[ExI] Film Script!

[Damien Broderick]

On 2/11/2010 3:53 PM, Spencer Campbell wrote:
> Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com <mailto:bbenzai at yahoo.com>>:
>  > (a whole bunch of brilliant nonsense)
>
> Yes. Yes! Maybe run two perspectives through the thing, so that we're
> following both an organic human hero and a robotic alien antihero. There
> can be a scene where the two of them enter into an interminable Socratic
> dialogue!

Oh, sort of like this?

Lune steps carefully, keeping her balance with outstretched arms. On 
every side, matted kelp and seaweed coat the sluggish surface of the 
ocean between the trapped hulks that have drifted here across hundreds, 
thousands of kilometers, fetching up at the still center of an 
indefinitely slow vortex on a cognate world of oceans seized by locking 
land masses. Other spoiled vessels hang trapped in the feral 
vegetation’s embrace, moving slightly, rocking against each other’s 
hulls with low, grinding vibrations and deep clangs, scarcely audible, 
like the booming of whales. This ruined ship, the Argyle, must have 
dangled here in the jaws of the sea for at least a century and a half.

“I can’t do this any longer,” she says. “I won’t.”

“How touching.” The K-machine wears a heavy yellow canvas mariner’s coat 
and black rubber boots, leaning against the stump of Argyle’s fractured 
main mast. Broken spars and fragments of a fallen sail and tangled 
rigging cling about it. “You love him.”

The timber planks beneath her foot are pulpy, sagging with every careful 
step she takes. The ocean has invaded the vessel from within, seeping 
upward through the wood, rusting and corroding the iron work, without 
yet swallowing it down into the depths. Perhaps that fate is certain, 
but it has been delayed for many decades by the matted pelagic 
vegetation flattening the surface of the water, locking all these 
marooned vessels into a graveyard without burial. Lune grimaces. The 
setting is the perfect preference of the thing that regards her approach 
with deep, gratified irony.

“Yes. I do love him. I did not expect—”

“Because he brought you back from death. This is not love, it’s supine 
and self-interested gratitude. Get over it.”

“You would have been quite happy to sacrifice my life to extinguish his.”

“Your life, like everyone’s life, is illusory. Is this not what you 
believe and argue, philosopher? The Schmidhuber ontology, the blasphemy 
that computation is the basis of reality?”

She stares at the thing with disgust and a certain enduring fright that 
she has known since childhood, when it first made itself known to her. 
The K-machine possesses power over her, in a measure she does not truly 
understand. Perhaps it and its kin had slaughtered her parents. Or 
perhaps, as it argues, that destruction had been, instead, and wickedly, 
the work of cold humans themselves, intent upon creating their own hell 
world. The Ensemble instructors had evaded that issue whenever she’d 
attempted, as an acolyte, to raise it.

“If life is illusory,” she says, “I lose nothing by living it in the way 
that I choose. I’m done with you.” But still she stands there.

The thing reaches forth an arm and hand made all of black metal, 
tenderly strokes her cheek. A kind of joyous revulsion rises within her. 
A memory from just beyond infancy: a figure all in black, shielded 
against the foul fumes rising to the shattered surface from the piled 
dead in the concrete caverns below. Dark-clad arms plucking her up, 
carrying her to safety, her pulse roaring, her terrified childish voice 
locked in her throat. Septimus, or one of his assistants, she sometimes 
thinks. Or perhaps, as it claims, this thing slouching at ease before 
her, or one of its kindred. It is a salvation she can hardly regret, 
either way, and yet she detests its memory. She waits stock-still as the 
thing draws a line down her face, withdraws.