THE DR GERO ARCHIVE

Case file

The experiment didn’t start with the androids. It started with the film crew.

In 1991, a casting notice appeared in a trade publication in Tokyo for a production identified only as “Project 17.” The notice requested actors comfortable with “extended periods of stillness and the suspension of autonomous decision-making.” The production company was listed as Akahige Studios. No address. No contact number. A PO box in Shinjuku that the publication’s records team later confirmed had been registered the same morning the notice was placed and closed the same afternoon it ran.

Three actors responded. All three were cast the same day via a reply postcard — no audition, no callback, no contract. Just a location in Kanagawa and a call time of midnight.

What they shot over six nights was 31 minutes of Dragon Ball Z Android Saga footage built around a single premise — what Dr. Gero built before the androids. Not a machine. A process. A way of taking something living and removing the part that hesitates.

The DBZ pilot aired on a cable channel in Kanagawa, January 22nd 1991. Runtime: 31 minutes. Broadcast at 3:19am. A night engineer at the station filed a report the following morning stating the transmission had played at the correct speed but that his shift, which he remembered beginning at midnight, had somehow ended at 6am with no memory of the intervening hours.

His report was filed. No investigation was opened.

All three actors listed in the casting notice have no other credits before or after 1991.

Their talent agency registrations all lapsed on the same date.

The date is the same as Dr. Gero’s canonical death in the Dragon Ball Z timeline.

Nobody has explained that.

Fiction. An imagined lost film by Daniele Arcangeli, made with generative AI and edited by hand for Instagram.