Mason’s Road Radio Drama Cliff Hanger

• Website: http://www.masonsroad.com/issue-3/features-issue-3/features/radio-drama-cliff-hanger/

Mason's Road Radio Drama Cliff Hanger is a project by Mason's Road, an online literary journal sponsored by Fairfield University's MFA in Creative Writing. It presents the opening episode of a radio drama, and invites people to write the next episode, or to write the opening of a new radio drama, as long as the written work provides another cliffhanger at the end. The Mason's Road Players will produce the winning submission.

In the dawn of the 22nd century, little is left of a once pristine planet Earth. The east and west coasts of American now start 250 mile inland. The Earth's seas and oceans, twice their original size, due to global warming and the melting of all glaciers and ice caps, are oil and garbage-clogged toxic sewers, in which nothing lives. Earthquakes have destroyed most of China. Bio-engineered crops have failed, and huge pesticide-resistant insects eat what is grown in corporate-owned enclosed bio-domes. Earth's population has tripled and its food supply is one-eighth of what it once was.

On April 22nd, 2100, a mysterious portal opened in the abandoned Corn World theme park, in Wichita, Kansas. At its blue-black swirling opening, a sweet-sounding voice keeps repeating this message: “Earth-people, enter here. It is your only hope for a future.” The leaders of the world's six remaining states have formed a coalition, and send and armed force on a giant spaceship into the portal, led by the United States marines, to discover what the message means, and what might be Earth's last hope for survival.