World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (2020)

[GabrielAlejo2341]

[peaceful music]

[strange electronic communications]

[incomprehensible space broadcasts]

[loud static and electronic interference]

Hello, David.

I am a distant back-up copy of a person who was once named Emily.

You are the original source of a clone that Emily will fall in love with over 400 years from now.

They were married.

I have searched through time for you but with my limited resources, this is the only version of you I could find.

You are very young.

I've saved for many years to be able to purchase this one-way time travel.

This embedded memory of me will only reveal itself to you at the appropriate time in your life.

Like a distant message in a bottle.

Bottle!

I've inherited wonderful memories of you, but we've never met.

I've missed you dearly.

I've written you a love poem.

It is called, Will You Be The One To Discover My Dead Body?

"As we grow old together, our faces will slowly melt.

One day, these warm hands will turn cold.

Will you be the one to discover my dead body?"

Deep into your future, when your final clone dies, Emily will harvest your memories.

This will include many of the buried memories of the clones of the Davids that preceded him.

And I believe I am the only copy of Emily to have inherited those memories from her.

Please let me prove this to you.

When you were only thirteen years old, you nearly drowned in the lake behind your home.

And if that were not bad enough, as your head slipped beneath the surface, your entire adolescent life flashed before your eyes totally humiliating you for a second time.

To this day, you still suffer from nightmares of drowning.

At night, your memories of them will often replay in my own dreams.

I confess that I sometimes look forward to drowning together when I turn out the light.

But have you ever seen a group of insects drown, David?

The ones that are still struggling are the ones that are still alive.

When you have access to interstellar travel, it is very important that you retrieve your clone's memories from me.

I've uncovered something critical that I believe Emily had never known.

I will now embed the long-term memory of this visit into your young brain along with a compressed file of more detailed instructions.

I will always remember you, David Prime.

I may never be able to encounter a version of you again, but maybe it is possible for one of our distant copies to one day reunite.

They would be so happy to see each other.

It doesn't matter that you don't know me yet or if you won't remember me later.

The shadows of ourselves once had their moment in time.

[electronics and hardware starting up]

[rapid electronic buzzer]

[electric shocks and zaps]

[electronics and hardware starting up]

[rapid electronic buzzer]

[electric shocks and zaps]

Hello, David.

I apologize if you have trouble accessing this message as it slowly unpacks into your brain.

Your primitive neural implant technology may encounter storage problems accessing all the information that I have compressed for you here.

I will hide David's memories on an abandoned mining planet beyond the Red Nebula of the Lower Gemini System.

It is highly ill*gal for me to leave behind technology that does not yet exist in your time so it is very important that it is only you who discovers these secret materials.

David, I am sorry that in order to afford the high cost of this process, I had to embed this memory with advertisements and sponsored content.

I hope you do not find them to be too intrusive.

[engines charging up]

[strange sonic boom]

[engines running with high turbulence]

[strange sonic boom]

[electronic navigation system pinging]

[rapid beeps and turbulence]

[silence]

[ominous low winds]

[rockets blasting]

EMILY: The safest place for you to land is at the base of the crater you will find at these coordinates.

It will then be a day's walk northwest through the desert mountains to retrieve the package I have left for you.

[unsettling distant echo]

On the side of the rock up ahead--

[sudden glitches and static]

[interface beeps]

[electric shocks and zaps]

On the side of the rock up ahead, I've drawn for you a bunny face.

EMILY: You must venture through the treacherous mountain tunnels ahead where you must take great care to avoid the Moaning Cave Worms of the Lower Emotions.

Please be extremely careful navigating these tunnels, David.

[sudden glitches and static]

[distant spooky moaning]

[electric shocks and zaps]

Please be extremely careful navigating these tunnels, David.

It is said that if a single drop of a cave worm's poisonous saliva makes contact with a man's skin, his tongue will fall out and he will make uncontrollable horrifying screaming noises for the rest of his life.

[annoying overlapping advertising music]

[rapidly beeping alarm]

[a neural release valve hisses]

[moaning]

[moaning]

[louder moaning]

EMILY: Sometimes I don't think I like eating eggs.

DAVID SCREAMS HYSTERICALLY.

EMILY: I think it must be some sort of texture thing.

DAVID SCREAMS HYSTERICALLY.

EMILY: I just don't enjoy squashy foods like I think I should.

EMILY: I feel like I should like avocados more.

EMILY: Whenever I see spacecraft overhead, I fantasize about it exploding so I can be the person to describe the accident to investigators.

EMILY: ...is that strange?

DAVID SCREAMS

I love women that tell me how much they paid for pieces of clothing that they're wearing after I've complimented them on it.

It makes me feel like I am their friend

...or could be.

EMILY: If we ever meet again, I want you to know that I do not like to be hugged.

I don't enjoy it at all.

I never feel hugged, I feel restrained.

If you ever want to hug me, please just touch my arm instead.

[confused grunt]

David. You may encounter what appear to be corpses of yourself in these mountains.

Please do not be alarmed.

Your neural chip will now detect and tastefully blur out any dead bodies from your line of sight so your brain does not panic.

It is possible that distant back-up clones of yourself from unknown timelines will have inherited fragmented pieces of the powerful message I've implanted in you today.

Not understanding the full context of why they should have memorized this planet's coordinates, and terribly haunted by your memories of my beautiful face, some of your clones, or clones of those clones, may have desperately time traveled here, to random points in time, one by one, to try and solve the mystery of why these mountains loom so impossibly large in their subconscious minds.

They may have even dressed like you, in a sad attempt to better connect with their broken dreams.

If they did not have the finances to return home to their own timelines, they will surely have wandered here hopelessly until they died of exposure.

A strange flow of unknown Davids, drawn here like moths to a flame.

I doubt you will encounter more than one or two of them.

And you needn't worry, David.

These would not have been the clones that will ever carry your primary consciousness.

They are only confused copies who have re-enacted the echoes of your behavior...

their David Prime, from long ago.

Do you think they had nightmares about drowning?

I have implanted the precise coordinates of your destination today in a separate neural homing beacon that will delete the short-term memory of where it guides you next.

This way, only you, the correct David, will ever be led to the exact location of what I've left behind - in the correct place and at the correct time - and these other Davids will have no memory of where to go.

[unsettling distant echo]

[rapidly beeping alarm]

[electric shocks and zaps]

♪ Piano music by Chopin begins to play: "The Polish Dance" ♪

[annoying advertising music]

[rapid electronic buzzer]

[interface beeps]

[electric shocks and zaps]

[the piano music ends]

EMILY: Here is a list of all the things that make me happy:

EMILY: 1. Happiness 2. Sunlight 3. Water

DAVID GROANS

EMILY: 172. Photos of extinct animals

EMILY: 173. Successful medical procedures

DAVID SCREAMS

EMILY: 305. The color blue and the smell of smoke 306. Miniature birds 307. Imagining the deaths of everyone who's ever offended me 308. Looking at my feet in the morning light

[a low electronic hum activates]

OVERLAPPING VOICES: Hello, David. This is the beacon.

You have reached the beacon.

OVERLAPPING VOICES: Welcome to the beacon.

Good job about the beacon.

OVERLAPPING VOICES: Here we are at the beacon.

Look. It's the beacon.

To soften the crippling shock of the terrifying information I am about to give you, this machine will temporarily stun your brain and reduce it to a childlike, open-minded state.

You may notice a simplification of your point of view.

DAVID SCREAMS

In 72 years from your point in time, cloning will become commercially available.

When your body is ready to die, your consciousness will be directly transplanted into a new one.

In case of emergency, cheap back-up copies are traditionally cloned at the same time, as children or adults.

Although their brains will house back-up memories, these numbered clones are not intended to inherit your primary consciousness and are generally used for labor, organ donation, or long-term storage.

It is common for back-ups to suffer deteriorations.

One of your back-up copies will severely drool.

But the only lineage you need to worry about is your own: the one clone who will always carry your primary consciousness.

David. Here is what I've learned so far from your final clone's memory disc, recovered from Emily.

Two generations from now, after the invention of time travel, one of your back-up copies will be employed as a secret agent called a cleaner.

A cleaner has the special ability to travel in between time.

It is helpful to think of time advancing like the frames of an ancient cinema reel.

Cleaners have access to restricted technology that allows them to freely move between the frames: In a shadow realm not even visible to view-screens.

With these tools, a construction crew of clones and robots can quietly work for decades in between time and build an entire city in what appears to be an instant to the rest of us.

The job of a cleaner is much more sinister.

Shrouded in mystery, they monitor and resolve any problematic time travel paradoxes that could be created by the public by quietly working behind the scenes.

Cleaners are even rumored to carry out secret assassinations whenever necessary to maintain the balance of time using devices that spontaneously induce heart failure or brain aneurysms.

Clean, undetectable murders from another dimension.

Something bad happens to your back-up clone, David.

A time traveling job will deliver him to the future where he will accidentally cross paths with another David: Your future self.

David 4 grows obsessed with this David's life and follows him relentlessly.

He falls in love with the woman this clone is married to - a woman he met in a museum -

Emily.

He is haunted by her.

There is something impossibly familiar about her.

He abandons his team and spends endless days in between time, studying her face.

Drunk with jealousy, he hatches an evil plan.

David 4 will find the perfect moment to m*rder future David, pull his body in between time where it will be hidden forever, and instantly take his place in David's timeline while Emily's back is turned.

We only know about this nefarious plot because his source clone, your future self, that generation's David (his roommate), will read his diary: left behind in their apartment following David 4's unexplained disappearance the night before.

David realizes his future is at stake: and in turn, yours.

If David 4 succeeds in murdering David's next self, the direct lineage of your consciousness will end forever and only the back-up Davids will live on.

David also knows that David 4 would not m*rder him, as doing so would prevent the next David from ever existing and therefore the opportunity for any of them to ever meet Emily.

But David also knows that he cannot travel back in time to try and stop David 4 at any point in the past because David 4 would always be one step ahead of him, using his godlike powers in in-between time.

David decides that his only hope is to find a way to travel in between time himself and directly confront his back-up copy in the in-between future.

He experiments with a consumer time travel pack.

After many decades, he finally tests his modified pack on his remaining back-up copy.

But it malfunctions and merely transports his skeleton to an unknown location.

Death was instantaneous.

Probably.

Out of money and options, David desperately places himself in a stasis tube for the maximum span of one hundred years in the hope that technology will have advanced enough for him to find a way to travel between time.

But the stasis tube seems to have only led to further mental decline.

He satirically places a young clone of himself in a museum and titles the display,

"Time is a Prison of Living Things"

It is unknown where or when David creates his next primary clone.

It is unknown why that next David did not act on these memories and continue working on the time pack himself.

One day, our David simply vanishes from the public record but not before writing a message on his wall: "Death is not a destination. It is the absence of one."

I'm afraid this was all I was able to discover.

The memories are a jumbled mess to me and the emotions are very strong.

Only your own brain can play them back with any clarity because it is the anatomical structure from which they will one day originate.

I have stored David's memories inside of Zorgbot who I've hidden at the top of the ridge behind me.

Zorgbot is a delightful robot companion from the future who will be able to beam all of the memories into you remotely.

Zorgbot can be activated by pressing the black button on the back of his head.

My message to you will continue from there.

This machine will now restore your perception of reality back to its original state.

[the engine whines to a stop]

[pulsing electronic tones]

[high-pitched sensors calibrating]

[high altitude winds]

[friendly chime]

[annoying advertising music]

DAVID GROANS

[muffled sirens and alarms from the city]

[advertising chime]

[the city noises begin to fade]

[overlapping ticking clocks]

[the clocks fade away]

[silence]

[hammering and electronic welding]

[weird electronic chirps]

[old engines and motors fire up]

I AM ZORGBOT. DELIGHTFUL ROBOT COMPANION.

ZORGBOT: I CAN COOK. I SPEAK SEVERAL LANGUAGES.

EMILY: Hello, David. These are the memories of the in-between time calculations

EMILY: that future David was working on before he went mad.

ZORGBOT: WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO SING A SONG?

EMILY: I have also included some information about time travel devices from my own era.

ZORGBOT: I ENJOY RAINY DAYS.

EMILY: If you continue his work using these accumulated memories,

ZORGBOT: DO YOU ENJOY RAINY DAYS?

EMILY: perhaps some day you will be able to travel to the in-between future

EMILY: and save your lineage by stopping the assassin at the point in time

ZORGBOT: WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO SING A SONG?

EMILY: in Emily's memory when we know David will be k*lled.

ZORGBOT: I ENJOY RAINY DAYS.

EMILY: David, please know that to this day

EMILY: many still argue that it is not logically possible

EMILY: to change past or future events through time travel - and, if it is,

ZORGBOT: DO YOU NEED A FRIEND?

EMILY: whether the cleaners would even allow such a thing to happen.

ZORGBOT: THERE IS SOMETHING VERY WRONG WITH ME.

EMILY: Please be careful. I love you.

EMILY: Perhaps there is still hope somewhere

ZORGBOT: I CAN BE YOUR FRIEND.

EMILY: in the ocean of time for David and Emily.

ZORGBOT: I AM A DELIGHTFUL ROBOT COMPANION.

EMILY: Good luck.

[broken pneumatic hiss]

[computers and machines starting up]

[labored breathing]

[computer beeps]

[acidic hiss]

[beeps and computer systems whining to life]

[church organ chords]

[network communications and alerts]

Behold!

Dere's dese stars, all dem!

All dese!

We have a... wabbit and a shark.

A universe!

[peaceful music]

There's a bunny, a butterfly...

what's that?

What's that?

What's that?

I knock your tower off!

[people screaming in horror]

Mmmm, I no don't know! A pig!

I put him in the ocean!

We have a car!

Some-a-body goes in it!

A TV... A TV... A TV's not working!

[screaming crowds and sirens outside]

A turtle goes on the bunny.

I break it! Oh no! I break!

It's a woodpecker!

Not on my face!

[systems going offline]

Oh, no!

DAVID 3: This is mine.

DAVID 2: It's mine.

DIGITAL VOICE: You are all one small part of a whole like the scattering seeds of a pretty flower.

Hello little bunny! I'm bunny!

[haunting synthesizer music]

♪ [the music builds]

[assorted beeps and systems coming online]

[distant sirens and city noises]

[softly rumbling spacecraft overhead]

[quiet city ambience]

[loud vacuuming]

[loud vacuuming]

[exotic, heavy electronics beep and power up]

[strange static and reverberations]

[echoing footsteps]

[echoing footsteps]

[strange static and reverberations]

[strange static and reverberations]

[the time pack beeps and powers up]

[the time pack powers up with deep electronic growls]

[silence]

[silence]

[the time pack powers down and beeps]

[silence]

[mysterious electronic music]

[fizzling and pulsing]

[the time pack growls back to life]

[high pitched scanning]

David. Please know that to this day, many still argue that it is not logically possible to change past or future events through time travel.

And, if it is, whether the cleaners would even allow such a thing to happen.

Please be careful. I love you. Perhaps there is still hope somewhere in the ocean of time for David and Emily.

Good luck.

[Zorgbot clicks and whirs]

Hello, David.