Logline:
A teenage computer hacker learns of an upcoming alien attack and prepares himself and his friends only to survive it. The aliens save them for a final, utopian experiment.
Treatment:
JARED STONE, a precious high school senior who impresses adults whom he meets at a local Unitarian church, is playing with his web server at home when he deciphers messages that predict an incoming alien attack.
In the mean time, there is a media report that all of the electronics in a particular well-to-do neighborhood is out, as if by an e-bomb.
He has a part-time job fixing computers at homes and visits
At Bill’s place, they calculate the arrival of the first spaceship and then go to the apartment solarium (and natatorium) and spot a shooting star in the evening sky that may be the craft.
(Note: to fit TR, he
might have made a visit to Bill a few years ago and be older now at the time of
the attack. He might have heard about Bill’s jailing for involvement with a
minor.)
Next day, right after the stock market closes, the craft lands in a major suburb, slowly, looking first like an asteroid with the fiery tale on the wrong side.
Within a few hours people who watched the event are streaming into hospital emergency rooms blind. Authorities go into the nearby neighborhoods and find many of the residents dead, many of them already transforming into “grays.” Some of them had started transforming a few days before with massive hair loss.
CNN covers this for a while, and then in many sections of the country there are complete power blackouts.
Jared deciphers a message on his computer warning him that he will go blind soon unless he meets one of the aliens at a bar. He is to bring along a friends whom he has told about the message. He is surprised that bars will even be open after this catastrophe and uses a fake id to get in.
He meets the alien, KAL, who is a super tall but good looking man (according to Bill’s ideas), who takes him and Bill into the space ship in a special private chopper. KAL also has the fake id.
Inside they are met by rather human looking people, who tell him that they can keep their sight if they move to another planet. They will go on a reconnaissance and Bill and Jared will get to pick whom they bring. Jared will not be able to bring his younger sister, who also went blind. But on the new planet they will have to fit in to the social order there.
They go clubbing and shopping—the stores are open again but the markets aren’t nobody knows when there will be another attack. Then there is a second attack in another city, so many people, going blind, line up to be on the ship.
Once on board, they are given medical examinations and put to sleep for the journey.
Once they reach the new planet about 80 LY away, they are put on a streetcar train. Though they were sleeping, they seem to have aged about 8 years. They view scenery that rather resembles a mix of AmJareda in the 50s with Soviet-Style housing complexes very much crowded into the cities. They have a decent reception with rather simple Asian-like food (though some rather bizarre creatures) and Jared gives the swimming lesson. He is already “maturing.”
They are told they are going to a place called “
There is a political system based on meritocracy, but no
fiat money (at least on top). The most talented young adults live in the
cities, in segregated housing. Gays are accepted and somewhat treasured. They
go to the areas around
The society has experimented with family values. It used to
be that only residents of
frontier, “on the outside,” where people live in small, primitive communities
(and must function in families or else become grays.)
The train takes them to a quaint residential community where
there are no modern conveniences, no electricity, except at one community
center, where they can communicate with the central “Urbana” (Baltimore is just
a shell) and the galactic community. Residents are assigned tasks. Bill
develops a good social reputation with his piano playing and starts composing a
legacy of western-style classical music. Gradually they turn into people who
look like Grays unless they succeed in familial relationships, and Bill and
Bill finds Tobey and finds out he is an angel. Non-angels have to have
training to qualify.
Bill finds out that some of the “heterosexuals with
families” live around vacant
Bill gets to make trips to
Jared is prospering, and finds out more about what happens
to the “losers” – they are turned out to
keep to their own kind so they do not burden the “freedom” of the “angels.”
But angelic status is hard to keep, and the people in the countryside outside
Bill gets sent to
Bill helps Kal escape back to his
own “
(dream add-on): Bill learns that he
can get back to
Bill shows that the social order on this Mini-Earth are a projection of his own thoughts from back home. So in a way, even his intentions, without direct aggression, became “harmful” just as a thought experiment.
He also learns now, from Kal, that the new earth is going to be approached by a brown dwarf, that gets more visible every night.
A year later they (he and
The brown dwarf passes,
Bill will move back
to “
Bill and
ADD ON:
Jared might have been a younger friend of Matthiias, saw him go up. Maybe a son of
Jared might stop on Titan before journey to other planet.
Beats
Pre – Jared helps Bill (virus infection danger to others – stake) on computer
Situation – Jared predicts, sees spacecraft land, will go blind himself (grays, blind) (stake – grow to body concern) unless he meets Kal. Kal recounts some history of Bill (music)
Sent to training in
Recognition – Tove has baby, stillborn because Bill didn’t love her enough. Bill in “dark session” (ability to adapt – stake) where his male buddy rejects him, but Bill takes new girl friend and travels to Grand Rapids to be with Jared, who has grown in glory. Jared learns that Kal has been “threatened”
They travel to
Bill and
Crisis – Jared must go to country to prove self—because he doesn’t want the ritual.
It’s better to go back to earth – but he has to have tribunal anyway. He can raise Bill’s kid on Earth as Bill dies.
Note:
Mathematics is the one subject that cannot change from one planet to the next (except for spherical geometry, a little).
©Copyright 2003/2005 by
PRESCIENCE
Jared, 17, at home hacks into alien communications
Presents his film on hacking, meets Bill
Visit Bill as a client (intimate)
Next day, alien attack on suburbs, people who looked at it are blinded
Bill will be blind in a few days
Jared learns he can save sight if he goes along with aliens and abducts other teens
He rounds some up at Saloon
He agrees to take Bill
Suburb wiped out by
Entire countru wiped out
They go to island planet
TRILOGY FICTION CONCEPT (3 novels or 3 scripts)
Prescience is envisioned as the last of a trilogy which could become a series of three novels.
There is an underlying “supernatural” process. The memories and consciousness of a finite number of “souls” (up to 144000 in Revelations) is transmitted to people through a virus (like a retrovirus). A person can be “infected” and if strong enough he/she will know the consciousness of at least one of these persons as well as his current consciousness, and will live forever as an Angel as long as he obeys certain rules of behavior..) He cannot have children, and he has only temporal access to sexuality, which he eventually outgrows. Angels who fail to outgrow this die and are not saved. (Note: an “Angel” is not the same thing as a vampire, unless he indulges himself in his own vanity; there are no “gee whiz” scenes of biting that have been common in horror films or even in serious treatments of immortality in the past.) Other persons infected do not approach this kind of “supernova” personality and are challenged, and must either become socialized or die. Still many more become psychotic and die. In a few cases, persons (including angels who die or persons who do not quite qualify) seem to change body parts and can disguise themselves. Publicly, most ordinary people infected live at high altitudes or in areas of high pollution where there is less oxygen content in the air. Because of the disease, high altitude areas of the country become uninhabitable and are mass-evacuated rather suddenly. Eventually this happens to many large cities because of pollution.
Novel 1: Rain on the
Snow
The book has a two-movement “Beethoven 31st Sonata” structure of a sonata (a development of many characters who crisscross) and a “Tema con Variozioni” where one character Bill goes through an Academy and then prison experience to train him for the Purification. He escapes and will change forever. The book takes several characters through the plot-structure “beat” process (Setup, opportunity, plan change, point of no return, crisis or setback, “payoff” resolution or staging for next story). Up to five major characters are protagonists of the novel and have major personal outcomes.
The novel traces the development of two angels, Matt and Tobey, whose paths gradually cross because of familial
associations. Matt will be the son of Naomi, who has another son, Ethan, in the
early 1980s. She buys a
Tobey has grown up in the
Bill’s life has picked up with the publication of a book “Do Ask Do Tell” in which he (with an autobiographical perspective) examines the civil rights issues for homosexuals on a libertarian perspective, and the counterargument that heterosexual institutions provide a socialization which enables most people to take care of others and deal with hardships by forcing them to accept a certain faith when they have children. Tobey, in grad school, comes into his life, and draws Bill into the clutches of Femeri, somewhat out of belief that he is helping Bill find a new life after job loss and personal family catastrophe.
The second half of the book takes him to the Academy in
Novel 2: Tribunal and
Rapture
This sequel is told through the eyes of one of the
perpetrators of the Academy, an African American West Point grunt named Ali,
who had been one of the first blacks to really do well at
Premise: American
society is quickly and progressively threatened by a new virus that
reincarnates the “souls” of those religiously “chosen” in Biblical times and
overlays these “souls” onto current victims, while at the same time these same
entities provide at last a way for today’s “chosen people” to escape to other
worlds. In particular, a retiring African American FBI agent seeks to rebuild
his own family so that he can escape, while (in a layered plot) an aging
homosexual man, recruited into training for homeland defense in the trying days
to come, stumbles onto tasting again his biological youth. While both social collectivism (particularly
communism) and excess individualism have reduced “traditional family values,”
escape from societal collapse might depend upon rebuilding the idea of family
and lineage within a closed escape environment.
Plot Synopsis
The hero is a
religious 60-year-old African-American, Ali Mogul, who approaches the end of a
long career as a decorated (and twice badly wounded) Army officer, defense
contractor, and FBI sleuth. He has become separated from his wife and estranged
from his rather sissy-boy son because the “real life” associated with family
performance seems mundane compared to the disconnected creativity that he
discovers in those he investigates and that he would like to develop within
himself.
After an older
alleged sex criminal whom Ali had helped apprehend escapes from an Arizona
prison by inciting violence at a work detail, another informant (Frank L’Istesso) from a civilian defense training academy invites
Ali to join a clandestine intelligence school (in Virginia) where law
enforcement, intelligence and military officers learn to use extrasensory
perception and remote viewing to
investigate possible terrorist threats.
During his first
viewing he learns that the real threat really derives from the tribulation
processes roughly like those in the Bible. Startled that his own “faith” and
personhood will be challenged, he first throws up and then capitulates with a
major heart attack. He had gotten
himself into psychic intelligence as a kind of self-indulgence. Now, facing mandatory coronary bypass surgery
and recuperation, he realizes that he must rebuild his small family, not just
to survive, but to understand his first viewing.
His Caucasian
ex-wife, an accomplished orthopedic surgeon, has learned of a major public
health threat, a new virus that gives its victims very bizarre psychic
properties before they die and selects its victims in a way that it threatens
the demographic stability of American society.
(It prefers victims with poor peripheral circulation, like diabetics,
and is much more prevalent in high-altitude areas.) She takes a break from
hospital duty and decides to invite Ali back into her home and help him
recuperate. (He has to persuade her to take his new career interest seriously,
and as deserving of personal respect more than love.) Ali revs up and starts
recovering (like David Letterman), desiring again to “escape” from the taming
influence of “family” and go back into the world and investigate the threat on
his own. He sneaks out from his ex-wife’s house in Alexandria, Va. and travels
on the Acela to New York to meet his son, who has
reformed and transformed himself from childishness and aimless compulsive
criminality to being able to help others now through newfound mechanical
cleverness—hacking “legally:
and secretly into the PC’s of other private citizens as well as large
institutions. Rebuilding communication
with his son (who had almost been killed in the 9-11 attacks) is a first step
in realizing his own epiphany.
His encounter with
his changing son highlights his focus on how he would spend the rest of his
life if his world of relative freedom really does go to “hell and a handbasket” because of unstoppable terrorist attacks or
this new biological epidemic threat. He
would face some choices: re-connect with his family and live through that,
return to his religious (Assemblies of God) faith as rather literally
interpreted, or participate in the power struggle of those officials who would
hunker down and plan surreptitiously to seize power in a society, paralyzed by
martial law, that is “easier” to rule. Now he is
suspicious that there are people like that; over the years he has sometimes
been like that himself, just as more recently has come to discover “pleasures”
of living outside of himself. He will sink into a quicksand created by
those others whom he has come to emulate because of his own ennui over
conventional life. And, going through
his own investigative files (which he rescues after his own condo is
burglarized) he finds plenty of evidence that the “old men” running the remote
viewing school are on to real threats, however self-serving their personal
motives. So Ali’s “problem” (in novel plot skeleton terms) comes in to focus:
to given himself a valid “purpose”
(participation in either “saving the world” for escaping from it), he needs to
rebuild his family; the converse is also true. And he needs a purpose to
survive (even “religiously”) at all.
His son’s efforts
point him back to his own files as a former investigator, particularly the
stories of the disappearance of the toddler son (Matthias) of a (female) health
club fitness instructor (Kelly Skiis) and of the
apparent criminal sexual encounter, some years later, between a middle aged
colleague (Bill Ldzett) and a vivacious Smallville-like “superman” pubescent teen who may after all
be Kelly’s son, returned after a mysterious “abduction” and two-year
disappearance. Bill’s “personnel”
records had built up during his stay at “The Academy,” a network of largely
privately funded training and living centers to house “asset persons” (or
“civilian reservists”) who will keep the country going after expected and
unpreventable terrorist attacks. Ldzett’s own encapsulated “Ghost” story is that of an
anti-hero escaping from his own character weakness (lack of empathy for others
and a predilection for living “third person” in his own fantasy world),
threatened with firing and unemployment, getting a “job” as an Academy trainee
through reviving a personal connection with Frank L’Istesso,
a former boy friend who had become ex-gay in the military himself and then
helped start the “Academy” as a private businessman after leaving the military
(when the “gay” problem catches up with him under “don’t ask, don’t tell”). Ldzett has encountered and become involved with the teen
friend (that is, probably Kelly’s son) through his misadventures at the Academy,
been arrested and prosecuted, sent to prison in the high country in northern
Arizona, and through his own ability to tease the homosexual fantasies of other
prisoners, overcome “all odds” and escaped.
But during the escape Bill has transformed or disguised himself as a
younger person and taken on a girl friend, Tovina
who, with her motorcycle,
had helped with his escape. Before his “employment,” sex crime
and imprisonment, Bill had built up some amateurish notoriety as a writer
pushing for a constitutional convention or town-hall to discuss a new Bill of
Rights.
The Bill of Rights
convention, having percolated for two years among interested third parties, is
actually coming off, and provides Ali Mogul with the opportunity to network with
old friends (especially Frank L’Istesso and a
graduate student, Tobey Strickland, who had befriend
Bill and helped promote some of Bill’s ideas) and solve the “mystery” as to
whether the remote viewings really mean the coming tribulations and as to how
to escape. Mogul goes through some “terror-related” misadventures on his
odyssey to
Ali will have the
legal duty to get Bill arrested and returned to prison if Bill “tells” who he
really is. As the congregated
acquaintances bridge the tensions among themselves and put their heads together
and hack further into Academy records, they decide to visit a series of sites
to look for “clues” that confirm their worst fears: that “angels” from
Revelations will capture the personalities of many male persons, leading to the
tribulations and the end of modern civilization, but that an escape to a new
civilization (facilitated by “miracle” technology available through the angels
to those who meet religious requirements) on another planet will be possible.
For Ali, the clues and capabilities are in his own life to understand something
like this. For example, Ali recalls the modern physics and engineering courses
way back at West Point and then at war colleges, and reconciles this Wissenschaft with
the Assemblies of God religious training (including speaking in tongues) that
forces appreciation of a kind of aesthetic realism as well as the selective
theology surrounding the “rapture” and the remote viewing. But the most
important evidence comes from the story of superboy
Matthias Skiis (who had died after the sexual
encounter with Bill), as he has actually been to Purgatory and seen what
tribulations are coming, as well as confirming that our recent technology came,
not from extraterrestrials in the usual sense (“Roswell”) but from the “144000”
angels who commute between our world and “Urantia.” There is also “Second Kind” evidence of
“angel visits” related now to what he saw in the initial remote viewings: that
very ancient societies (back to Atlantis) had information technology superior
to ours but kept it within their priesthoods and conveyed it to the “masses”
through ingenious mechanical technology with devices such as astrolabes (and
monuments constructed as “computers”).
Ali comes to understand that his eligibility to “escape” will depend on
his ability to participate again in a closed society that will for some
generations depend on blood family dynamics and propagation, and that this
ukase will be even more critical for Bill.
He makes a deal with Bill that Bill can go on the ship (and escape
arrest as a fugitive from prison) if he proves that he can “perform” with Tovina and potentially father a child.
By now the nation is
disintegrating as the news of the epidemic spreads and mass evacuations of
higher-altitude areas where infections are common proceed. The “tag team” meets victims (and spouses) of the
disease victims, and recognizes now how the disease has personally affected
them, all of this providing and ante-climax. Frankie helps Bill, Ali, and
others “escape” to the spaceship site at a major strip mine in West Virginia,
but, having hijacked a train during the final race for the launch site, is
arrested and kept behind to live in an unpromising world—a disappointing but
deserved end for a character who as a young man had been almost as gifted as
Matthias, without having (like the Clark Kent character) the advantage of
indirect extraterrestrial lineage. Ali
will take his reconstituted family into space because there is no other future,
and Bill will get to go now once (on the last night of their “road trip” when a
“first experience” provides a personal point of recognition) he has proven that he can procreate
and start a family, however late in life.
The ship takes off and makes a 24-hour journey to Saturn’s moon, Titan,
which, at the end of the novel, the characters learn has always been synonymous
with Purgatory. During the “transoceanic
length flight” angelic medical technicians determine that Tovina
is indeed pregnant with Bill’s child.
The journey to one other reachable civilization some dozens of
light-years away¾angels can get them close to Einstein’s limit of light speed but they
don’t violate the laws of physics and “uncertain” causality¾ will require families to be able to carry on
lineage for a generation while living in a closed space environment, yet
ironically none of the major characters escaping had established lineage until
near the time of their group departure.
©Copyright 2001,
2005 by
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