A Living Machine With A Human Heart

Today I have another great guest post for you. This time Simon Horrocks  has taken some time to give us a fascinating look at the disturbing sci-fi movie "Third Contact", which he is currently working on.

Science fiction, known as a ‘literature of ideas’, has emerged as a genre only in relatively recent human history. We looked out into a vast, unfathomable universe and saw that we were far from the centre of it. So, something of an irony, then, that the more science enables us to dominate our environment, the less in control of it we feel.

Set in dystopian futures where civilisation has broken down, or inflicting on us irresistable warrior-races from alien worlds, or even monsters of our own making (from Frankenstein’s creation to The Terminator’s Skynet and beyond), sci-fi reflects an age of human paranoia, where every new discovery forces us to question everything around us.

American novelist Philip K. Dick’s stories were mostly driven by one theme; a question central to our existence – what does it mean to be human? Are we no more than a genetic machine? Are we merely a device for carrying memories around? If one day we can replicate this machine, so that neither we nor the machine can spot the difference, will this machine be human too?

But now some science has apparently lost the plot entirely. Yes, at the sub-atomic level, things are looking increasingly weird. You can be put in a box and be both dead and alive at the same time. The Quantum Suicide thought experiment suggests the conscious mind is immortal. As The Joker says in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight – “Whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you… stranger.”

The Steampunk trend is perhaps a reaction to these uncertain times, harking back to a day when science was as unsettling as a chemistry set on Christmas morning. H. G. Wells time machine was, somewhat quaintly, made out of nickel, ivory bars and ‘sawn out of rock crystal’. The intrepid Time Traveller embarks on his journey by pulling smartly on the machine’s ‘starting lever’.

However, there is perhaps a suggestion Wells had some foreknowledge of the Many Worlds theory and immortality. As the Time Traveller is about to set off on his journey, he describes the moment he is about to operate the machine as “a suicide holding a pistol to his skull”. Did he somehow get a premonition of the Quantum Suicide idea?

At some point in the (probably not too distant) future, ideas we now consider the height of cutting-edge sophistication, will inevitably seem humorously quaint to those looking backwards. But we science fiction creators hope we will have touched on some timeless theme, even if it’s a little bit by accident.

So it was, in 2007, I began to write a story about the uncertainty of everything. That story, through various incarnations, eventually became a movie, Third Contact. At the time, I was moving through many dark places in my mind. They’re not always the most pleasant places to be, but what I brought back from those lightless caves went into the screenplays I was writing.

And more and more, I became interested in the idea of the possibility of infinite realities. As a man who had for many years been pertrfied at the prospect of death, I began to understand how my own immortality might work out for me, after all. From the point of view of the physicist trying to blow his own brains out, a scientist finds himself with an impossible task. He cannot take his own life, no matter how many times he pulls the trigger.

I figured: death is only relevant to those who witness it, and you will never witness your own death. Therefore, from your own point of view, you are immortal – and we only have our own point of view to go by, right? And one of the 20^th Century’s most renowned philosophers had already arrived at this conclusion, about 90 years before. “Death is not an event in life. We do not live to experience death.” Ludwig Wittgenstein.

As I wrote Third Contact, philosophy and science reacted together to create my story. If a universe splits each time there is a possibility of more than one outcome, as Hugh Everett’s Many World’s theory suggests (a theory is which is currently in favour amongst physicists working at the quantum level), then… then what? It means that, if something has a probability of happening, no matter how small the chance, in some universe somewhere, it will happen.

Third Contact is essentially a story about a man, a psychotherapist, searching for an answer to a mystery. He finds himself in a world where strange things have begun to happen. A patient, a man called Rene, has died – apparent suicide.

The therapist, David Wright, tormented by memories of a woman from his past, spends his days consumed by despair. He is distracted for a moment by Rene’s grieving sister, Erika, who has travelled to London seeking answers. As Erika is going through Rene’s belongings, she finds a list of four memories, dated and described in short, personal details. She meets David and asks if this was part of his therapy – it was not.

The memory of his lost love continues to drive David towards madness, to the point where he is unable to function as a therapist. One patient, Helen, walks out. But there’s something strange about her behaviour. She seems quite happy as she informs him, “You really don’t know how clever you are, do you?” He offers to refer her to another therapist but she refuses.

That night, David discovers Helen’s handbag in his office. She must’ve forgotten it. For his own drunken amusement, he goes through her belongings. Then, he finds something profoundly disturbing. At the back of her diary, scribbled in pencil, a list of four memories, just like Rene’s. Brief but intimate details from her past, all dated.

With so much drugs and booze flowing through his viens, David struggles to stay awake as he drives across town. But he knows he must, because he fears the worst. He fears what he will find when he opens the door to Helen’s appartment and creeps along the unnaturally quiet corridor to her bedroom…

So begins David’s journey into the unknown. A film I made in hope of provoking other journeys. This is science fiction as a living machine, with a human heart. As H.G. Wells wrote about his own stories, “…the fantastic element, the strange property or the strange world, is used only to throw up and intensify our natural reactions of wonder, fear and perplexity.”

Simon Horrocks

Writer/Producer/Director of scifi thriller Third Contact

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