Deposit Three Billion Dollars For The Next Two Minutes IVAN AND IVA are electrical engineers working on guidance systems that use miniaturized vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes are making a comeback in military hardware because printed circuits are too vulnerable to interference. A helicopter gunship can flip and crash if a cell phone is being used a mile away. It's happened 6 times. It's embarrassing. IVAN is standing there holding a toy helicopter and he says that he feels guilty about blowing up the world, but it's what he's good at. IVA tells him that he has delusions of grandeur. They're playing a video game: building weapons that dont work to meet threats that dont exist. THEY make a date for dinner, but IVA needs a 2 hour start. She has to get to her exercise class to mellow out. She leaves the grad school around 3. IVAN checks his watch as he walks out of the grad school: It's 5:30. He's tempted to walk home, it's the middle of rush hour, but he decides to take the train anyway. It's a 5 minute walk from the grad school, but when he gets there the sky is strangely dark and the station is deserted. Then he looks at his watch: It's 8:32 and he's lost 3 hours out of his life. He checks his schedule then he remembers something simple. The day time security guard had been on duty in the lobby when IVAN had left the grad school and that meant it was before 5:45. It's now 8:35. He's missed his date with IVA and she isn't talking to him. He searches his memory but, draws a blank except for anger without a target. He's sure that he's been toyed with unspeakably, but he cant remember a thing. He gets home and he's left the TV on, so the cat will have something to watch, and as he's opening the cat food there's someone on the tube talking about alien abductions and telling the exact same story that happened to him. He's been abducted by star aliens. IVA thinks it's a lame explanation. 2 "Alright, some of them are telling the truth about what they remember, that doesn't mean that what they remember is what happened. It's someone trying out a new toy like the CIA dropping LSD in the punch bowl to watch the secretaries jump out of windows." "If it were them, they'd be abducting secretaries or leather boys or whatever. They'd be expressing some kind of preference. But they're taking a random assortment of very ordinary looking people. Whoever abducted them cant tell the difference. We all look alike to them. They're not from here. And they're not human." But what are they doing here? and why are they being so sneaky about it? Apparently, we are off limits for some reason, maybe a good reason: to protect us from being corrupted, exploited and enslaved as every culture is when it meets one with better technology. If we knew for sure that the aliens were out there, the entire planet would turn into Tiajuana. But, if we're a protected species, then the aliens ----- zoologists, porn film makers or grad students desperate for a thesis or whatever they are ----- are criminals by their own laws as well as ours. So, why dont they just land and take what they want? Weapons are ineffective if you cant remember what they're for and the Aliens give you instant Alzheimer's. So, what are they afraid of? What could we do? One explanation would be that there is a way of calling Galaxy Central and reporting prowlers. But how? "When in doubt, quote the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Effect. It can be used to prove anything. Dont ask me to explain it, it gives me a pain behind the eyes like you get from eating ice cream too fast, but it seems to imply the possibility of faster-than-light radio. How is that possible?, you may ask, when Einstein argued convincingly that energy cannot be transferred faster than the speed of light." "In a vacuum and he didn't prove it, he assumed it." 3 "That's worse. The catch is that information is not energy, it's the arrangement of energy in a particular order and there is no particular reason why that cant be transferred instantaneously. Yes, Baby, I know. Like Heisenberg always said: 'Anyone who is not outraged by quantum mechanics on his 1st contact with it cannot possibly have understood it.'" IVAN finds a way of dialling the galactic 911 using the EPR effect, but he gets a few wrong numbers 1st and, before he can get connected, it apparently attracts the attention of the alien mission control. IVAN disappears and suddenly IVA starts taking this seriously. She finds the error in IVAN's calculations. She's about to dial the Star Cops then decides against it. She doesn't want to chase off the nasties. As long as they're around she has hopes of sneaking up on them and stealing IVAN back. Her girlfriend YLLA is a small-animal vet. She says that the aliens' motives make perfect sense if you assume that they think like cats. Cats love to hide and pounce even if there's no reason for it. And IVA starts to think. IVAN couldn't have been snatched right off the street, somehow he was made to turn off into one of the buildings in the 2 blocks between the grad school and the train IVA walks the 2 blocks carrying IVAN's cat, who has gone noisily into heat. The cat pulls IVA into the 3rd building on the block and down to the basement. There's something thing going on down there. It looks like trick photography: 100 doorways lined up. At the end of them is a star ship and it doesn't look anything like a saucer. She comes out of it in the lab. She's lost 3 days out of her life and the cat is sitting on IVAN's desk purring contentedly with outrageous implications. IVA tries the same building again but, of course there's nothing there. She gets the idea that the only way to bushwack the aliens to warn someone in advance that he's going to be abducted. 4 But how? IVA is in the faculty club with a tray of 6 Bloody Marys and feeling morose. She gets picked up by a physicist named ELI. He has a lock on a Nobel Prize and wants to tell her about it. It's hard to talk about High Energy Particle Physics without saying "Bullshit" at least once a sentence. Every time the books dont balance they invent a new particle to explain what happened to the energy or whatever. Which brings us to "tachyons", particles with imaginary mass, moving faster than light and backward in time. Meaning that, they dont exist except as a convenience of accounting procedure. At least, they shouldn't. If tachyons did exist, they'd be signalled by the presence of _erenkov radiation (pale, watery blue like after-dinner mints) in a vacuum. It's emitted when a charged particle goes through something at a speed greater than the velocity of light in that medium. This occurs most easily when the refractive index of the medium is high. _erenkov radiation is like the bow wave of a boat or the shock wave of a jet going supersonic. Photons would pile up in front of the tachyon and get snow plowed away. They were actually sighted once, in 1973 at the cosmic ray station in Buckland, Australia, but the experiment was not repeatable and that makes a very poor impression. The observers haven't recanted, but they have stopped talking about it. Now ELI has found a way to generate them. IVA listens carefully then takes him by the hand back to his lab. As luck and dramatic structure would have it, it's above IVAN's lab on the next floor up. Just as he said: _erenkov radiation in a vacuum, meaning it'stachyons or something even more annoying. She takes the controls away from ELI. She points the tachyon generator straight down and starts blazing away in dot-dash bursts. 5 "What in Hell do you think you're doing?" "Experimental theology! And the next person who tries to explain virtual particles to me is going to get knee capped!" Back to scene 1: It's 3 PM with IVAN and IVA working in their lab with the miniature vacuum tube pulsing Morse code in watery after-dinner-mint blue. It's telling IVAN that he's going to be abducted by space aliens in exactly 3 hours. They think it's a joke, but they keep watching. The Morse code starts saying personal things that no one else could have known. They're thinking about it seriously as POV zooms out. The story ends in 1974 at the cosmic ray station at Buckland, Australia. 2 PHYSICISTS are watching the blue light of _erenkov radiation in a vacuum. One of them says: "It looks almost like Morse code." and the other says: "Now, that really is ridiculous." TO BE CONTINUED 6 SERIES DEVELOPMENT IVA is a 6 ft. gazelle of a woman with an Eve Arden trombone voice. She collects father figures, usually 20 years older and a foot shorter. She's an Amazon of necessity. She wants to be passively feminine, but no one will give her the chance. To her intense exasperation SHE is in love with IVAN, a dizzily heroic character who would be type cast for the lead in ANDROCLES AND THE LION. His head clears eventually, say, about episode 9 . Meanwhile, HE's in love with YLLA, a veterinarian and little girl grad student with a nursery mouth and astonished eyes, getting a PhD in animal psychology and seriously into bondage. Her other hobby is psychoanalysis. She learned about masculinity from a comic book so, SHE's in love with ELI, a macho posturing clown who is a genius at particle physics and an vulgar idiot at everything else. He's 6'5" and looking for his Amazon Queen. Naturally, HE's in love with IVA who's in love with IVAN, 5'6" and vague. Naturally, ELI and YLLA deserve each other and fall in love by episode 12. PROJECT NOTES: [a] The scientific jargon is a bit overwhelming because the story is condensed but, in stories of this a kind, it's used as incantation: No one understands it, it simply has to be there. I dont see that it will do any harm if it also happens to make sense. 7 [b] The approach is ironic. Irony is acceptable in science-fiction. THE X-FILES are admirable but totally humorless and paranoid. I believe that it would be a mistake to compete on those terms. [c] Which brings us to MULDER AND SCULLY. A role reversal with a passive man and an aggressive woman who find each other fascinating and exasperating and are genuinely indignant at being in love. That's familiar in another context, the screwball comedies of the 30's, as played by Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn or William Powell and Myrna Loy or even Bogart and Hepburn in the AFRICAN QUEEN. I've done something like that with IVAN & IVA. The relationship is essentially comic. The originality of THE X-FILES is to treat it absolutely without humor. The result is ominously kinky but, as long as it doesn't get explicit, they'll never notice in Peoria. The trick is to suggest it and then claim that you're being misinterpreted. [d] Another thing THE X-FILES have going is that the questions are never answered, the mysteries are never resolved and if the plot lines of different episodes occasionally contradict each other, that only makes it more mysterious. They've created a situation where they can get away with anything. It's otrageous, but it's beautiful and it seems to work. For this reason, IVAN&IVA never quite outwit the Aliens, never quite find out what the Aliens are up to. EPISODE 2: IVAN is warned and goes Alien stalking. He figures that they use hypnotism, mechanical or otherwise and schemes ways to avoid it. He's going to dose himself with amphetamines and coffee and he improvises electronics that will keep the alpha brain wave damped. Then IVA explains that, if he cant be hypnotized, the Aliens wont try to abduct him and he'll lose his one chance to trap them. Switch to Plan B. 8 He uses a radio controlled model helicopter with a micro-TV camera and a jam-resistant guidance system he's designed. IVA steers it to follow him. He gets abducted and she gets some beautiful footage, but no one will believe it because the Aliens look disconcertingly like Michelle Pfeiffer in a black leather catsuit. IVAN goes home to find a Michelle-Pfeiffer-in-a-catsuit-Alien in urgent conversation with his cat. Both of them resent the interruption, but are determined to be polite about it. IVAN misses subtleties, but he catches signals. "May I offer you a saucer of milk?", said IVAN. "Thank you, that would be nice", said the Alien. "Make it two", said the cat, a black Siamese named SCHROEDINGER. EPISODE 3: Hyperdrama flashback to EPISODE 1 IVAN tries to call the Star Cops using the EPR effect pivoting on the belt in Orion, which is neatly on the galactic equator. "It's been done by Bouwmeister and Zeilinger at the University of Innsbruck. I didn't know they had a university in Innsbruck, I thought they just skied and yodelled. They're calling it 'quantum teleportation', that's kind of grandiose but I guess they're entitled." IVAN throws the switch and finds himself on a jungle planet, eyeball to eyeball with A GIGANTIC 6-LEGGED, 3-EYED TELEPATHIC BEAR who likes to argue philosophy. "Misplaced my decimal point." said IVAN, looking morose. IVAN has been pulled in by the slip stream of the LEVITATING MILLIPEDES who are invading the SUPER-BEAR's planet. THE BEAR lectures to IVAN that it is proof of Man's inferiority that he needed to develop a civilization to defend himself, that Man's emphasis on cooperation and teamwork is proof of his individual inferiority, that he (THE BEAR, that is) is perfectly adapted to his environment which is the rational goal of every intelligent predator. Surf-Nazi chatter continues until THE BEAR needs IVAN's help to get him out of a trap he's walked into. 9 How does IVAN get away from THE BEARS AND THE MILLIPEDES? Easy. IVA does the experimental theology routine with the tachyons, warns IVAN off 3 days before and he finds himself standing next to IVA watching Cerenkov radiation in after dinner mint blue. For a second, he thinks that IVA has 3 eyes, but he blinks and she has 2 of them again. IVA gives IVAN a worried look. "Are you alright?" "I am perfectly adapted to my environment which must be the goal of any intelligent predator." "Just thought I'd ask." EPISODE 4: This time they time-travel Morse code to get the winning numbers the day before to a $175 million jackpot to the Connecticut lottery (YLLA's idea, actually), but IVAN is immediately kidnapped and held for ransom. IVA does the time travel signal to warn him. THE KIDNAPPERS think that one of them has talked and massacre each other. IVAN wins the same lottery again, but this time he's chased by SENDERO LUMINOSA because he represents fulfillment of the American Dream, by GUATEMALAN TERRORISTS who think he's stealing their kidneys to use as spare parts and then it's extortion by a SHANGHAI TRIAD. IVA gets him out of it a 2nd time. And a 3rd. But there's a strange slippage on each iteration. They're moving steadily backward in time until they're standing there in Bonnie and Clyde costumes watching _erenkov radiation in those giant 1930's vacuum tubes that look like cologne bottles while the Hindenburg burns merrily in the background. Regretfully, IVA jams the initial transmission of the winning numbers so, that the whole thing never happened. Then they're back in the present, in the lab, looking at each other and trying to rethink it. 10 EPISODE 5: IVAN mouse traps an alien starship with the most powerful electromagnetic pulse available from civilian hardware: the wa-wa pedal of a Hawaiian guitar (according to The Anarchists' Cookbook) But IVAN has noticed IVA and starts bargaining with the Aliens to be made 10 inches taller, IVA wants to be 10 years younger, YLLA wants to do a thesis on Alien psychology and ELI wants a starship. They settle for finding out if there's life on Mars and Jupiter: Of course, there is. EPISODE 6: Calling Galaxy Central and instantly being targeted for a barrage of inter-stellar junk mail, free try outs of science fiction hardware and dating services. And then petal-nosed men show up wanting us to trade land for firewater. And then there are fanatic religious missionaries from Sirius belligerently handing out pamphlets. TACTICS AND THE IRONIC SIDESTEP: As THE X-FILES have argued, and I believe that they have proved, that you can only work the alien peek-a-boo routine for half a season at a time. The real plot mechanism is a conspiracy to suppress the truth about almost anything and you do need variety even in your paranoia.. There are enough real conspiracies, but they're boring. They become dated quickly and require just too much explanation. They also involve all the tedious and overwrought obligations of investigative journalism. The intrigue has to be fictional.
Copyright © 1999 Angel Obregon |