The Transcript (Segment 9)

Broadcast: THE TRUTH FILES

Episode Title: The Mermaid Hypothesis

Air Date: June 28, 2020

COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT OF TELEVISION BROADCAST

HOST: Last summer, in the days leading up to the SirenSong IPO, a video went viral. We won't replay the video on this broadcast out of deference to its subject, Ariel Callahan. As we heard from the Callahan family earlier, the video was recorded and leaked by members of The Disruption movement. It contained a thirty-second clip of Ari singing Part of Your World, her favorite song from Disney's The Little Mermaid. From all appearances, the video was captured without her knowledge or permission. It went on to rack up over 100 million views, and it continues to be shared across the internet to this day. Our Truth Files investigators have confirmed the identity of the young man who recorded the original footage. He joins us tonight, via satellite. Zac? Are you there? Can you hear me?

PIERCE: Yes. I'm here.

HOST: Thank you for joining us tonight. As a reminder for our viewers, Zac is the grandson of Benedict Pierce, and he traveled to Seabreeze Point last summer under his grandfather's supervision. Is that correct, Zac?

PIERCE: Right.

HOST: And is it true that you were the one who recorded the now-notorious video of Ariel Callahan singing?

PIERCE: Yes. I took it. I'm not proud of it. If I could take it back, I would. I never intended for Ari to get hurt. Somehow, I got in way over my head.

HOST: Literally. You nearly drowned, the night the video went public. Isn't that right?

PIERCE: Yeah. Almost. Near-death experience. That was pretty much a wake-up call for me, that night.

HOST: Can you walk us through what happened, Zac? What led you to leak the video? And what were you doing swimming in the ocean in the middle of a storm?

PIERCE: I went in the water after Ari. I was trying to rescue her. Not that I'm a hero or anything, but—wait. Can we clear something up first? I just want to set the record straight. I wasn't the one who leaked the video.

HOST: You just told us—

PIERCE: I recorded it. I didn't broadcast it. Not that I'm innocent in all this, but there's a difference. I was planning to get Ari's permission before I showed it to anyone else.

HOST: Who leaked it, Zac?

PIERCE: My grandfather. I didn't even know he had it. I was just as surprised as everyone else when I saw it getting shared all over the place that night. It all went down really fast.

HOST: Tell us what happened.

PIERCE: The IPO was scheduled to take place in a couple days. We were having a Disruption meeting to talk about some last-minute ideas to derail it, and I invited Ari to the meeting. I was hoping my grandfather could convince her to help—that she would let us use the video voluntarily. But then we got raided, and the whole thing got shot to hell.

HOST: Raided by?

PIERCE: Those Counter-Disruption guys, working for Torrent. They got wind of the meeting somehow. There were probably 20 or 30 of them that night. Everyone scattered when they came into the house. It was chaos. I got separated from my grandfather. He basically ditched me and my cousin and made a break for it. He posted the video on his way out of town.

HOST: Why?

PIERCE: He thought it would disrupt the IPO. We all did. Basically, we thought if people heard a human voice that could outperform SirenSong, then it would prompt a backlash. There would be a resurgence of interest in real music, and the IPO would be a bust.

HOST: But that wasn't how things played out.

PIERCE: No. We were missing the one key piece of the puzzle. We didn't even realize what we had until it was too late. We handed it right to him.

HOST: Explain what you mean by that. Handed what to whom?

PIERCE: Dominick Torrent. Sorry, let me backtrack and explain. See, we knew that Torrent had somehow found a way to harvest Mae Song Yee's voice and turn it into SirenSong. We assumed that he'd been lying about everything, when he acted like some grief-stricken lover after Mae supposedly died on 9/11. But I guess there was a real relationship between him and Mae at some point. Somehow, she ended up pregnant with his kid.

HOST: Hold on. You're alleging that Dominick Torrent fathered a child with Mae Song Yee? Do you have proof of that?

PIERCE: Proof? No. Not exactly. It all makes sense though, if you back up and look at the timing. Ari was four years old when she was found in Seabreeze Point. That happened in August 2006. So she would have been born sometime in 2002...

HOST: But Mae Song Yee disappeared before that. Her death was reported in September 2001.

PIERCE: Exactly. Ari wasn't born yet. It must have been early in Mae's pregnancy when 9/11 happened. She probably wasn't even showing yet. She somehow used the chaos of the terrorist attack to escape and disappear into New Jersey. That might have been the whole reason she left, actually—to keep the baby a secret from Torrent.

HOST: So, according to your theory, Dominick Torrent didn't know he had a child?

PIERCE: Right. I don't think he ever knew. We know he tracked Mae down in 2006. They were in contact. My cousin dug up an old message in Korean, warning him that she would drown herself in the ocean if he tried to come after her. Which is exactly what Mae did, apparently. But Torrent didn't know she had a four-year-old daughter she was planning to take with her.

HOST: And you believe that daughter was Ariel Callahan?

PIERCE: Right. That's why no relatives came forward after Ari was found. Mae didn't have any other family. She was an orphan herself. And Ari's father didn't even know that she existed.

HOST: Perhaps, but that seems like quite a leap—

PIERCE: Like I said, I don't have proof. It's just a hunch on my part. But there is one thing I can prove. There's surveillance footage of the Counter-Disruption after they raided our meeting. The resolution kind of sucks, but you can see how they reacted after the video of Ari leaked.

HOST: Let's play that footage for our viewers.      

PIERCE: See. They were in the middle of rounding everybody up, and then once the video surfaced, it was a total about-face. They stopped in their tracks, and then they left. It looked like they were getting orders from someone through those earpieces they were wearingg.

HOST: Getting orders from whom?

PIERCE: I don't know. Somebody in charge. Probably from SirenSong HQ, if not Dominick Torrent himself. The whole company kind of went into retreat after that night, if you remember. They pushed back the IPO a couple weeks. We thought maybe we had stopped them. Maybe we had won... But then they put out that press release.   

HOST: SirenSong announced they were releasing a new iteration of the software.

PIERCE: Exactly. Ari's voice was the missing piece the SirenSong developers needed. They used that vocal sample to perfect their algorithm. SirenSong was only 99.99-whatever percent optimized before the video came out, but the new release was 100% optimized. No human voice could ever out-sing it. At least, that's what they claim.

HOST: Yes, we heard that claim from Dominick Torrent earlier in the broadcast.

PIERCE: He didn't even know that voice existed. He didn't know Ari existed. We handed it to him!

HOST: It's true that SirenSong went forward with a successful IPO, immediately following the surprise release of a major new software update. That much we can confirm.

PIERCE: Yeah, the IPO ended up beating all the Wall Street expectations by a mile. Grandfather really screwed the pooch on that one. And here I always thought the old man was two steps ahead of the game.

HOST: Did your grandfather make any attempt to disrupt the rescheduled IPO?

PIERCE: I wouldn't know. We weren't on speaking terms at that point.

HOST: You had a falling out?

PIERCE: It's funny. When you're a kid, you have this idea like the grown-ups in your life are always on the right side. Like they know everything. They have the whole world figured out. That's what I thought about my grandfather. But that's how a kid thinks. I understood that afterward. I think I did a lot of growing up that night. Maybe because I almost drowned.

HOST: Did your life flash before your eyes?

PIERCE: No, that's a cliché. It's more like... more like certain thoughts are clarified. You see your life more clearly in those moments when you think it's about to end. It's hard to explain... Kind of like when you're reading a book, and there's a twist ending that throws the whole story into a different light. Suddenly, looking back, certain moments that seemed inconsequential turn out to be key. That's what it was like for me. I realized the truth about Ari when I was out there in the water that night. But more importantly, I realized the truth about my grandfather.

HOST: What truth was that?

PIERCE: That he wasn't a good guy. Not someone I wanted to be like. His whole philosophy was that we had to do whatever it took to get our way—that the ends justified the means. But I don't agree with that. Life isn't all nice and neat and black-and-white that way. Every action has ripple effects. Unintended consequences. It doesn't matter whether your intentions are good or not. The only thing that matters is how it ends. And in the end, it turned out my grandfather was just as wrong as Dominick Torrent.

HOST: Do you really believe that?

PIERCE: They both took something pure and beautiful, and destroyed it. Stole it. Used it for their own purposes. I mean, literally, the ending was identical. They both took someone innocent and drove her into the sea.