by C. A. Gray
What a fool I had been.
“I didn’t,” I admitted, as he constructed what I gathered was a makeshift projector, designed to use the wall as a screen.
“Well. I’m the master of home cinema,” he said matter-of-factly, grunting as he bent double and plugging things in behind the netscreen bay. Andy and Jake meanwhile scooted a couch and loveseat over to face an unobstructed blank wall, and then Jake and Julie took the loveseat. I sat on the end of the couch next to Julie so I could reach the popcorn, though she playfully swatted my hand away. When I grabbed some anyway, I tossed it in her hair. Andy sat beside me, at first at a reasonable distance, but then when Val and Nilesh settled in on his other side, he scooted very close to me indeed. If only I still could enjoy that.
“All right! Becca said you guys were doing an animated film, so first up is ‘Dare to Dream.’ Might inspire you.”
The story followed a girl named Farrah, drawn with indeterminate ethnic features from a rural village in an unidentified impoverished region. Farrah sings about the world outside her village, but has no hope of ever seeing it. She and her friends sing about their dreams of travel and adventure, but her mother tells her to reduce her dreams to survival. So many of their friends have died of starvation or disease. Farrah hears a rumor that there are medical bots in the Land Beyond that could cure those diseases, and that in the Land Beyond there is more than enough food for everyone, including them. But the religious Council claims that the Land Beyond is just a myth, and that only their gods and superstitions are real.
But when Farrah’s beloved little sister dies, she determines that she is going to find the Land Beyond and bring back their elixirs to save her people. She and her pal, a mischievous salamander, set out together.
But the council in her village is fearful and superstitious that the bots will destroy their culture and way of life. When Council woman Regina hears about Farrah’s journey, she tries to stop her, and Farrah has to flee. But Farrah does eventually reach the Land Beyond, and sees that it is indeed flowing with proverbial ‘milk and honey’; there are bots everywhere, and food, and clean water. Farrah manages to explain to the kindly regents that her people are in desperate need, and the regents agree to send them intelligent bots to dig wells, to show them how to cultivate food in the harshest conditions, and to give them medical care and education.
Farrah returns, overjoyed, but gets put in prison by the Council before she can tell anyone what has happened. She pleads with the Council to see enlightenment, that the bots are merely a means for their survival and it’s a way to preserve their culture and way of life, but the Council is too closed-minded. Regina orders the destruction of every shipment of bots, and tells Farrah that she can go ahead and talk about the Land Beyond if she wishes to discredit herself, but ‘the Land Beyond doesn’t exist. Everyone knows that. Those who insist it does are either fools or liars.’ She says this with an infuriating smile, which tells Farrah that Regina knows very well that it exists, but she intends to perpetuate the idea that it is a myth. If Farrah claims it is real, she will only be dismissed by the people in her village as delusional.
But Farrah’s pet salamander manages to steal one of the bots shipped from the Land Beyond before it can be destroyed: it turns out to be a companion bot and it tells her to call it Martha. Martha has access to the labyrinth, and for the first time, Farrah can actually see exactly how large the Land Beyond is. She begins to use Martha to show the villagers the truth of her story, that there really is hope out there; all they have to do is overthrow the Council in order to have access to it. They all join together in a rallying song called Be Brave (and I noticed Val tapping her foot to this one. When I glanced at her, she was mouthing all the words, too). But the majority of the elders are on the side of the Council, and they see a ‘treaty’ with the Land Beyond as a deal with the devil. Farrah is sentenced to be sacrificed to their gods as a blood traitor.
While she awaits her fate, Martha breaks her out of prison, and enables Farrah to send a message to the Regent Supreme of the Land Beyond. Just before she is sacrificed, an army of bots arrives, and overthrows the Council. There is a song of rejoicing at the end, as the scene swirls and magically transforms from poverty to gleaming wells, roads, infrastructure, and sick villagers seeing medical bots with grateful smiles. The remaining villagers tell Farrah that she is a hero for persisting in her dreams, even when everyone was against her.
When the ending credits rolled, Nilesh paused the screen and turned to look at us.
“Thoughts?” he said, with an encouraging smile in the glow of the projector, as if he were a teacher leading a discussion. “I’ll start. Animated in general isn’t my style, but for what it was, I’d say it was technically perfect. Followed the archetypical hero’s journey well, catchy music, and proverbial but likable characters. How about you guys?” He gestured at Jake and Julie first.
Jake shrugged. “I liked it,” and Julie nodded. Beside me, so did Andy.
I shook my head in dismay. Did we see the same film?
“And I know Val liked it,” Nilesh grinned at her. “You practically knew every word. Didn’t it only come out last month?”
She shrugged sheepishly, and confessed, “This was my third viewing.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and let out an incredulous hmph.
“Becca?” Nilesh raised his eyebrows at me with an expectant grin. “I saw your face contorting with rage. Your thoughts?”
“Totally disgusting, precisely because it had its intended effect,” I muttered. “Yes, in this film, the Council are depicted as horrible, evil people. But Chiefton effectively lumps anyone who raises any objection to the bots taking over and Halpert’s ultimate goal into the same mold, as if they are all equally evil. It’s a fallacy! It takes one belief and emotionally attaches it to a particular kind of person in the mind of the viewer, so that he comes away with this idea that ‘anybody who criticizes Halpert is just like Regina in every way.’ Which obviously isn’t true, but stories bypass the critical thinking that might actually identify the fallacy! They create emotional beliefs, regardless of the facts. It’s brainwashing, pure and simple!”
Julie raised her eyebrows and smiled at me, in a do-you-know-who-you-sound-like kind of way.
“What?” I asked, leveling her with a deadpan gaze.
“I mean, I never even met your dad, but from what you told me about him…”
“Yeah, and he turned out to be right, too, or we wouldn’t all be here,” I retorted, but smiled a bit at I said it to show I was teasing.
“You know who else she sounds like?” Nilesh added, making a show of looking around. “Where’s Liam? He’d totally back you up.”
I glanced at Val involuntarily at this, and saw her squirm. She cleared her throat, and said a bit defensively, “I just… see so many of the kids I work with in Farrah. She’s the underdog, and I love cheering for the underdog. I guess it just never occurred to me that the filmmaker had an agenda, and wanted me to think a certain way.”
“And that’s the problem. It doesn’t occur to most people,” I said.
“Well, I see it now,” she snapped.
The retort was out of character for Val, and everyone seemed to feel it. At last Jake cut the tension, and told me, “I guess I can see your point, Becca.”
“Okay,” Nilesh clapped his hands together, “We can take a five minute break, and then, up next, ‘The Immortals.’”
“He’s such a taskmaster,” Jake joked, standing up to stretch.
When we came back together in ten minutes, Nilesh had managed to drag Larissa, Liam, Alex, and Francis downstairs as well.
“You guys need a break!” was his argument as Larissa and Alex descended the stairs after him—even though to my knowledge, Alex hadn’t been doing anything. “Besides, this isn’t just a break. This is research.” Behind them, Liam and Francis each carried one side of another couch from the den. They situated the couch beside ours
, one end next to Val. She happily leaned over the arm, and Liam sat on the edge of the new couch beside her. I couldn’t quite see them over the others in my way, so I had to glance at them surreptitiously several times to make sure they weren’t holding hands. They weren’t… that I saw, anyway.
Nilesh queued up “The Immortals.” This one was live action, and the story followed a brilliant young cyborg doctor named Pierre, on the cusp of discovering human-cyborg immortality through a combination of surgical advances, nanobot technology, and mind uploading. His cyborg brain makes him more supercomputer than human, though he still has all the emotions of a human too. But the closed-minded mob, led by a religious zealot named Clyde, believes that he is ‘playing God,’ and that God has sent him to enact judgment upon Pierre’s blasphemous research. Pierre narrowly manages to flee for his life, abandoning his laboratory and his work, and fearing that it will never be completed.
Graham, Pierre’s research colleague, hides him from the mob. In an interlude where the mob believes Pierre is already dead, he and Graham try to regroup. The media coverage shows Clyde’s rallying cry of a holy crusade to purge the earth of all ‘unnatural’ humans with cybernetic parts. “It’s a new kind of racism!” Graham proclaims. “Genocide against all cyborgs, to preserve the ‘purity of their bloodline’! It’s impossible to reason with people like that!” Pierre agrees, sounding defeated, but tells Graham that the irony is, the mob only behaves as they do because they haven’t had the mental ‘upgrades’ he and Graham have had: the upgrades would eliminate all human prejudice and irrationality.
Pierre and Graham manage to salvage Pierre’s research again after all and build him a new lab. But Clyde discovers that Pierre is still alive, and hunts him down. He kills Pierre and torches the lab, trying to destroy Pierre’s work once and for all. But fortunately, Pierre had just solved the immortality problem before his death, told Graham of his solution, and backed up the data to multiple remote locations. Graham manages to escape from Clyde and the mob, patents the knowledge, and tells the world via the labyrinth that even though Pierre died, he’s the last one who ever will. Clyde is taken into custody, where even he is turned into a benevolent immortal cyborg. There’s a heart-rending memorial scene at the end, overlaid with an epic, moving score, where the entire world comes together to mourn and celebrate Pierre’s legacy.
I folded my arms across my chest and shook my head. Chiefton didn’t bother hiding his agenda at all. I glanced around the room. Larissa and Alex had both apparently left, but Andy, Julie, and Jake were all rapt with attention. Val was crying. At least Liam and Francis both looked as irritated as I felt.
When Nilesh stopped the film and turned on the lights, he sat cross-legged on the floor once again, facing us.
“So,” he steepled his fingers. “What did we think? Val?” Nilesh gestured at her, grinning. “You apparently had a strong reaction.”
“No no, she cries at commercials. This means nothing,” Liam smiled at her with a fond familiarity that made my chest ache.
“It was just… really moving!” Val sniffed, dabbing at her eyes.
“It was heavy,” Andy agreed, and Jake and Julie on my other side both nodded too.
“Chiefton is a master, gotta give him that,” said Jake.
“I agree, it was certainly well-done,” said Nilesh, “I’d give it four and a half stars as an art form. But I see Becca’s scowl, and I agree: it was heavy-handed to the point of being maudlin. That’s why I knocked off that last half star.”
“You only knocked off half a star for that?” Liam interjected before I could. “Come on! It presents a total false dichotomy! It ignores all the actual arguments and dangers of extensive cyborg and nanobot technology, and mind uploading, and goes straight for the emotional ‘jugular’. Clearly Pierre is a hero, so if you don’t align yourself with him, then you, too, are a closed-minded wingnut, and ‘it’s impossible to reason with people like that!’” He used air quotes for this last bit, rolling his eyes. “So of course that encourages the viewer not to even try. Best to bypass all reasonable debate and go straight to labeling us as zealots, bigots, and morons!”
“That’s exactly what Becca said after the last film,” Nilesh nodded at me with a grin.
I jumped in, enthusiastic to prove this, “Yep. Exact same tactic as in ‘Dare to Dream’—and it’s disturbingly effective, especially when nearly every form of media uses the same strategy. After awhile, nobody dares to voice, or even hold, an alternate opinion.”
Liam beamed at me. Beside him, Val shot me a look of daggers.
“Francis is fuming over there,” Nilesh observed. “You wanna jump in?”
I glanced at Francis: his arms were still crossed over his chest, and he glared at the screen as if it had done him a personal insult, his mouth set in a hard line.
“How dare they?” he seethed at last through gritted teeth.
“How dare they what?” Nilesh prodded, like a game show host.
“Everyone should be surgically altered. That’s what it’s saying,” he spat. “As if people won’t lose who they are in the process even if the surgery is successful, and become a completely different person, and lose half their memories!”
Confusion passed over Nilesh’s face, and I saw the blank looks on almost everyone else’s as well. But Liam caught my eye, and raised his eyebrows significantly. I thought about asking Francis to sit under the VMI right now, so I could snap an image of his brain—this was exactly the kind of emotion I’d been trying to elicit before, and the VMI was right there in the corner of the room. But I thought better of it, not particularly wanting to get my head bitten off.
“Alex walked out, you might have noticed, as the message was a bit offensive to her too,” Francis continued in a growl. “I should have gone with her.”
After an appropriate silence, Nilesh added, “And where’s Larissa?”
“Oh, she just got bored,” said Liam. “It’s not her type of movie. She should have been here for the animated one.”
Nilesh looked at me. “So Becca? Did you get any inspiration for your counter-propaganda?”
“What?” Liam turned to me quizzically, and so did everyone else.
Briefly I explained my idea to the room, to mostly enthusiastic nods. “I’ll need your help the most,” I told Jake, “for writing the songs and the scores and stuff, and the animation. I think I can crank out the script for the first one pretty quick, if I just use my own story.”
“You’ll need AnimatR and probably GreenScreen and RecordingStudio,” Nilesh jumped in. “I got you covered on those! And Larissa and I are already working on solving the revolving broadcast geolocation problem.”
“Oh, that’s simple,” Francis muttered. “I can write the code for that in about half an hour.”
“Oh.” Nilesh blinked. “Well, Francis is on, then! And Becca, remember, you promised me a role in one of them!”
“I didn’t forget,” I grinned at him.
Francis and Liam grabbed either end of their couch to drag it back upstairs, and with one final evil eye in my direction, Val followed them. Julie announced that she’d like to go for a walk and stood up to stretch and trail along behind Val. Nilesh opened a chat window on one of the netscreens, presumably to get someone on the Commune to download the programs we needed and send them over.
“Get AnimatR first,” Jake told him, and then explained to me, “easier to draw on there than on paper and then transfer it.”
“Downloading now, my friend,” Nilesh assured him. “Two minutes.”
“Is there a netscreen upstairs that shares all the programs?” Jake asked me.
I nodded, thinking of the one Mom had used when Madeline first arrived, and grabbed a pad of paper and a pencil. I’d ultimately write the script on a netscreen too, but I liked paper for the initial brainstorming sessions.
I followed Jake to the upstairs room with the dome, and Andy trailed behind us, making comments like, “O
oh! Jake, you should draw Becca’s character like Desdemona!” naming one of his favorites from End Game. “And I should be Trayu—”
“What makes you think you’re gonna be in it?” Jake smirked at Andy over his shoulder. But Andy was too excited to acknowledge this. “And they’re searching for a secret treasure, like the one on the lost island of Fenri, but it’s guarded by the trolls…”
Jake shook his head at me. “Yes, this sounds exactly like your life story so far, doesn’t it?”
“Well, artistic license!” Andy protested. “It could still be you!”
“…Except, as a warrior princess searching for treasure on a mythical island guarded by trolls,” I deadpanned.
“Exactly!” He grinned at me now. “But can she sing, too.”
“Oh, well, that’s really the most important touch,” I joked, and Jake laughed. “The rest is just details.”
Chapter 22
Jake immersed himself in AnimatR, and I sketched the outline of my script, trying to massage the elements of my own life into the recognizable Hero’s Journey format. The best stories always did this, and kids’ stories followed the outline especially closely.
“Hmm,” Andy peered over my shoulder as I sketched the outline, and read, “‘Ordinary world: where most robots have taken everything over and few people work. Elizabeth’s father is alive but he’s a conspiracy theorist. Call to Adventure: Elizabeth’s father turns up dead, and she thinks he died for something he knew.’” Andy stopped. “Elizabeth, like Elizabeth MacIntyre?” he asked, naming one of our friends back home.