships. Well, they’re still a ways out from perfecting the technique, but in the mean time, they have offered us a stopgap measure. The title of the project is fittingly Penis with a Top Hat. As you might expect, the project includes putting a top hat on the penis, though they are also suggesting adhering a monocle or a fancy mustache. No, these details do not a personality make, but they are at least improving the odds of a successful sexual encounter. One thing to note, the top hat and monocle should come off of the penis before the sexual encounter itself.

I have news from the Division of Incredibly Boring Things, shareholders. They have told me that the marketing and sales of Bore-nography have been through the roof. Truly, people cannot consume enough Bore-nography. But what we’ve discovered is that too much Bore-nography can lead to overall desensitization to boring subject matter, making it harder for people to become bored in general. For that reason, we’ve introduced some more intense installments, or hardcore Bore-nography. The newest title, for example, is about a specific brick-making process known from one specific region of europe, where virtually no bricks remain to be studied. It includes long descriptions of what the bricks might have looked like based on the soil composition, and includes numerous dissenting rebuttals from equally uninformed academics. They say…
(Noise Rises)
“Sir, sir.”
“What is it this time?”
“Nothing important, sir, I was… just wondering if you ever thought about if you were Denny or not. I think about that sometimes.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I’ve thought about it. But look, there is Denny right there.”
“Yes, sir. But what I mean is that we know that Denny could exist – or at least a lifelike copy of Denny could exist in Denny’s world. That doesn’t preclude us from being Denny.”
“Denny is right here in front of us. Can’t you trust your senses?”
“But we spend all of our time trying to make sure that Denny doesn’t know that Denny is Denny. Isn’t it possible that we could just be fooling ourselves?”
“I think I’d know if I were Denny. Wouldn’t you?”
“What if it feels identical to the way we live now, though.”
“It couldn’t possibly. Obviously, real life feels different.”
“But doesn’t that mean that we’re not doing our job sir? I mean, if Denny could know that Denny is Denny, then we would fail to successfully sabotage epistemology, sir.”
“I’m going to say this one more time. Denny is right there in front of us. I am not Denny. You are not Denny. None of the people you see walking around every day are Denny.”
“But how can we know, sir?”
“You’ve got to stop it, man. You know. You know you’re not Denny.”
“How can I know?”
“You just do. That’s it. Let it go.”
“I’m not sure I can, sir.”
“You have to. Take a deep breath. Relax.”
“HHHHAAAA.”
“Good.”
“I’m feeling better, sir.”
“That’s all you can really hope for.”
(Noise Falls)
Wow, that was… uh… that was pretty extreme. I sincerely hope that I didn’t push your boundaries too much by reading that, shareholders. Some things cannot be unheard, I know. It almost made me forget about that fucking machine for a minute. Let’s move on.

They say that when you know darkness, you know nothing. I think I might have screwed that up. Oh well. This is Things We’re Taking Credit for Now. This week, we’re taking credit for product placement, forgetting to fast forward the commercials, and all of the stupid people they are apparently targeting with this advertising nonsense. If you happen to disagree with anything we’ve taken credit for this week, then I would encourage you to come down to the main branch, Floor 2, room 2044 for your beating and/or murder. If you disagree with anything from previous weeks, the room you’re looking for is 2045. And the line moves really slowly.

Petra Lebedev has won this week’s Ruin-A-Life Drawing. As a result, the life of her selected target will be ruined. Petra has selected Izabel Duarte as her nemesis. The Wheel of Misery spun and spun and landed on “Wing”. The Division of Genetic Manipulation and Body Modification has been sent in to provide Izabel Duarte with a wing. Just one. We all know that two wings means flight. This is one wing. And it will regenerate no matter what Izabel Duarte does. She will have one wing forever. That really sucks. For good measure, Petra Lebedev won’t be able to imagine what wings are ever again. Congratulation on the win.

My monitor into the contraption’s room shows that the scientists are now attempting to play rhythms on the shell of the device using small hammers. Based only on what I can see of their polyrhythmic beating, it appears that they are attempting to communicate with the device through the mambo.

That brings us to the end of today’s broadcast. Destroy the radio. I feel like a big rock might be the optimum method. Experiment with it. See what you come up with. The numbers are next.

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Kakos Industries is written and produced by Conrad Miszuk, who is also the voice of Corin Deeth. The music is also composed by Conrad Miszuk. The introduction is read by Kim Aiello, and the credits are read by Hanna Jones, who is currently starting a youtube channel for candle reviews. Special guest appearance in this episode by Sean Hennessy and Mike Hennessy. Check out KakosIndustries.com for more episodes. There’s also transcriptions if you’d rather read the Kakos Industries announcements. That’s K-A-K-O-S-I-N-D-U-S-T-R-I-E-S dot com. Questions, comments, or a strong desire to collaborate? Drop us a line at inquiries@kakosindustries.com. That’s I-N-Q-U-I-R-I-E-S @ K-A-K-O-S-I-N-D-U-S-T- R-I-E-S dot com. If you like Kakos Industries, be sure to rate and review us on iTunes and Stitcher, and like us on Facebook.

If you’re feeling down after this broadcast, have you considered simply waking up? Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.