INT. HOSPITAL-O.R.
Darkness and voices are broken by a horizontal white line, opening in an oval shape until the screen is filled with an operating-room lamp. Nurses and doctors keep popping in and out at ever-increasing speed. The voices fade as the hospital staff moves faster and faster.
JASON: (off-screen voice) I woke up staring at that accursed light. I must be held down by straps or whatever, I can not move. I have not slept since then, they do not let me sleep.
As JASON speaks we fade to view him with his head, chest, wrists, waist, legs, and ankles, all strapped to an operating table. There is an "aura of darkness" around his body that's intensified closer to his person. Light seems to be absorbed by this field of darkness surrounding JASON'S body. We see doctors and scientists with their nurses and many bizare machines and tools and trays of liquids, tubes, and needles. Some flashing what seemed like bolts of lightning to fill the room, yet it stays dark around JASON. They keep going faster and faster as we hear only JASON'S voice.
JASON: (Cont., off-screen voice) I am painfully awake and sober. Time has changed for me, I think... ...don't know...
CAMERA ZOOMS IN on JASON. As we approach the dark aura around JASON, it begins to turn red and the people in the hospital seem to go faster and faster. The aura turns to orange and then to yellow, green, blue, indigo, as everything else around JASON keeps going faster and faster the closer we get to JASON. As we enter the dark field we see JASON for the first time in normal light (though much too close). From the inside the aura appears like a "coffin of light." Everything outside is thick with blinding light. The people and things were moving much too fast to make out much more than a blur once in a while.
JASON: (off-screen voice) I woke up in a hospital, I know not which one. I had to wonder if anyone knew I was here, or even, if this hospital were known to the public at all. I did, however, know why I had been forcibly institutionalized; "I had not been myself", I had acted out of character and that always seemed to scare folks these days. I also know that I have broken no laws, nor did I threaten to, but this was a mere technicality. The general rule was; if something should come over you, be it benign, or even very good and positive, you've likely fell under "outside control." Possession is assumed and measures are taken. Even nearly imperceptable changes in attitude or behavior are dealt with severely. The PSY-COPS never miss even the most subtle shift in any mind, conscious, or not. Friends of mine were awoken from their first dreams of puberty and taken by Federal Marshals.
FADE TO FLASHBACKS as we hear these stories, we see flashes of the things JASON speaks of.
JASON: (off-screen voice, Cont.) My childhood friends were interagated for weeks and then sent for several months of de-and-re-programming at one of the federal institutions. No one ever knows where these "hospitals" are, if they did they would get that memory erased! They would hook their brains to the nearest electroshock-forgetting machine. Forgeting is the single largest market in the history of the planet. The Psy-cops keep upgrading their equipment to catch folks before they can erase any illegal thought patterns or irregular mind-sets, "for their own safety" of course. Everyone knew the results of reprograming, and were thusly willing to kill half their brain in an underground shock-therapy session to avoid it. At least a retarded mind is not lost and helpless out side of the puppeteer's strings!
CONTINUE FLASHBACKS
JASON: (off-screen voice, Cont.)The Psy-cops became the new elite. Rich or poor, these patrolmen would catch you eventually. Their mind-scanners became so powerful that they could process thousands of thought-types from billions of people. They would litterally choose from several thousand thought-types and assign many of them to several million people each (Only those from the File of Acceptable Thoughts, of course.) One thought out of place in a thousand mile radius and the Psy-cops would swarm like greedy locusts on a desert oasis. They are hard pressed to show their usefulness these days, they have become ruthlessly competitive. They dispense judgements over smaller and smaller changes in people. The terms right and wrong have long been abandoned as an irrelevent issue.
JASON: (off-screen voice, Cont.) There hasn't been a violent crime in twenty-five years. Anyone with a violent thought was long ago taken to the prison island of Baja-California. It took a year and a half to round the "evil thinkers" up. That first de-and-re-programing was most certainly amoung the most horrific episodes in history. The Inquisition or the German death-camps broke many minds eventualy, here they were shattered completely from the begining. The oblivion of insanity was not even the worst part, however. The early mass-reprograming was by far the most tourturous procedure ever inflicted by any man on another fellow human. The same technology and Psy-cop training that allowed them to read their minds, was simply intensified a thousand times to apply the "necessary re-programming." To say they were puppets would be a gross understatement; they were worshipers of the "new gods"! The Psy-cops quickly became the most powerfull aristocracy to ever rule over men. The non-worshipers were quickly labled as subversives, for little or no reason whatsoever.
CONTINUE FLASHBACKS
JASON: (off-screen voice, Cont.) No one even dared think of a relative, no matter how brutal their arrest, or unjust it might have seemed. An entire generation has grown up knowing only mental-clones of Psy-cop supplicators and brain-fried dullards. The legend of free-will has long since been wiped from even the most sub-conscious memory. Many are de-and-re-programmed a dozen times through-out their lifetime. Secretly placed bombs by federaly funded terrorist kept the masses demanding ever-more mental-monitoring, and swift, total, reprogramming of "dissedents."
JASON: (off-screen voice, Cont.) These gods required no faith what-so-ever; they would much rather force your mind to worship them anyway. Soon, every position of authority was taken up by a Psy-cop. The churches, the capitols, the thrones of every office of power was held by these nigh-omnipotent rulers of men. In three years there were no more offices to hold or people to control, except those held by another Psy-cop. Two weeks after the last few were taken up, the great war started.
CONTINUE FLASHBACKS
JASON: (off-screen voice, Cont.) As modern attrition is to ancient battles, double that factor over the world wars and this falls grossly short of describing the pure horror and carnage of the early Submission Wars. It became unthinkably worse when the carnage stopped, hell, nobody dies any more. No one has even died of old age in fifteen years! The mind could be programmed to control and even eliminate the aging process. Neither could one put oneself in to harm's way. To even think of death would swiftly bring the most severe repercusions imaginable, durring which, any man would beg for death with every fiber of his being, only to earn more punishment. Then, of course, comes the de-and-re-programming, now condensed to a few seconds and repeated frequently. These "gods" were empowered by their worshipers, and not even death could take them from their duties.
JASON: (off-screen voice, Cont.) The Psy-cops soon tired of fighting over, and or, with their subjected peoples. No one could imagine that the worst of this, man-made pit of hell, was yet to come. The Psy-cops turned their powers and machines on one another. Imagine a million or a billion beings unified in perfect oneness with their god, only to feel their master become the worshiper of some other "stranger-god." This being, thought to be infinitly greater than they, was now completely subjected to some un-known, and, beyond-unaproachable, god.
JASON: (off-screen voice, Cont.) I love my Grandma, I love her most of all. I think more of her than the songs of birds or the smell of spring flowers or late summer fruit. I love her even above the first "Ribbit" of late Winter's melting streams. She, above all, makes my mornings, though cold and bitter, look fondly through the day, twords the early eve. For each night Grandma created a universe! Grandma reighned supreme when it came time for the nightly story! After a decade or two, I began to truley appreciate her talents as a storyteller. She could forge a universe, a magical land, or an alien planet, with the whim of a phrase. When I became a writer I began to understand on a whole new level.
JASON; (off-screen voice, Cont.) Then came the Psy-cops. Suddenly books were sold only on the black market. If you could find one, the hardest part was finding a place to read it. And then, harder still is trying to come back home with no detectable change in personality. There were many folks that were "rounded up wholesale" If you were a preist, or a guru, or a writer, or story teller, then you were certain to be hauled in for de-and-re-programming. Since the day they hauled me away, Grandma has not told another story. I was the eldest and so were both of my parents. I am the only one of my generation to remember Grandma's storytelling years. After nearly twenty years she told one story more, to me and to me alone. She new what would happen, and she was ready for them when they came to take her away. I saw, in her face, a broken heart. At her welcome home party, the youngest toddlers recognized her not and asked, "Who's that?" She has never told a story of any kind to anyone since then. She made me promise not to ever repeat the story she told to me, until after she died. This promise, I kept.
JASON: (Cont., off-screen voice) She started by telling me to try to remeber every story that she ever told. This, I eagerly did. To my suprise, I found it quite easy to recall her stories in great detail. When I told her how well I could recall her yarns, she seemed not nearly so suprised as I was. When I exausted my surface memories I tried to recall more and she interupted me. She said, "Those stories, though sometimes based on fact, are only told to teach the most basic truths. The deliberate exclusion of details is no accident, the details that are given should not be over-analized." Suddenly I remembered her tales along with some Bible stories and parables plus All the legends and fabels that I had heard and read. They flashed one by one through my head, then many of them sort of grouped together, by the similarity of their lessons. This came as quite a shock, as though the real meanings of all those stories were waiting for me to "get it." The real meaning was not in the words but in the creative and flexible nature of the lesson. Especialy the parables of Jesus, and of course, Grandma. She had the voice for storytelling as well. She could make a pirate's voice and turn to do a little girl or a vicious animal. Her's was truely the most adept tounge these ears have ever heard! Yet this blessed gift was silenced for a decade plus, until that night, when she broke her story-telling silence. It was the first she spoke since I was taken away. This was, most likely, the only time as well. Much of how I see things now, is based on the things she told me on this day. She seemed desperate, but calm. As though the time had come to lay her life down and her resolve was absolute. Her choice included and even embraced fear, for the greatest possible good. She took many precautions, to be certain that no one would hear her telling the story, until it was finished. We sat in the basement, with the upstairs pounding from the sterio, she spoke to me through a long wrapping paper tube. I listened, with my ear up against the tube, careful to not to miss a single word. She told me about the early days, confirming legends of free-will, will-of-the-people, free speech, and something she called individuality. To tell you the truth , I didn't believe a word of it. The rush of hearing her only story in near twenty years, and maybe forever after that, sealed every sylable in my memory, anyway. It wasn't until much later that I began to recount and truely listen to what she said that day. She told me of a time (though I still hesitate to believe) when attitudes where not assinged. She said that children were observed for clues to the nature of their personality, rather than their succesfull programming. I kept waiting for someone to say, "Just kidding!", but, her eyes, so pleading, still as yet, called my heart to belive. My legs fell weak beneath me. Such an image afforded me the most elulsive of hopes. A hope I knew would be honed in on by the counsil of Psy-cops and, at the very least, would make me the target of 24-hour multi-level surveilence. I did not care in the least, even this unlikely source of hore felt better for an illusiory moment, than a century without. My first thoughts were to check for surveilence; both cameras and microphones. Grandma was god, she made sure we were not recorded, by audio, or even her lips by video. I could never prove that she said any of this. The main person, to whom I would like to prove she realy said these things would be, myself. This is that day as I remember it.
JASON: (Cont., off-screen voice) It was late spring and everyone had spoken of the blooming flowers and running streams on the way to church that day. At the church there were the usual "beggers for service" that would kiss the ground before you and apologize for it as they kissed the ground after you. Once again we stood out on the church's front porch as the door opened. The Reverend opened the door and stepped half-way out. He gave a slight twist of his head and his eyebrow lifted. The ushers pushed and carried the non-members out of sight in an instant, after which the door opened the rest of the way. "Welcome" he said,with open arms, "Welcome, children, welcome children of the Lord." He smiled a smile without flaw, both friendly and happy. A smile so firm and sincere that suddenly I thought it fake. I had to sleep through the whole service to hide my dissolusionment.
JASON: (Cont.,off-screen voice) When I was young, as I was on this day, you could get away with a good number of unconscious "frailties of thought", mainly, I think, because of the complex nature of decoding and seperating dream symbols as well as the fact that an opposite in dreams can strengthen the conscious ideal. Subversive thoughts in his dreams may be exatly the nightmare required to keep his conscious thoughts in line. Anyway, you could usualy avoid the Psy-cops for a while if you slept all the time (up to a point of course). First and formost, I couldn't believe for an instant that I had actualy seen through the Reverend's expression to find his smile to be "a fake." I fearfuly rejected such intuitions without contemplation, to look for an unassuming pew to rest these over-active eyes. Sleep, my restless vision, sleep! ...but it did not... I sat through his sermon, and I tried to listen as best I could, until I managed to fall asleep. I seemed unusualy drawn to look at my Grandmother's face whenever I wasn't gazing into the eyes of the Reverend himself. What I remember most, from that service is how Grandma's eyes lit up when it came time to sing a sacred song. Oh, how her eyes did light up indeed!
JASON: (Cont.,off-screen voice) On the way home that afternoon, I asked to ride in my great-uncle's car (my grandmother's younger brother). On top of the pervasive elation of being out in such a perfect spring day, I knew I also needed to see that perfect day in Grandma's eyes. The air was crisp, and the sun shone bright and high. Grandma's eyes darted to and fro, hither and yon, everywhich-way until for a moment that I didn't notice. I had fixed my eyes upon the clear-running creak of melted snow from far beyond the horizon's crest. As we approached the bridge to pass this stream, I shook my head to the reality that it would be gone in a minute, and I looked again at Grandma's face. She seemed, somehow, to be acknowleging my pleasure in her exspresion as her gaze showed that she too had become transfixed by the sublime beauty of this humble brook on a spring day. "Stop!", I shouted, "I want to go fishin'!", from the top of my head. To my delight, the logic of the question became the subject and I knew that I had already secured a victory in all of the necessary levels of persuation. "You don't have a pole, a hook or even string!" Who will watch to make sure you don't drown or get lost on the way home?" Grandma spoke up for that last one. Someone mumbled a word or two and there was a cough with no betraying gesture. Grandma volunteered to sit with me while I fished in the creek. She looked quickly with a gaze that would melt steel to see who would speak their peace. No one was willing to measure either a word nor a phrase against that clear challenge. Her smile was almost giddy when she climbed out of the door behind me. The remaining three folks in the car watched with doubtful faces as we flagged down my dad's car that was shortly behind us. I quickly secured some weights, lures, and hooks with a spool of fish-line from the tackel box in the trunk. Grandma assured dad that we would be home in time for a late lunch. Dad said he'd be back if it came time for dinner an' we di'n' show up yet. The two cars full of family started up their engines and continued down that country road. The spring day air bristoled behind them and seemed to be echoed by winds bouncing back and forth and every which way. They drove away, raising the dust on the horizon. As we stepped off the road the shoulder sloped sharply, close to the bridge. A few more steps and the road was high over head. The bridge and the steep shoulder form a protective corner for a patch of bamboo. The elder shoots all grey from a long winters drying, brittle, but sensitive and springy. I chose one with a hint of green still left, that was sure near twenty foot tall. I tied my string to the middle, for a backup knot. I then tied a taght short line on both sides of the largest knob twords the tip of the branch. Then, of course, I draped an extra foot of line and tied it to the very end with a firmly tightened slipknot. When I reached the water's edge I was already measuring the line. The 20 foot pole held straight up over the head then you step on the line and cut after your foot. A floating fly lure was in the water nearly as quickly as I could walk to the shore. I then began to search for live bait. I barely felt the nibbles testing the line. There was a gentle tug as I timed one of the "test nibbles" almost perfectly. As the line arched overhead I spotted an earth-worm under the rock I had turned over. I tied a bait hook 'bout three feet up the string from the fly. I, then, set a small pinch-weight there too. I tied a cork at the six-foot mark. The line a'fore and after was jus' long enough to let the worm dangle twords the bottom, and have the fly still a'layin' on the top. I didn't wait but a minute or two till I felt a solid strike. That fish done up an' hooked him self but-good. I spurred to the moment. It was a strong and heavy fish, but at that moment it felt like a feather. My adrenaline was pumpin' hard as I carefully pulled up the line. I swear there was no prettier fish on the planet that day. I focused back in, and heard grandma's near-giddy laughter of joy and excitement. I pulled that puppy in and landed her as my grandmother dammed near danced around. 'tell you what, that day started off jus' right.
JASON: (off screen voice, Cont.) I remember that day so perfectly well, like an apex of life, I remember that day to the minute. I remember splittin' an' guttin' that fish an a hangin' it over a bed of smokin' embers we fixed up quick-like.
