Delos 1 - Westworld

by Michael Crichton

  ACCOUNTANT: Yes, ma’am. I expect so.

  CUT TO:

  Martin, staring at the woman, then he turns to Blane.

  MARTIN: Who’s Miss Carrie?

  CUT TO:

  Miss Carrie’s Saloon. Miss Carrie, a tough thirtyish hooker, presides over a bordello of great splendor and what can only be described as the most tasteful and elegant decadence. Unlike the first saloon previously seen, her house is feminine and rich, the atmosphere subdued. In one area, men play cards on richly covered tables; their cards make a quiet slapping sound, their bids are given in low voices. In another area, some preliminary hanky-panky consonant with a PG rating is taking place.

  The total effect is just a little intimidating, as Blane and Martin enter. Martin is appropriately wide-eyed as they move to the bar. A couple of Miss Carrie’s employees lounge at the bar. They are quite pretty.

  CARRIE: You fellas new in town?

  MARTIN: Yes (to bartender) Whiskey.

  CARRIE: Just passin’ through?

  BLANE: Maybe.

  CARRIE: Lookin’ for some fun?

  BLANE: Maybe.

  CARRIE: Well, you come to the right place. Plenty of fun here. This’s Cindy, and Arlette. Arlette’s from Paris, France.

  MARTIN (to the girls): Howdy.

  Cindy and Arlette leer invitingly. Carrie gets more businesslike.

  CARRIE: P’raps you gentlemen are taking a liking to them?

  BLANE: P’raps.

  Cindy and Arlette preen. Martin smiles appreciatively at them, then has a thought. He turns to Blane.

  MARTIN: Hey, listen—

  CARRIE: They’re real accommodatin’

  BLANE: They look it.

  MARTIN: Hey, listen, are those two—

  CARRIE: You just go on upstairs, and we’ll reckon accounts later.

  BLANE: Sounds good to me.

  MARTIN: Are those two girls machines?

  BLANE (leering at the girls): Now how can you say a thing like that?

  MARTIN (gulping): Are you sure?

  BLANE (clapping him on shoulder): Come on . . .

  Blane, Martin and the two girls ascend the stairs to the second floor.

  As they go upstairs, murderous and continuous gun-fire goes on from outside. Martin and Blane stop their ascent; Martin grateful for the diversion, Blane merely curious.

  MARTIN: What’s going on?

  MISS CARRIE (looking out window): They’re robbing the bank.

  MARTIN (to Blane): Robbing the bank . . . Hey, maybe we should go help out . . .

  The shooting continues. Blane considers it. Finally Blane shakes his head.

  MARTIN: Well, you don’t know, it might be fun to fight bank robbers.

  BLANE: This’s better.

  He slaps his girl on the bottom, and continues upstairs. After a moment, Martin shrugs to Arlette, and follows her upstairs. Gunfire continues through next sequence.

  CUT TO:

  One of the upstairs rooms. Arlette puts her foot on the bed, hikes up her long frilly skirt, and begins to unlace a high boot.

  The room is dark, warmly lit by a couple of gas lamps; it’s romantic in a way, dramatic in a way. The sounds of the brawl downstairs are muted.

  CUT TO:

  Martin, undressing by the bureau, looking at her in the bureau mirror.

  Arlette, dropping her boots on the floor, reaching behind her to unhook her bodice. She glances once at Martin over her shoulder, smiles.

  CUT TO:

  Martin taking off his shirt, smiling shyly.

  CUT TO:

  Arlette in a white slip as she removes her dress with a loud rustling of starched petticoats.

  CUT TO:

  Martin lying naked on the bed, watching her. He is increasingly anxious.

  MARTIN: There, uh, is something I have to tell you . . . I mean, I don’t know if, uh, it matters, but it matters to me . . .

  Arlette undressing, not very concerned.

  ARLETTE: Yes?

  Martin in bed.

  MARTIN: Yes, uh, you see, I’m a married man and I never, uh, I mean I’ve always been faithful to my wife . . .

  He is watching Arlette, still undressing.

  MARTIN: So I haven’t had, well, I mean, it’s, um, it’s been a while, and I, well, I hardly know you, if you know what I mean. I mean we just met a few minutes ago, and you’re probably very nice and all, but—

  Martin breaks off abruptly.

  CUT TO:

  What he sees: Arlette undressing. Her clothes are essentially all removed. Her body is extraordinarily lifelike, and at the moment, powerfully sexual— which is what made Martin shut up.

  Arlette smiles at him, approaching the bed.

  MARTIN: I feel funny.

  ARLETTE: Why?

  She lies down next to him, kisses him softly.

  A close shot of their lips pressing together.

  A stock romantic shot with new meaning here.

  Martin, being very experimental about the sensations, then closing his eyes, letting go.

  Montage of their lovemaking. It is done in the most fuzzy-filtered romantic style possible. We end the sequence on his eyes, closed as he reaches orgasm.

  Arlette’s eyes are also closed. And then at the final moment, she opens them wide: and again we see that they are electronic, unreal.

  SLOW DISSOLVE TO:

  Martin is sitting on the bed pulling on his boots. He is dressed except for them. (The phallicness of boot-pulling-on will not be emphasized.) Across the room, Arlette stares at the mirror and combs her hair. He looks at her, sighs, shakes his head.

  ARLETTE: Is something wrong?

  MARTIN (smiling): Not a thing.

  ARLETTE (smiling): Good.

  She comes over and kisses him on the cheek.

  ARLETTE: I think you are nice.

  Then she leaves. Martin just sits there. After a moment, he sits a little straighter and begins to smile. He is thinking about the episode and feeling good about it. He gives a little chuckle, and obviously thinks himself pretty debonair at this moment.

  Blane comes in, excited.

  BLANE: How was it? Wasn’t it terrific? Boy, machines are the servant of man. Wasn’t that great?

  MARTIN (still debonair): Not bad.

  BLANE: Not bad . . . Now you’re the big lover.

  Martin has gotten up, gone to the mirror, and is more or less primping.

  MARTIN: Well, you know . . . some guys have a way with women . . .

  Blane has gone to the window. He looks out.

  BLANE: Shooting’s stopped . . . I guess we missed the robbery.

  MARTIN (yawning): Well, you can’t have everything. You know something? This place is really fun.

  CUT TO:

  The hotel room where Martin and Blane are asleep. Camera pans away from them toward the window.

  CUT TO:

  An angle down of the western street. A scene of carnage: dead horses and dead bodies all over the place, silvery in the moonlight.

  CUT TO:

  A slow, ground-level pan across all the dead animals, the people, the shattered windows, the incredible mess.

  End the pan on an incongruous sight: two electric headlamps coming silently toward us. As they come closer, we hear a faint electric whine.

  CUT TO:

  An electric-driven van as it pulls to a stop and a gang of workmen in white coveralls climb out. They begin to collect the bodies, moving them into the van.

  CUT TO:

  Montage shots of the nighttime cleanup. Some of it is very difficult: for the horses, a winch apparatus is needed. There are also straightforward repairmen, replacing windows, fixing broken chairs, and so on. But the main interest is the collecting of the dead.

  CUT TO:

  The van, as the machines are being loaded.

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  Another part of the street as the van pulls into a ramshackle, ordinary-looking building at the edge of town. It goes out of sight.

  CUT TO:
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br />   The repair-building garage. The van backs up to a conveyor belt. Workmen begin to unload the damaged machines onto the conveyer belt, which carries them out of sight.

  CUT TO:

  The robot-repair room. It is a vast surreal hall lit by banks of cold fluorescent lights. The room contains rows of benches, each with a cluster of electronic equipment. On each bench, a machine is being repaired by one to three technicians. All the technicians are dressed in white labcoats and wear white hats over their hair.

  Altogether it is an incredible sight; horses on their backs, legs sticking into the air rigidly as they are torch-welded; men and women naked, being screwed, bolted, fitted, wired by technicians. All of it rather quiet, and scrupulously clean.

  We run a long tracking shot through all of this, and eventually pick up a supervisor, about fifty, scholarly-looking and thoughtful. He is conferring with a workman about a horse lying on one of the benches.

  SUPERVISOR: Yes, I’d replace the whole unit rather than try to repair it.

  WORKMAN: Ten?

  SUPERVISOR: Use an XX Fifty if we have any in stock. The XX Fifties have a longer lifespan.

  WORKMAN: A Fifty may not fit in here.

  SUPERVISOR: Maybe if you shift the integrator unit further up into the cavity . . .

  WORKMAN: I’ll try it.

  The Supervisor goes on down the line, and the camera follows him. He stops by one bench on which a woman is being repaired; her shapely leg is held up in the air, and wires protrude from the sole of her foot.

  SUPERVISOR: That balance servo again?

  WORKMAN: Yeah. She fell over this afternoon. I think it’s the sensor. If it’s the central unit we’ll have to open her up.

  SUPERVISOR: Get a confirmation before you do that.

  He goes up. He comes to a grizzled old-timer, chest torn open.

  SUPERVISOR: What’s he in for?

  WORKMAN: Central malfunction.

  SUPERVISOR: Another one?

  He frowns, continues on.

  CUT TO:

  The underground conference room. It’s rather spartan—concrete walls and a gleaming metal table, around which six supervisors sit. They all look more or less like the supervisor we’ve seen: distinguished intelligent men in their fifties. All wear white lab-coats and shirts and ties beneath. In front of each is a small control console.

  FIRST SUPERVISOR: . . . so that after applying all our corrections to data, we come out with six central malfunctions in Medieval World during the past week. This is absolutely unprecedented.

  SECOND SUPERVISOR: What about Western World?

  THIRD SUPERVISOR: One malfunction tonight. Makes three in the last week.

  SECOND SUPERVISOR: Well, I don’t see any reason to worry at this point—

  FOURTH SUPERVISOR: Any problems with life-support equipment?

  FIFTH SUPERVISOR: All our units seem to function normally at this time, but the technology of those systems is less complex.

  THIRD SUPERVISOR: I’ve been wondering whether we are looking at a nonrandom pattern and failing to recognize it.

  CUT TO:

  The working technician’s locker room. It is a sharp contrast to the austere conference room. This place is plastered with pinups, and is very proletarian. Several technicians are getting out of their clean work clothes and into ordinary street clothing.

  FIRST TECHNICIAN: Jeez . . . what a day.

  SECOND TECHNICIAN: Look at it. Three in the morning. We never used to finish past two.

  FIRST TECHNICIAN: What’re you working?

  SECOND TECHNICIAN: Rome.

  FIRST TECHNICIAN: That’s the worst. I’ve been in Westworld. It was pretty soft.

  THIRD TECHNICIAN: So was the castle. It’s been bad lately, though.

  FIRST TECHNICIAN: Damned supervisors don’t even know what’s happening.

  SECOND TECHNICIAN: Well, they don’t have to do the work. Just walk around and give orders. They got their heads in the clouds.

  CUT TO:

  A screen in the underground conference room. It is a schematic of the three-part resort, with numbers being superimposed appropriately.

  SIXTH SUPERVISOR (voice over): From the day we opened the resort, we had a failure and breakdown rate conforming to computer predictions, that is, zero-point-three malfunctions for each twenty-four-hour activation period, concurrent or not.

  CUT TO:

  The sixth supervisor.

  SIXTH SUPERVISOR: This was an anticipated operations aspect of the resort, and we were prepared to handle it. The majority of breakdowns were peripheral and minor, until about six weeks ago.

  CUT TO:

  The screen, showing the resort and the superimposed numbers. There are some other numbers for dates and subcalculations, central breakdowns, peripheral breakdowns, total breakdowns, each with a column for absolute numbers and percentages. In other words, the graphic representation is complex.

  THIRD SUPERVISOR (voice over): Roman World has a rise in breakdown rate, which doubled in a week. In addition, we saw a disproportionate rise in central as opposed to peripheral breakdowns. We identified some problems with humidity control, and regained homeostasis.

  CUT TO:

  Technicians’ locker room.

  FIRST TECHNICIAN: You ever made it with one of those machines?

  SECOND TECHNICIAN: No . . . I’ll take the real thing. If I can ever get home to her.

  FIRST TECHNICIAN: I tried it with one of those Rome hookers. One night out on the repair table. Powered her up, and really went to town . . .

  THIRD TECHNICIAN: You could get fired for that.

  The First Technician snorts disdainfully.

  CUT TO:

  The underground conference room.

  THIRD SUPERVISOR: Despite our corrections, the breakdown rate continued to climb. Then Medieval World began to have trouble. And now we are having more Western World breakdowns . . . There is a clear pattern here, which suggests an analogy to an infectious disease process, spreading from one resort area to the next.

  The supervisors react in their various ways.

  SECOND SUPERVISOR: Perhaps there are superficial similarities to disease—

  FIFTH SUPERVISOR: It’s only a theoretical concept. There are a lot of ways to order that data.

  FIRST SUPERVISOR: I must confess I have difficulty believing in a disease of machinery.

  THIRD SUPERVISOR: We aren’t dealing with ordinary machines here. These are highly complicated pieces of equipment, almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, the design of our robot circuitry has been worked out by other computers. We don’t know exactly how they work . . . Why shouldn’t they be vulnerable to, let us say, a neurological disease?

  SECOND SUPERVISOR (sarcastic): Or mass psychosis?

  FIFTH SUPERVISOR: You ask me, we’re the ones with the mass psychosis.

  SIXTH SUPERVISOR: I feel we have an obligation to our guests at the resort. They are entirely dependent on us and the machines. If there is any widespread breakdown, we’ve got to close the resort—for their safety.

  SECOND SUPERVISOR (still sarcastic): You afraid they’ll catch the disease?

  THIRD SUPERVISOR: I agree it’s a serious problem. It may be premature to close the resort now, but unless we can stop the breakdowns, we won’t have any choice. We’ll have to shut down.

  CUT TO:

  High angle down on conference room as the group sits there, then gets up.

  CUT TO:

  Western street—dawn.

  CUT TO:

  Battlements of Medieval World—dawn.

  CUT TO:

  Roman World—dawn.

  CUT TO:

  Central control room. It is an enormous, circular, underground room, resembling an Apollo mission-control room. On the TV screens we see dawn breaking over the three worlds. There is a hubbub of complex technical talk. Eventually we realize that the people are starting up the resort for the day, getting this intricate and ponderous machine to come to life,
activating everything.

  TECHNICIAN ONE: Up gain four-three-seven . . .

  TECHNICIAN TWO: I’m not getting sound pickup from the tenth quadrant, please check my leads to console . . .

  TECHNICIAN THREE: My telemetry is good, repeat, good telemetry . . .

  TECHNICIAN FOUR: We have sunrise in zero point forty-three, ready on all quadrants. Energize grid.

  TECHNICIAN FIVE: Grid energized. Confirmed.

  TECHNICIAN ONE: Uh . . . all right, then, give me four-three-six if you can patch in that . . . If not, four-three-five . . .

  TECHNICIAN TWO: I have sound now, thank you . . .

  TECHNICIAN THREE: Yes, I wanted scrambled eggs and bacon with cinnamon toast. Do you have any cinnamon toast? Okay, send it down to the central control room, console three.

  TECHNICIAN FOUR: Just a minute. (pauses to light cigarette) Okay, what was that? No grounding on unit five? Try a bypass . . . Well, I have readings on all units, five included . . . hold on a minute . . .

  Technician Four lights a cigarette for Five.

  TECHNICIAN FIVE: All right . . . let’s standby for resort activation.