Round 6.4 [Reminiscence v. Time to Die] posted by kza

Reminiscence (Shockah rank: #13, Burley rank: #3)

Time to Die (Shockah rank: #6, Burley rank: #10)

CATCH THE SPIT!

Actually, that story did absolutely nothing for me. :-) And it wasn’t because it was different than my original synopsis. (Well, that’s not entirely true, but my point is, I’m not really married to my concept.) It’s just not really the type of story I want to do, at least for this idea nugget. But I really appreciate the attempt — the marriage of Being There and V for Vendetta was very amusing.

So, rather than be a Scrooge, I guess I should make my own attempt to give this a fair hearing. While you took a more comedic route, I was thinking something more Solaris-y (either version, take your pick). That’s probably kinda cliché, come to think about it, but it’s really all I got right now. (There’s a reason this came in thirteenth!) So let’s try this:

REMINISCENCE

We open on a long white corridor, with a queue of people in it, waiting very patiently, very placidly, for something. At the front of the line is a young man — we’ll call him Tom. Someone calls “next!” and Tom goes into the next room, where some technicians put a visor over his eyes, hit a few buttons, and the visor glows for a second, underneath the lenses, on Tom eyes. Then the technicians remove the visor and Tom is on his way.

Tom has just had his memories dampened. He looks at his hand — imprinted there, as a glowing tattoo, is his necessary information: his name, his job, his address, etc. As he heads back down the corridor, one of the people in line jumps out of the line and grabs Tom. Tom, don’t you remember me? he says. Tom looks at him blankly, then tries to get away from this obvious maniac. As the man paws him further, yelling things incomprehensible to Tom, security guards emerge and take the man away.

Tom resumes his life: his boring job; for entertainment, quick-cut, nonsensical, empty movies that excite the senses (like, say, The Rock); and scheduled sex with another citizen — the powers that be don’t want any lasting emotional attachments, so the sex is impersonal — maybe it’s even done through some kind of screen, and Tom doesn’t even know who he’s fucking. Or maybe there’s a screen between the two, but a videoscreen of a sexy woman (or man) facing each participant, and they think that’s who their partner is. It’s like Two Minutes Hate, only with hardcore action! ;-)

Anyway, that’s Tom’s life. But he has a secret. He keeps finding strange messages etched in out of the way places — at the bottom of his sock drawer, on the back of his medicine cabinet. He figures out that the messages are pointing him towards something. He puts the clues together and finds a secret compartment underneath his bed. He opens it and finds a cache of contraband: photos, comic books, a carved wooden horse, trinkets, all manner of items, each kept because of the memory it evokes. And it all comes back to Tom: his life as a boy, on a Tarkovsky-esque farm with his mother and siblings, enjoying his time with the animals and nature, growing up, his brother carving the little horse for him, taking over the farm when his mom falls ill, mourning when she dies, watching with incomprehension as some oppressive political force takes over the country, watching with incomprehension when they come and take him and separate him from his brothers and sisters.

(We can see these memories in a number of different ways, in different combinations: as oblique, faded Kodak moments; as stand-alone sequences, with the audience given an omniscient view of events; as stand-alone sequences with the adult Tom present, watching with the audience, a la Spider; and/or any other method we can devise.)

So Tom is a criminal — he’s regained memories, which is verboten, and apparently has a stash of mementos (sorry, that’s the best word) to help him remember, which is worse. He tries to go about his daily routine, but the memories haunt him, disrupting his work, making people look at him funny. He misses his mother — he has a vision of her gravestone in a field. He had family — what happened to them? Who was that man that stopped him in the hallway? Were they related? Does he know something about their lives in the past? Does he know where their mom’s gravestone is?

Tom decides to find him and get the answers to this questions. This is difficult in a world where no one really knows anyone else, and life has a pre-programmed quality. He questions his fellow workers about the man and the farm, but just gets blank stares. He deviates from his routine and instead of his usual entertainments, he goes to a bar — but doesn’t realize he’s being followed. The bar patrons, used to having their memories wiped, are big on trading stories, and Tom joins in. Of course, most of the stories are incredibly banal — the people not having a whole of lot of history to draw upon — but when they hear Tom’s story about farms and mothers, they are rapt, some even moved to tears. One of those present, a woman, seems particularly interested — but more like she’s interested in Tom than the story. But no leads are forthcoming, so Tom leaves, but as he steps outside, he’s nabbed by the authorities.

They drag him up to his apartment and force him to reveal the cache of mementos. They take the mementos and destroy them in front of him, and then take him down to the memory-dampening center. They strap him in the chair and leave him to the technicians. He’s terrified of losing his memories, and begs for them to stop. But the glasses go on and the lights glow and that seems to be the end of it.

But instead of the blissed-out expression of someone recently wiped, Tom still looks distressed. The glasses come off, and there’s the woman from the bar, only in technician garb. She releases him and after faking out the authorities as to Tom’s memories, she takes him back to her place. Her name is Arlece and she tells him there’s a whole underground of people like him, that hoard mementos and keep memories alive. Tom figures if the man in the hallway recognized him, then he could be part of this underground. She doesn’t know the man, but wants to help Tom find him. But they check the tattoos on their hands — they only have two days and then Tom and Arlece are scheduled for memory-dampening, and then Tom will forget the man.

The only lead they have are surveillance video of the hallway. Arlece has access, so they sneak in and find it. The next obvious step is to check the database, but they’re chased off before they can do so. But they leave with a holographic image of the man’s face. They take it back to the bar and ask around. One man — we’ll call him the Barfly — tells them that he’s met the man in question, and they follow him back to his place to see stuff he’s picked up from the man. He shows them a “time wristband” that he got from the mysterious man — we recognize it as a digital watch. Tom wants to know more, but before he acquiesces, the Barfly wants to have sex with Arlece. Arlece has no problem with it, but Tom, having come to know and trust Arlece, gets jealous and loses his temper — something that’s never happened before. He attacks the man, getting into a fist fight with him — a very pathetic scene, as neither man really knows how to fight. During the fight, the holographic image gets destroyed. Tom gets the upper hand, and beats him into submission, and, too add insult to injury, Tom takes the watch from the man. Arlece is very concerned about Tom’s violent outburst and his theft of the watch, but opts not to report him.

They go back to his apartment to fix up his scrapes. He’s more interested in the watch, which neither of them have seen before, being used to doing what the tattoo tells them. He stumbles upon the alarm function of the watch, which startles him. Arlece wants to know why he attacked the Barfly, and Tom explains to the best of his ability. Arlece doesn’t understand jealousy (not that Tom really does, either) and thinks maybe it’s best if she leaves. Tom doesn’t want her to leave, but he gets more and more emotional, Arlece gets scared and runs away. He chases after her, but loses her. He returns home and once again examines the watch.

Morning. Arlece appears at his door. She apologizes for running off, and recommits to trying to find the man and unlocking the mysteries of Tom’s memories. The Barfly told them that he used to see the man around the south side of town, so they arrive there. They look for the man, but don’t see him anywhere. Tom and Arlece are pretty much at the end of the line. There’s only a half-hour left until their scheduled memory appointment, and there’s nowhere left to go. And then they see him: The man.

They follow him back to his home, and introduce themselves. He recognizes Tom as his brother. Tom is overjoyed. Unbeknownst to the authorities, the man (whom we’ll call the Scavenger) lives above some kind of forgotten dumping ground, and he’s dug a tunnel beneath the building where he retrieves all sorts of thrown-away items, presumably dumped there long ago by the people in power. Arlece asks the Scavenger if he’s the head of the memory underground, but he has no idea what that is. He simply finds the stuff and gives it to people. He and Tom get to talking about the past, but as the Scavenger goes on, it slowly dawns on Tom, a realization mixed with dread: the Scavenger has a completely different memory of family life. No farm, a father instead of a mother, etc. Before he can really process this, though, the authorities burst in. They get the Scavenger but Tom escapes down into the tunnels. He reaches a dead end, where he finds, on the ground and sticking out of the dirt walls, hundreds of tiny, identical wooden horses — the same kind that he had. What he thought was a unique object to his personal history was actually a mass produced item. It’s likely that hundreds of people have the same horse and have created their own remembered history around it.

Arlece appears behind him. She was working with the authorities all along, using Tom to try and find the Scavenger, and stop the spread of the mementos through the community. Although there is no real underground movement, the last threat to the memory-dampening technology is extinguished, as Tom is led out and the tunnel is destroyed.

For the last time, Tom is taken back to the facility to have his memories taken away from him. But this time he doesn’t yell or try to escape, but goes placidly, almost willingly. Arlece administers the process, and is sad that they’re both going to forget what happened, but she’s resigned to it. The glasses go on.

Tom is back at home. He goes through his routine. He wonders why there are horrible marks on the bottom of his sock drawer and on the back of his medicine cabinet, like something’s been scratched off. He goes to work. Everything is as it was. Then, that night, he goes to bed, but is awoken by a beeping. He looks around the house, trying to find the noise. He finally locates it, coming from an overhead light. He removes the light from the ceiling and inside, within the wall, is the watch he put in there. He flips it over, and scratched on the back is the word “MOM”. He has no idea what this means, but when he goes back to sleep, he’s back on the farm, with his mother and brothers and sisters.

THE END

Okay, so that wasn’t Solaris-y at all. No prison planet, either. And let’s not even get into the countless borrowings from other SF movies — I’m tired enough as it is. But, while there’s (intentionally) a lot of room for expansion, more detail, and more tricksy plot maneuverings, the goal here was to lay out a sequence of logical events that built up to some kind of ending. Anyway, that’s kinda what my idea of Reminiscence could be like.

Note: The preceding synopsis (although in some ways it’s more like a pitch, but we’ll get into that later) was built using the sequence method. I’ll be posting about that next.

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