The Worst Thing in the World (audio story)

 was the thirty-first Bernice Summerfield audio story released by Big Finish Productions. It was the third story of the seventh season.

Publisher's summary
The Drome was set up with the best - or at least the most blatantly venal - of intentions. A self-contained planetoid-community, wired with microcams, designed to pump out product to the GalNet media-stream twenty-six hours a Galactic Standard Day.

But now the Medium is rotting minds and turning them to murder. The machine is turning out brain-dead zombies, setting them to stumble through the twists and turns of some inhuman and unguessable plan - and Professor Bernice Summerfield, and her ex-husband Jason, are caught in the middle of it!

Now Benny finds herself in a desperate fight for her life. A fight so desperate that she will be forced to do something she has never done before, a horror that she never imagined she could bring herself to commit. The worst thing in the world.

Plot
Jason travels to the Drome, a community populated by performers and technicians, but Media Blitz is unable to record his segment advertising Xenomorphic Bondage Slaves Part Thirty-seven after one actor attacks his supporting cast on Inspector Wembley and another kills founder Marvin Glass in front of his daughter, Hannah, whilst in costume as a highwayman. When Jason returns to the Braxiatel Collection, he asks Benny to help him investigate and persuades her by suggesting that it could be a psychic phenomenon and by telling her that there will be an open bar.

Arriving on the Drome by junk capsule, Benny and Jason meet with Hannah and are shown MARVIN, a transputer which is running the place and contains its namesake's thought-processes. Technician Jane Peters tells Benny about bugs in the system and saves Jason when he is treated roughly by a guard for attempting to enter Production Control, after which she warns Jason that war is imminent. During a filming session, a man in a rubber suit becomes an actual monster and attacks until Benny uses a live wire to incapacitate it, only realising afterwards that the wire is only part of the set. She visits Hannah and is soon joined by Jason, who has been stabbed.

With Jason unconscious in the infirmary, Benny listens to a tape that he recorded for her in which he talks about the Singularity and how something has been feeding subliminals to everybody on the Drome through all of the equipment, causing hallucinations which alter reality. She reveals this, but the subliminal control kicks in and turns a number of people into zombies who chase her and Hannah to MARVIN, which does not respond to Hannah until Jason, conscious and aware that he was stabbed by a hypnotised Jane, accesses the control systems. MARVIN confirms that he is sentient and has been manipulating people to produce stories just as he was programmed to. He agrees to find another way to make stories, but he is unable to stop the zombies until their story reaches a conclusion.

Benny decides that the only way to end the zombies' story without her and Hannah dying is for her to do what she considers to be the worst thing in the world: a song. She has MARVIN make the zombies sing along with her and the story ends, restoring everybody to normal and allowing her and Jason to leave the Drome. They learn that the Collection has been hit by an Arbivotrosian Comedy Beam and that one half of the residents are holding the other half hostage until they laugh at their jokes whilst a Golonian spaceship in orbit demands that Peter stand trial for destroying religious artefacts with his scream.

Cast

 * Bernice Summerfield - Lisa Bowerman
 * Jason Kane - Stephen Fewell
 * Marvin Glass - Bernard Holley
 * Hannah Glass - Jane Milligan
 * Jane Peters - Jenny Livsey
 * Zombettes - Sean Connolly, Simon Guerrier, Joseph Lidster, Edward Salt

Worldbuilding

 * The Drome's programmes include:
 * Squaxobulan Street
 * Inspector Wembley
 * Media Blitz
 * Whoops, There Go My Double Entendres
 * Head Down
 * Topless Garden Makeovers
 * Whose Stool Is That
 * Frock and Fanny
 * All New Adventures of the Infinity Division
 * A Larder in the Garden
 * Inspector Wembley, played by Jeremy Timson, calls Snouty a nonce.
 * Manda T is a pop star and "sole-survivor" of N'Synthetic. She uses a holo-vid of her daughter Pixie Astroflash's birth as a music video for "Pumping Out Your Baby of Love".
 * A garden city is an artificial community set up by industrialists for their workers.
 * Mrs Bandersnatch is a character on Whoops, There Go My Double Entendres.
 * Benny uses a dictaphone.
 * Reference is made to the Galactic Transit Core, bubble-chip technology, the Infinity Division, transputonics, transputers, temporal reality and sector security.
 * The "singularity" is essentially "god-grade A.I." Marvin becomes the "god box," an A.I. with a god complex.
 * Cabin fever feeds on itself, and usually takes an outsider to see it.
 * Benny's favourite colour is turquoise.
 * Jason drinks scotch.
 * Benny mentions Sweeney Todd and Les Miz.

Continuity

 * Benny has previously sung as part of the story. (AUDIO: Oh No It Isn't!)