Cut to, hard-rock listening, cigar smoking astro-tech dutifully clomping back to secrit Mars base.
*High fives Elon Musk.
I was just imaging your sidekick as Jon Cryer and your heroine as Molly Ringwald, and ‘choosing his death’ to be equivalent of leaving on his own at the party to go off with the rich asshole with the helicopter.EDIT: was there a helicopter, or was that Romi and Michelle?
I dunno, I always preferred Some Kind of Wonderful.
@SteampunkBanana The One? I’d totally forgotten that film, although I have seen it. Shame Delroy Lindo doesn’t do too much these days, always liked him. Sounds a bit Highlander-y too (and if we have multiple ‘transcenders’ we end up getting back towards Edge of Tomorrow again.
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I think the way to make it original in amongst a myriad of time-travel tropes, ahem, is to accentuate the changes in consciousness which would happen to her.
I’ve got some ideas about how to achieve multiple time streams in after effects. (ala Kylie Minogue vdeo Come into my world)
Making of:
Doing some testing this weekend and will try and design some kind of set up to model what I mean (See previous comment about flowing and terminating paths through a dangerous situation).
No, it would still be a dog. It must be a dog.
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I don’t like dogs.
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Well, that wasn’t my favourite Kylie Minogue video, but I enjoyed that, hadn’t seen it before.
A bit BTTF 2-esque?
Were you thinking of casting Ms. Minogue?
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Okay, let’s see if this idea is coalescing the way I think it is.
It seems to me that a relatively simple way to explain this disastrous wasteland is that humanity’s overpopulation ravaged the planet’s resources, and then, once the Elites discover their way to Post-Human Transcendence, there’s a caveat that the Transcendence will require an utterly enormous amount of near-instantaneous energy consumption that will prove ruinous to the ecology of the world and all lifeforms left behind. But of course the Elites, after some cursory handwringing, find that an acceptable sacrifice (since they’re off to do Great Things, no doubt, as they evolve to the higher plane of existence), and off they go.
Our hero finds the MacGuffin out in the wasteland.
Maybe it’s a relic of the mass-Transcendence of the Elites. Or maybe, if we don’t mind a Bill and Ted approach that hasn’t been fresh since Interstellar came out, since our post-humans “manipulate the very fabric of reality,” the MacGuffin was left there for her to find by the future, end-of-the-movie hero herself! (I’d rather not lean on this idea, for obvious reasons, if we don’t have to.)
Okay, dig this:
The Elites, having performed their final act of mischief upon our world, have moved on, throwing gasballs around the firmament, or whatever it is that newly-minted godlike beings do once they throw off the shackles of mortal, four-dimensional existence. They may vaguely regret destroying our world, but they mostly don’t give it a second thought any more than we grown-up humans think about our old home, the amniotic sac. Our hero (let’s try and think of a name for her, even if just as a temporary placeholder), once she figures out what has happened and is happening, reacts from a place of believing that all life is sacred (or at least should be recognized as having all the potential and all the value of any of the Elites). She wants to save what’s left behind, even if she finds herself unable (or eventually unwilling) to halt her own Transcendence. In that sense, she conceivably becomes the first compassionate Goddess. 
As for her power… hmmm… well, this is how I’m visualizing it now. Let me know if this is too far away from what you’re thinking.
The way our Elites manipulate reality amounts to a selection between the nearly-perfectly-parallel lines of all alternate realities. The technology permits them to slip from one leg of the Trousers of Time to another, provided those legs are close enough (i.e. identical enough to a given degree of precision). They flip through these parallel views until they find an instance with the Present Conditions they seek. The catch is that they still cannot see the future, so they don’t know if choosing this instance will result in a worse outcome down the road a few years or days or minutes, but if it does, they can reroll again for a new Present Instance. So this is how she discovers her power and learns how to use it: stopping reality at a death, flipping through a few parallel alternates until she lands on one that’s really close but in which she survives, and then goes on from there.
Hey, how about this: maybe a failsafe on her MacGuffin goes haywire, and she starts flipping through realities too far removed from her desired destination? Her hair changes color, the atmosphere gets slightly more nitrogen, all the characters in the scene grow gills, the setting and predicament changes altogether, gravity disappears, reappears, and fluctuates, and when she finally stops she’s (temporarily) in a completely unknown alien environment, fearing she’s trapped forever on the far end of the multiverse with a busted TARDIS-gun and no real idea how to fix it.
Two tangential thoughts:
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The sentimental distance the Elites keep from their roots, and the increasing remove at which our hero finds herself from Earthbound humanity, are reminiscent of what happens to Jon “Doctor Manhattan” Osterman in Watchmen. By the middle of the book, he really can’t be arsed to care about humanity’s troubles anymore, and prefers to sit in his Martian fortress and contemplate the radioactive lint in his navel.
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One of the ideas I have floating around is a contemplation of a modern-day incarnation of the goddess Fate. I scribbled down a 1200-word treatment of what I had in mind about seven years ago. if I can find it, I’ll post it below for giggles, though it’s not really relevant to this particular story. But a woman micromanaging reality to meet a very specific goal? That’s what it’s all about.
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Kylie Minogue as the mocap/voice basis of the dragon.
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In this scenario, we’ve preserved an element of conflict: stopping and rerolling at a death no longer feels as pointless as a Bioshock or Halo 4 campaign respawn, where you just keep beating your head against something until it’s finally worn down, rather than those circumstances or your strategy actually changing. Now, each reroll has a possibly-worse outcome, which our hero can’t discover until she lives it.
Do you suppose she might discover a “rewind” button, or an “undo” button on her MacGuffin, in case her choices keep getting progressively worse? Or should we close off backward time movement as making everything too easy? I personally like the idea of locking her and the Elites onto a steady forward movement in time… or maaaybe allowing them to slow or stop it in order to move around within it, but being utterly powerless to reverse it since, I dunno, that would be the sort of stuffing-the-toothpaste-back-into-the-tube that would irretrievably wrinkle the Trousers of Time and break the MacGuffin’s ability to jump between the legs… or maybe it would cross those legs in a way that mixes them up in a way that can’t be untangled, having horrific space-time consequences in those affected realities.
One reason why I like nailing the Elites down to a single time vector (or at least an infinite number of them that only proceed forward) is that if they’re able to see the future or revisit the past, it becomes too easy (trivially so) for them to fix the damage they’ve done. So maybe she has to find the Elites to try to convince them to change what they’ve done, and then for her to find out that, as far as they know, their omnipotence stops at backward time-travel; they simply can’t do it. As far as they know. And so then she has to convince them to figure out a way to do it, before her own diminishing humanity causes her to stop caring, in a Doctor Manhattan way.
Whaddaya think? Is this going in the right direction?
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Are we thinking that she gets a view of possible options when her life in in danger, and ‘chooses’ one?
(insert second reference of the day to quantum mechanics and wave function collapse)
Something else comes to mind here, too.
Have you seen Premium Rush? (if you haven’t, it’s about a bicycle courier and there are a few scenes where he is about to have an accident, and ‘sees’ his possible options, picking the one where he doesn’t have an accident. Can’t link to a video 'cos all I can find on YouTube appears to be the whole movie…
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Here it is. Pardon the scattershot nature of it all; it’s just essentially a Note To Self about a nebulous idea I had a while back. There’s much more of it in my head, can’t remember if I wrote more of it down elsewhere.
Y’ever notice a distinct lack of serendipity these days? Time was, lovers could meet in crowded train stations, lost pets could find their way home across thousands of miles, and winning lotto tickets only stuck to the heels of the virtuous and heretofore downtrodden.
But when was the last time any of that happened to you or anyone you know? Despite all those yogurt-headed nincompoops who fatuously proclaim that “everything happens for a reason,” the Entity variously referred to as Fate, Serendipity, Coincidence, and “The Damnedest Thing” has been away from Her post since February 28, 1997.
Sure, things used to happen for a Reason. But now they don’t, and (haven’t you noticed?) the world is largely the poorer for it. In the good old days, everything happened for the best. Good people never died unless for a truly excellent (though not always obvious) reason, evil was always (eventually) punished, and step by slow, incremental step, life on Earth crept toward the Paradise that was always our eventual due.
But without the Lady to give the cosmic tiller an occasional nudge back onto the Gulfstream of Good, the S.S. Humanity began to list toward the Mare Mediocritus, risking splintering herself on the Shoals of Shit. Entropy ruled, Chaos reigned, and Fear and Panic grinned and gambolled from soul to soul, sickening and weakening every relationship, blowing halitosis on every dice roll until they all came up snake-eyes, and soon creating premature nostalgics out of six-year-olds.
But today, all these years later, She’s back. And she’s got some serious catching up to do in a ridiculously short amount of time.
Causality isn’t always obvious. When the plummeting grand piano strikes the top of your hatless head, the cause is not subtle, and the effect is likely splashed all over the sidewalk. But few could guess that the full blame for the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 (for example) could not be laid at the doorstep of greedy banks or feckless borrowers, nor could anyone on Wall Street or Washington have done anything at all to stop this financial meltdown from reaching its critical mass, some eleven years after the catalyst event that brought the world’s greatest economy to its newly-scabby knees.
The near-collapse of the American economy was the direct result of the infamous North Hollywood Shootout of February 28, 1997. The B of A bank robbery, you’ll remember, with the two guys with body armor and assault weapons firing armor-piercing bullets during their 44-minute reign of terror on Laurel Canyon Boulevard just north of Victory.
How did one lead to the other? Well, first let us refute the most obvious (and least intelligent) possibility. Larry Phillips and Emil Matasareanu left the bank carrying a scant 300 grand. Even allowing for remarkably favorable rates of return on clever investments, the two wouldn’t have made off with an amount that would topple century-old banking institutions a decade later. In fact, their 44-minute reign of terror lasted just 44 minutes because immediately following those 44 minutes, both guys were shot dead and the money recovered.
So it’s a long story. But trust us: had one of the 1,300 bullets fired by the robbers not struck a passing pigeon high above Colfax Street about a half mile away, dropping a bloody mass of feathers and birdshit onto the windshield of an ill-maintained U-Haul truck, preventing the truck’s driver from stopping in time to avoid striking and messily exterminating 17-year-old paperboy and math whiz Simon Cortiz while he rushed through the last block of his route so he could get home and change in time for the districtwide Economics Bowl at which he expected to represent North Hollywood High against perennial champions Sylmar…
Well, then Ernie Lopez would have spent 30% less time scrubbing blood off the sidewalks in North Hollywood, might have had a better appetite, and probably would have driven his Caltrans pavement-washer over to the Sizzler on Roscoe around 2:10 PM, rather than settling for a quick Taco Bell quesadilla and a small Mountain Dew at 3:30.
And then, of course, all hell would have broken loose. Only back then instead of now. And you might not have thought so at the time, had things gone that way, but trust me, it would have been a big improvement in the long term. And not just for Simon and that damned pigeon.
So now the world has fallen so far off course, that the influence that Madame Serendipity must bring to bear is no longer subtle. Once-in-a-lifetime coincidences now happen all the time. Not just every day, but every minute. None of the eventual repercussions of these ridiculously unlikely occurrences is immediately obvious, as no pattern at all is present… except that things keep happening that, individually, have an infinitesimal likelihood of happening, and taken as a group have such a complete absence of probability that you know the gods are fucking with us. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not like the laws of physics are being broken. Falling pianos don’t suddenly bounce harmlessly off one’s head. It’s just that all of a sudden, certain people may suddenly become aware that they seem to be a magnet for falling pianos. On a normal day, few people step beneath falling pianos. Far fewer of them manage to dodge them. But nobody’s ever had to dodge pianos twice, no matter how butterfingered a piano mover he may be.
But today, if certain people want to keep breathing without mechanical assistance, they’d better keep on their toes. Those are the people who Fate has decided should have expired long ago, and now she’s out to rectify her eleven-year lapse of duty.
Now, this isn’t all Final Destination territory. Fate is not Death, and she doesn’t feel cheated or anything. In fact, she’s not even a particularly malevolent force. Just a fairly inexorable, “mysterious ways” one. But one guy notices early on the kooky effects of Fate’s meddling, before she really starts to ramp it up, and he manages to figure out what’s going on to a limited degree. This morning it occurred to me that he might be a god as well, or he might become one. I envision the two of them duelling with these coincidences and odd happenstances, sort of like the Wizard’s Duel in Disney’s The Sword in the Stone writ large. The cleverness by which one god could arrange for a passing 747 to suddenly run out of gas directly above his or her opponent tickles me in a sublimely juvenile cinematic way. I don’t yet know why Fate buggered off, nor what occasioned her return, and I don’t yet have an excuse for Our Hero to duel with her in this way. All I know is that she needs to cause a zillion extraordinarily unlikely (and yet, strictly speaking, 100% possible) events in order to right the listing ship of human destiny. That part right there was the part I’d conceived many years ago, and it’s the core of the story. Now, all I need are the motivations, and then the endless fun of inventing all the causal chains.
So: to work.
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A Magnolia/Dog Day Afternoon crossover?
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Oh! This is juicy! I’m too drunk to make an informed contribution right now.
I promise to read all of this in the new morning light and comment without impedence. And I am significantly impeded right noo. 
Intial impressions are “WOW!”. This is fun.
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I’d just like to add, impaired as I am:
let’s try and think of a name for her
(can’t quote on mobile)
Morrigan.
The phantom Queen. 
Oh my good god, the mobile version of discourse is not friendly (at least when drunk).
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Poifect! Morrigan she is.
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Could very well be. I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t seen either.
The bank robbery element was just a handy point of divergence. A hell of a lot of bullets were fired, and I thought it’d be funny if one of them that was shot in the air had far more far-reaching and ultimately destructive results than any that actually hit an intended target.
Turn in your Hollywood Mogul badge at the door, please. 
nah, sounds nowt like either apart from the real life bank robbery bit and the stuff in Magnolia about unlikely coincidence.
What you were describing almost sounded a bit Jason and the Argonauts-y too
Maybe both ideas have hints of Sliding Doors, too.
I’d watch it.
I require all future elevator pitches to be of the form ‘It’s X meets Y (meets Z)!’, to help me.
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YES! I like the Irishness of it!
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I dunno… I like the rest of the posthuman transcendence stuff, but I think we should brain storm other ideas that this comes about in the first place? I’ll have to think about it a little and see what pops into my head.
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Yeah, there’s definitely no reason to go with the obvious explanation if a better or more interesting one can be thought up. I figured if Morrigan is living in some postapocalyptic hellscape that is a direct result of the Transcendence of the Billionaires it might give her a strong motivation to seek their help in correcting the problem for the Meatbag Multitudes left behind. Or, if the Transcendence was at least partially motivated by the increasingly shitty conditions of the world simply due to what we humans have done to it, there could be a strong (though not particularly fresh & new) environmental message there. So that’s why I thought we could extrapolate from current RL conditions, and have the world be made intolerably crappy by the masses, and then almost uninhabitably destroyed and abandoned (rather than repaired or salvaged) by the 0.001%ers who Transcended, which makes them a bit more antagonistic rather than simply aloof.
Also, I’m not entirely sure whether the intent is to have Morrigan acquire the MacGuffin and end up having precisely the same powers as the Transcended (albeit “unearned” in their eyes), or if the MacGuffin bestows upon her additional powers and gifts that the Transcended do not possess, and thus instantly covet for themselves. Like maybe the “rewind” button, or some similar minor (and yet terribly significant) advantage.
But I do think it’s important we know where that MacGuffin came from, what it allows her to do, and why the Transcended don’t already possess it, if it gives her additional powers. We obviously don’t need to know the particulars on how it works or anything, but I believe we should know what the hell it is, in a practical sense, and how she came to acquire it. If it’s just a spare unused Transcend-o-tron that allows her to rise to their plane of existence, then it needs no special explanation. But if that were the case, wouldn’t she be woefully outnumbered by all the rest of them, and thus no real threat to them, unworthy of their attention?
Or will she simply need to persuade them?
Lots and lots to think about!
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