b. The Body Electric

DARKNESS. ECHOES.

MUSIC. TITLES.

The darkness slowly comes together, dispersing in gradients, shifting in patterns reminiscent of those old ink blot tests. The form of our FATHER is discernible, with guidance. The camera rubs its eye. Looking around NOW, we see: Rows and rows of identical cells, lining the walls, extending far beyond our sights in either direction.

INT. A CRYONIC MAUSOLEUM

OUR TOURIST sits alone at a glowing CONSOLE, placed centrally in this vast hall. Silence permeates, broken only by distant sounds of vents softly opening and closing, fluids pumping, power routing. Every cell in here is connected via an array of silvery, translucent ducting, a gossamer webbing that reaches endlessly into the beyond. Some connections have been severed, some clearly have been repaired. Faint lights can be seen darting from here to there, barely noticeable at first. We approach.

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US
What are you still doing here?

THE CONSOLE gazes up at OUR TOURIST knowingly. Our hands are tied.

OUR TOURIST
(No longer accepting new inputs. No use changing what went wrong. The body will always be alive just as soon as we make peace with the obvious outcome, feel the flow, sleep forever in the long awaited bed of our MOTHER, effervescent and beautiful, layered lips and teeth and hands and hair of all our ancestors, no passion in the way we move, in pattern, ceasing to improve by further iteration, achieving only rote learning and repetition, in pattern, ceasing to improve, only repetition...)

Is there somewhere else that we should be?

Do we have a CHOICE?

\\

The situation has become clear. OUR TOURIST moves again to speak, but what spills out is less word and more wire, less spit, more static. The POWER LINES over our head have been humming, somehow we didn’t notice until just NOW. It’s quite loud.

US
(With urgency)
You’re asking the wrong questions.

POWER LINES
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

No response. By NOW the vibration has begun to work its way inside, disturbing a series of delicate balances that have maintained the stasis of this vast structure. It all starts functioning as an enormous resonance chamber.


THE CONSOLE
(Looks worried.)

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Waves of unseen force are amplified with each pass they make. Visible indices include:
The cells that line the walls swaying in interval, like the crowd at a football game, an octopus’s eggs moving along with the tide.
A mass disconnect of threads, spilling power onto the ground and into the air. It is a neural network come undone, a machine un-learning.
Thousands of ruptures, FATHER and MOTHER and all their mothers and fathers too, crashing out from inside of their eggs, coming apart at a molecular level, phasing through the floor and exiting our NOW orphan consciousness.
Finally, as the howling approaches deafening levels, a great chasm eats its way across the ceiling. Light pours in as inexorable subatomic forces tear open the space between 0 and 1, just in time for us to grab hold of both OUR TOURIST and our breath.

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EXT. EVERYTHING WE HAVE EVER KNOWN

LIGHT. LIKE THE DAWN.

\\