Let's write a movie. How hard could it be?

Is Atlantis one of these failed trouser legs?

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Ask the BBC…

###Officially Walked back, left as reminder not to drink and write.
Grain and grape and cigars and writing, apparently, do not mix for me.

Can she meet herself? Other versions of herself? Some on the same quest, others doomed to fail. Standing in the hypercube, would she see an infinite number of her-selves being shuffled around? Jumping here and there?

Perhaps not, perhaps I’m muddying the issue. Perhaps she would always be ‘herself’. Jumping into the version of a world where she does not exist. If she has infinite worlds to choose from, there would always be many, many worlds where the conditions were just right. Where everything was almost exactly the same but her doppelgänger from that reality quantum tunnelled into nothingness, was hit by a cosmic ray and evaporated, was killed by a bomb, ala Rick and Morty (see this series by Dan Harmon, it’s one of the best, funniest cartoons ever made).

But if she is to have visions and we are to have multiple writers going wild within their own trouser leg (ahem), perhaps we can have these diversions, to enforce specific ideas. (I don’t want to be too possessive :slight_smile: Even if we have been hogging the mic :grin: ).


Ok, so I also have to state, quite drunk right now and sort of promised myself I wouldn’t contribute when in this state. I get real muddy real quick.

Will revisit and revise in the morning. :heavy_check_mark:

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Morrigan prematurely stepped into the Project Accelerator, and vanished…

She awoke to find herself trapped in the wrong trousers (Gromit!), suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not her own.

Fortunately, contact with her own trouser leg was maintained through brain wave transmissions with Al, the Project Observer who appeared in the form of a hologram that only Morrigan can see and hear.

Trapped in the trousers, Morrigan finds herself leaping from leg to leg, putting things right that once went wrong, and hoping each time that her next leap will be the leap home…

Oh boy.

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Because:

If that was purely from memory, I am impressed!

Of course, also:

Oh god damn, now I want to watch Quantum Leap. To the inter-tubes!

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Have you ever had a feeling of reality’s primacy? Of our reality’s primacy? Like we are an average of all possibility, not just one of many?

I’ve read that there are more ways of re-arranging a deck of cards than there are atoms composing the earth.

A deck can be shuffled many ways but there is always one card on top.

But in our ‘deck’ the underlying cards inform the condition of the top card. Like an error checking bit. A card that encapsulates the whole hand of that deck.

The top trump.

Just leaving this here for later.


And so, to sleep.

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[Chicken chicken chicken] (https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf).

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That’s why we have Ezra, il miglior fabbro.

I think she has to be herself, at least most of the time. It’s a function of what she’s doing. She is transferring her consciousness into a physical version of herself that is in the same 4-dimensional locus in space/time as she was in the Trouser-leg she just left, complete with the same subjective history (at least to several decimal places), and the only difference is that this new one isn’t quite killing her yet.

Which brings up another hiccup.

When I proposed this potential bit of backstory:

…the idea was that he was standing perfectly still, looking at the passing Trouser-legs of possibility, but fearful of actually moving himself into any of them, for fear of being either violently torn asunder on a subatomic level, or simply never being able to return. The upshot was that the Transcender would be able to see, in rapid succession, and eventually choose from, all the potentialities near enough to permit transfer. Which is kinda nonsensical (more so than I like, to be honest), for the following reasons:

  1. If the Transcender is flipping his consciousness from one reality-stream into another, why would his body disappear from the one he just left? Why would he physically cease to exist in that timeline? He’s moving his consciousness into an existing body, not into a vacuum where everyone would be surprised to see him.

  2. And if a Transcender (specifically, one with Morrigan’s power, not the relatively pedestrian power of the Elites) leaves one timeline where she just died to enter another, how could she bring with her the knowledge she possessed just at the instance of her death (or whatever triggered her flip) in the previous timeline? I mean, the flip may not quite be instantaneous, but her consciousness has selected a timeline in which she did not die, and yet she’s bringing along a memory of having died (or otherwise dodged something that necessitated her flip, some event that did not quite happen in this new timeline). I assume her old “just-died” memory comes with her and instantly overwrites the “didn’t-die” memory native to the new timeline. Which implies a bit of overlap, maybe. Hmm. The way I envision it, time kinda freezes at that moment, and her POV shuffles through a quick assortment of almost-identical POVs until she settles on one where she is not quite being killed, upon which time resumes its normal flow.

Hey, it’s only a movie, right? :wink:

So I guess that could work.


Okay, I’ve just been AFK for a couple hours having dinner with co-workers, but now I want to address a few more things before going home and to bed. Let me read up to where we are first.

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Heroic Sacrifice. Yeah, that’s pretty tropey all right.

Hmm. A new question just occurred to me:

How meta can our multiverse be? How infinite are our possibilities? If we oversimplify it to the point where we just say, “If it can be imagined, then somewhere it exists,” then not only can truly weird things happen, but reality-breaking ones as well… paradoxes out the wazoo.

Imagine Morrigan begins to discover her power, not yet understanding its full extent. At first she flips through realities simply to stay alive. The trick seems automatic to her, out of her control, but then she slowly begins to realize that the flip is more autonomic than anything else, like yanking her hand away from a sudden flame, or blinking when a gnat flies too close to her face. She learns she can control her flips, that they aren’t just useful for involuntarily ducking danger. She can slow and apparently stop time when she selects a new reality, but of course that effect is 100% subjective; as far as both realities on either side of her flip are concerned, time always progressed as normal. She learns more about the Elites from the facility whence they departed. She decides to see if she can pursue them, to see if they might be persuaded to help her fix the problem. After all, they’re like gods now, but they once were human. When she finds them, most are uninterested in what she wants, though they’re powerfully interested in what she can do, once they become aware of it. The few who are sympathetic reveal that with all their extradimensional abilities, they are still locked onto a one-way time vector, and see no possibility of going back to change things (and not much advantage, if any, in doing so in the first place). Perhaps there is a struggle. Perhaps she reveals her dimension-swapping ability, and perhaps the Elites are powerful enough to recognize that power for what it is: that multi-dimension-sliding trick that Brother Musk once glimpsed way back in the day. They are astounded that it wasn’t just a flaw in the physical mechanism, an incomplete tuning-in process. Having thought that they’d attained perfect Transcendence, they are now infuriated to find that their godhood is now little more than demigodhood compared to Morrigan. They turn on her.

At this point, it seems to Morrigan that all potential realities into which she can flip contain Elites who are actively trying to kill her or steal her power from her. They take shots at her, they often miss, when they hit her she flips into another reality, but in the new one there’s no break; they’re still trying to get her. She’s still alive after every flip, but not at all refreshed, and she’s tiring rapidly. Remember: though minor circumstances around her might change, and very minor characteristics of her might change in some flips, she is still in a mortal human form, and though she has flipped into realities where that form can adapt or survive in an eyeblink, she has not become an immortal being of pure energy like the Transcended have. She can just duck through an infinity of back doors everytime her mortality is threatened… but that makes all the difference.

At a lull in the conflict, a sympathetic Elite ally makes a suggestion: since she appears to be able to shift between alternate realities, and there seem to be no real limit to those realities, maybe she can access any reality that she can imagine. (I am somewhat reminded of McCaffrey’s Pern novel Dragonflight, when the dragonriders rediscover that their teleporting dragons can actually teleport through time, given clear enough coordinates such as a physical landmark and a temporal one such as star positions in the sky… and for centuries they thought they could only teleport through space and not time!) Soon, after a few disastrous attempts, she discovers that it’s really hard and painful to even try to find a reality in which she could never have been born, since the forced-open junction between those two realms instantly threatens to tear her to microscopic pieces. But then her ally suggests she try to find a reality in which she exists, but practical time travel has been discovered. And then she can flip to that reality and try to find a way to use the time-traveling mechanism to close off the Transcendence before the Exodus begins.

Heh. And then perhaps she discovers that the inventor of the time machine was one of the would-be Elites who abandoned the Transcendence as a conscientious objector, and once all the Elites had left, he turned his mind to building a time machine, hoping to find a way to better the plight of Earthbound humanity. But of course, neither he nor Morrigan can use it to go back and halt the Transcendence, since that was the triggering event that led both of them to seek time travel in the first place. If the Transcendence is shut down, neither of them will end up with the ability to travel through time to shut down the Transcendence. (Yeah, yeah, another TV trope… there’s a reason they’re tropes: they’re so popular they’re tough to avoid.)

We (and Morrigan) come to realize that her powers cannot help her stop the Transcendence, since the Transcendence directly allowed her to become the empowered being she is now. So after a brief spell of despair, she realizes she has to find a reality wherein the effect of the Exodus was not nearly so catastrophic. She can imagine it, so she’s convinced it must exist… but she can’t find it after a long, long time of trying. Maybe she realizes that that particular reality is so far removed from her own, that she’s going to have to make a special effort to travel to a dimension very, very different from her own, one so different that she’s not at all sure she’ll be able to find it, let alone enter it. But maybe she succeeds. And maybe, rather than settling on that reality, she sets out to discover why that reality’s Transcendence was not nearly as destructive as that in her own universe. And maybe she sets out to carry that key difference back with her to her home universe.

Because she’s going to have to face a tough reality in her new Goddesshood: she can’t save everyone. There are many (nearly all!) universes where she fails utterly, and many more where she never existed, and in all those universes there is untold pain and suffering and anguish because of the Transcendence… and there isn’t a damn thing she can do about all those universes. Because she has already failed, or was never there to succeed. Because she can imagine those circumstances, they exist… somewhere. And this nearly breaks her mind with hopelessness, despair, and regret. It occurs to her what it might feel like when a small child asks her, in all seriousness, why she allowed his parents to die so painfully, and for his legs to be burned so horribly, and his sister to starve so miserably, how could she let this happen in a world that pretends to contain justice and compassion and mercy. And she realizes that godhood is no more than a perception, that nothing can be omnipotent, that all good ends cannot be served in the same reality, and that for all her advantages, even added to the Elites’, most living things will die, painfully and alone, somewhere among the uncaring multiverses.

And somehow she will eventually overcome this despair, and do what she can for her home timeline… which maybe turns out to be the one she always can return to, for even though it’s the one in which she was first killed, it’s also the one whence sprang Morrigan the Immortal, the woman who never could be killed. She never died in that universe; she dodged it by ducking into another strip of reality! In that universe, her home one, she has never actually died at all.

A moment’s thought (like I just had) might suggest to her that she could bring The Key Difference technology back home with her, the one that made the Transcendence bearable to the Left Behind. The only caveat is that she herself, and all her friends and family that she knew growing up, must be made to suffer precisely as she felt they did in her own subjective past. She, at least, must go through all the events in her life that led up to her turning on the MacGuffin, or else she’ll never do it. And so she has to somehow go back in time and deploy the Key Difference, while fine-tuning the area-of-effect of the Exodus’ destruction so she can live her young life believing that the whole world has been destroyed, when in fact it has not.

Will that bitter pill be something she can swallow? Will that trolley-car sacrifice, that of everyone she ever knew and loved in her whole life weighed against everyone else in the wide world, be a choice she can make?

Man, it must suck to be a goddess. So much responsibility! :wink:

Anyway. Maybe we can chew on that a bit. Jesus, we gotta start parceling out the writing assignments; this thing is getting too big, too unwieldy, and too plotted-out.

Do we all still like it? I think it’s obvious that I do.

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Though I’ve never actually seen the show, I was getting increasingly aware that we might be inching a bit too close to it. :wink:

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I’m going to walk back my rambling additions from last night and promise not to make drunken meanderings from now on. Fun experiment but no. Not conducive to concentration and subtlety.

Of course there’s no physical travel. D’oh!
We’ve already established that she is getting physically killed in one reality and tunnelling through to another, more beneficial reality. Her mind state would be almost perfectly similar, the neurology an exact match, only a whisper, a deja vu of knowledge concerning her death would persist.

An echo of tragedy.


Ok, just had a minute or two to re-read this in the morning light. Back in a few moments to pour over this and redact, repair and revisit.

Now, this would constitute one of those greater infinities that surround our hero’s arc. The background to her strata of infinity.

Perhaps something she can eventually become aware of as she finally transcends, or is given a glimpse of as a warning when lamp-shading the limits of her powers in order to encapsulate the plot. The ‘here be monsters’, ‘avoid the chasms of chaos’ deal.
Perhaps a mechanism by which she is eventually able to introduce lasting change in her own braid of realities. If this awareness, or even ‘reach’ of her powers only becomes available once she transcends-proper it would give her a way of averting the dystopia in the past.

This has emanations from ‘GEB, Godel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid’.
These are the ‘sub-circuits’ to her mind, but also to her ability. These are channels the stream of her consciousness can take, invoking the primacy of reality I talked about in the ‘trump’ post.

We come to learn she isn’t just flitting between those potential, survivable realities but is actually bringing those cards to the top of the deck.

Whilst she is becoming more familiar with her powers and how to make use of them, we also learn more about the subtle nature of the movements through the many worlds, given her primacy.
The primacy of her story.
She cannot move into realities in which, by definition, she will never exist. And on the flip side of that coin? We have the integrity of the plot denoting what we, as the viewers, are looking at. Narrative primacy. The story told around the fire must be bound to itself to be a story.


Yes. And that’s the boundary within which we should colour (color ;))

Apologies for my diversion :pensive:

Hands in his pocket he could not lie
Hands in his pocket he began to cry
Hands in his pocket he lowered his eyes
He said, “Miss, I ought to apologise
“I’ve been falling, I’ve fallen down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf2nrdk7HMM


Snap back to reality, Oh there goes gravity


I see this as the final realisation of the film, she has had her back turned to these worlds in order to conquer her own labours. Before we fade to black, as she has finally made good and majestic, completed her quest, she finally turns to the seething multitude and sees disaster and chaos growing like cancer.
Empire Strikes Back ending anyone? We leave our hero with a job unfinished, potential for a sequel or an eternal golden braid of sequels.
We can open the door to the many worlds once she has discovered the key out of her own reality tunnel. We can succeed and also leave her, the troubled god, to ponder what comes next. And we gift ourselves the potential for Morrigan to inhabit many other stories.


Addressed above. Agreed.


I think we have different grades of transition here.

Sister Musk is, until the point of Morrigan’s transcendence, the only person to have made it out of context. To have cast off the shackles of her humanity to such a degree as to abandon her fixation with the sandbox that the others dare not leave.

The other Elites have managed a lesser form of Transcendence than Sister Musk but a greater form than Morrigan is initially capable of. They have gone ‘Rainbow Body’ as Sister Musk has, programmed their mind-body into extra-dimensional light, a cohesive concrescence of Mind-stream energy that can concentrate it’s influence across many worlds but always within their original realm, the sandbox of their original ‘braid’ of the many worlds.

Morrigan.
Morrigan is initially just flitting to the closest available many-world. We come to learn that she is in fact reshuffling the deck, bringing to primacy the reality most conducive to her survival. The mind-state, the neurology of her self in that world is almost an exact match, save for the half-remembered nightmare of her death. Deja vu of disaster but quickly forgotten with a shiver down her spine, absorbed and sent packing to the subconscious as her extant mind stream asserts itself. But never completely erased. Allowing her to pick up these memories again, once she has begun to realise the potential of her powers.

As she develops an awareness of what is happening, perhaps through some weird discontinuities, she beings to pick at the seams of her powers, unravelling the potential of her capabilities. This would be final act stuff, I think. Foreshadowed but not broken open into the light until she has learned some truly difficult lessons. Until she starts to take on the mantle of ‘Morrigan The Saviour’. Having learned all the harsh, ironic lessons that evolution entails.

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The evolution of the danger she faces also transcends. Initially it is her environment, trashed and deadly but once she has caught the eye of the Elites, they too would constitute an impediment to her progression.
But there are many Elites paying attention, and, as the pirates of the cursed plains must always behave themselves or bring down the ire of the community, so too must the Elites.
They are self-regulating to a degree, but the baddies, Morrigan’s foes, are always trying to discreetly impede or destroy or redirect her against the wishes of the Musk-community. They would use subterfuge, maybe even echoing the kind of subterfuge Sister Musk is using. Perhaps to harness Morrigan’s potentiality for themselves. Something they do not fully understand.
Morrigan would be the first star of incandescence they would be aware of that has the potential to eclipse even their own power. If Sister Musk had managed to infiltrate and hide herself amongst them, disguised as just another Musk, they would not be aware of the infinities beyond. Would this potential beckon them? Would it terrify them? Is she something to study, or something to destroy?

I greatly like the self-limiting nature of the society of Elites. I especially like it because it echoes the society of the human survivors. A self-regulating, homoeostatic community. Morrigan is the outlier, the new gene being spliced into the genome of the (many) world(s). They would surely ask themselves ‘Will she cause cancer or gift a new capability?’


Their ignorance revealed. How do they react. Is there a council of Elites? Are there dark wraiths amongst them? Their ‘society’ is drawn from the trillionaires of the period of transcendence. Surely there must be monsters amongst them. Surely, too, there must be calming voices. Calls for investigation rather than annihilation.

“Let’s not nuke it from orbit. We could try and peel her apart and see what makes her tick but, and I’m ashamed to say this… I did already try that. Something stopped me. I really chipped a nail there. You try grabbing her and see what happens.”


Ha! That’s a great way of externalising the solution. Somewhere there is an abandoned lab waiting, Mary Celeste-like, in the cooling fog of evaporating liquid nitrogen. All of the transcendents may be locked to a specific direction of time but that doesn’t mean that backward travel is completely impossible. Just a technology out with their reach. Only for organics? Terminator style. They would have to give up sooo much of themselves in order to fit back into a mortal being, none of them had even considered using the damn thing. Why go back and fix things when we have it so good, up here in the Aspen-realms? [Editors note: see below for better limiting factor]

Here’s the kicker. We can subvert this trope because we have a transcendent caught midway, still in her human form. She can travel back into time using the time machine but can subvert the direction of the travel. Not just into a static line where she will be forced to watch the whole thing happen again but into a new braid that she can bring to primacy.

This is the ultimate reality-gun. A fusion of her morality-driven powers and an extremely rare device. [Ed’s note: Here it is] Perhaps because of it’s existence it is the only one that can possibly exist in all of the many worlds. Locking down it’s own projection into reality. One of a kind in the truest possible sense. Waiting off in the hinterlands of potentiality. Sullen, solid and unmoving. A freak of a freak coincidence.

A tragic failure from the point of view of the inventor, who is forced to watch as the same immoveable events transpire again and again. Trapped within his own very special time-stream, unable to effect any change. Ready to destroy the damn thing, wrench in hand, raised above his head; about to destroy it forever when Morrigan splices into his world and stops him at the last second.

This would have to exist in some special braid of realities which she cannot initially access. That none of the Elites from her braid can access. Only once she comes to her full powers would the knowledge of such a place be possible. Only then would she be able to travel to it and make use of the solitary device.

The Macguffin itself has an evolution. A transcendence of it’s own.

:smile:


Truly we are creating a god. Not the God. I am all for thumbing our noses at the theists in this regard. Can God create a rock so heavy he cannot lift it? No. A being must always have some kind of limitation, god-like or not. Otherwise we are looking at the multi-verse and hand waving: “it must be a being itself!”
It need not be.

The depth of humility this goddess feels is only amplified by her expanded perceptions. Her compassion only grows with the realisation that, whilst more powerful, she is only more cognisant of her limitations in the grand scheme of things. This is a story of the limitations of true ‘getting your hands dirty’ morality. Not hand waving omnipotent fantasy: “The market will take care of it,”!


This is the true core of the film. The humanity and empathy that drives us. The tragedy and sadness. The bitter-sweet comedy of life. The soul.

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Perhaps this comment really requires a new topic of it’s own.

How the hell do we visualise this? Any suggestions for prior art that inspires you? Original ideas?

I used to be fairly handy with after effects and am currently rebuilding my PC with that in mind. These ideas seem like an appropriate challenge to get involved and dust off my degraded capabilities.

Sky replacement, virtual set building or augmentation of shooting locations, keying and the like are all a lot easier than they look. Especially with some stock footage, of which there is a great deal on offer, going cheap.

I’ve got a fair idea of how to accomplish the blending worlds of Morrigan’s initial realisation of her ability. The ‘snap to’ temporary disembodiment. The flowing into a surviving version of herself. The rising of that card to the top of the deck, taking primacy. Asserting itself.

I can even see it not being too difficult to overlay multiple realities at once, the diverging world lines she later becomes aware of.

Her powers within the wasteland and the wasteland itself would be relativity easy to represent. It’s the transcendent realms that trouble me.

What the hell would they look like? What would the transcended beings look like?

If they can choose their own form, would some still look human, some like the gods of old? Would some take on the form of Cthulu, ravenous bestialities? Would some be merely points of light?

And what the hell would it look like from extra-dimensionality? They are ‘up the skyscraper’ in space-time. Along orthogonal dimensions we cannot imagine. Are they a mere twist of the camera away, the converging lines of our perception of distance squeezed down into a point or line? Great chasms of stars or negative star-scapes filled with points of darkness? Seething tendrils of time tunnels ala Bill and Ted? Fractal psychedelia?

Any ideas?

I kinda like Kylie-Dragon. I see her as pink on pink on pink. Redefining the colour.


I like the visual implications of the ‘Braid’ idea. It is a purposefully limiting mechanic. We are encapsulated within the braid of our story. There may be many braids, accessible by Sister-Musk but everyone else, even the other Elites must be (initially) encapsulated within the story’s braid.

Now, this visual idea is redolent of Bill&Ted’s time travel, going along the time circuits, which is probably a bit too cutesy but I think it has potential if applied properly.

Has anyone ever hallucinated music? There’s a form of synaesthesia in the ‘literature’ of trip reports that seems fairly consistent. At least, insofar as I have found/experienced.
That of a trunk of visualisation, passing vertically past the observers visual field. Different instruments, or different melodies and timbres evoking particular columns of colour and pattern. Flowing here and there as the pattern changes, brighter and darker, closer and further away. Twisting in the rhythm.

I see this trunk as our braid. Consisting of many different but ‘bound’ instrumentalities, of worlds. Each with their own contribution to the theme. Reverberating with each other, harmonically bound and evocative.

Instead of time-tunnels or ‘circuits’ flowing like writhing snakes on the ground, I imagine a trunk of braided reality flowing vertically past our perception. Perhaps like a waterfall, something like Rapunzel’s hair flowing down the tower. Golden, braided, eternal.

[Hmm, yeah, that was one of my ‘close to the chest’ ideas. But FI, I’m all in.]

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Well, hot damn.

I just got to work a half hour ago, turned on my computer, and read this stuff. And, not to put too fine a point on it, I am basically orgasmic with delight and glee! I have so much to say in response, and so much appreciation to register, but I have a sound layback session for our series finale to take care of for the next couple hours, so I’ll be AFK until that’s done.

But this sounds so very, very, very good to me. I’ll be back to offer feedback ASAP.

:heart_eyes:

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I’ll also be AFK for a while then probably on a self imposed ‘read only’ session.

I think our time zones are working against us here. :smile:

Yes indeed. Where you is? GMT? I’m out in L.A.

Scotland. GMT.

Hoots min.

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Oof. Stay warm!

This picture is 2 minutes old:

24 degrees Celsius. That’s how we do February out here. :wink:

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