Scene 2.02 - Tour Bus
EST: EXT./INT. Tour Bus - Day.
FADE IN
(A flashy tour bus, followed by a van and a car, is driving on sparsely-used highway. Upbeat, heavy-metal music plays. Credits roll.)
CG: October 31, 2069 - Wichita, Kansas
LOSE CG
ZOOM IN
CUT TO: INT. Tour bus
(BOBBY and PANDORA are gazing into a hologram. See next.)
CUT TO: The video reception as it would appear on a television screen, yet without a television screen.
PANDORA
One minute. Relax, Bobby.
CUTAWAY: Aerial: Highway. Tour bus, 2040's-model van and 1970's, four-door Cadillac
(The tour bus is painted with a waterfall of gold coins melting continuously from the roof of the vehicle to its tires. Seemingly, the paint is filled with millions of crystal pixels capable of functioning as a video screen -- seamlessly creating a perpetual waterfall of gold and jewels, drizzling and spattering and splunking in random ways across the lettering on the sides of the bus. The bus leaves a small trail of water and lit from the bus' underside, appears to be golden in color -- completing the illusion that gold coins are falling from the heavens and melting into a golden stream left on the asphalt. The van, which also trails water, drives itself on an unmarked, rubbery-yet-solid highway that not only soaks up the trails of water left by the vehicles, but appears to have the sheen of wet asphalt, although, in truth, the road isn't asphalt but a highly-sophisticated "concrete" manufactured of electro-magnetic chips of gravel made to be able to "breathe" on its own. Face it, it’s 2069. Nearly every adult who remembers where they were on 9/11 is living some virtual-reality existence at a rest home. To many, Social Security was a sick joke, Most gas-burning vehicles have either been converted to hydrogen or have gone the way of the steamship, and global warming keeps Kansas weather between 65 degrees to 125 degrees year-round. Marijuana is finally decriminalized in all 52 states, although most government issue schwag wouldn’t get a person high even if a pound of it were to be smoked. Black-market trading almost exceeds legal trading and the barter system has returned to the unemployed and impovershed in spades. The U.S. dollar is almost worth less than the peso and most everything is made of non-durable plastic. The drinking age has been moved to the voting age and the draft has been re-instated. Life expectancy is about 100 years of age for men and 110 for women. Cloning organs is a fact of life. Health care is abysmal to the poor and a daily beautifying factor to the rich. The world population is twenty billion, and the U.S. population is still around 500 million. Computers run most everything, and taxes are at an all-time high. The federal deficit has passed the quad-trillion mark, and many people are out of work. Few can remember any pure racial lines, or racism for that matter. There are no more pure Native Americans and fewer pure Hawaiians and everyone has a little Hispanic, Negro and Asian in their blood and yet everyone thinks they are entitled to a piece of the reparation fund, wherever that may be. Invisible laser beams are the weapons of choice for the military and most prisons are packed with political dissidents and transgressors who committed acts that were misdemeanors a scant fifty years prior. Cameras are everywhere and holograms fill every nook-and-cranny unused by the government. A person's number is seemingly all that they are in the Invisible Age. A person's monetary standing is all anyone seems to know or care about. Socialism has swept the system and most citizens work for or with the government in one capacity or another. Rock And Roll, now an arcane part of a past culture, is one of the few artistic endeavors mostly untouched by the Department of Cultural Preservation, which is also called The Department of Censorship by its detractors. Few Americans own their own home and most of U.S. property is owned by foreign investors. It is an act of treason to speak against the government or to criticize its foreign relations and civil rights aren’t really enjoyed by anyone. The A-C-L-U has been abolished while U-C-L-A thrives. The K-K-K lost members while the A-A-R-P doubled in size. The N-R-A swelled as the P-T-A died of atrophy. The Bill of Rights and most Amendments have been interpreted by The Supreme Court to be a Constitutional guideline rather than a rule of law and one half of the U.S. population is secretly bisexual or homosexual while the other half is vocally and vehemently anti-gay. A resurgence of the Great Depression dominates the culture of America and in the New Dust Bowl; Kansans speak, dress and act much like their ancestors did a hundred and thirty-five years earlier -- despite constant consumer guidance that impels one to a contrary mode of life, a commercialized non-existence of consumer conformity offered by an all-encompassing media. Everything is on the internet, and most rural life and evidence of Americana are sad memories nationwide. Congress controls agriculture and all pertinent national resources through over-regulation and mostly operates behind closed doors. Dirty-bomb detonations are occasionally reported by the corporate-owned media outlets only to discourage dissedents by showing the government's swift reciprocation with fines and hard-labor sentences imposed on family members and children of people suspected to be revolutionaries or against the "Constitutional Revisionists" who at times use nefarious methods to achieve their goals. Wall Street has fallen to the Global Financial Network, which is criticized as being about as reliable and true as weather forecasts, which haven’t gotten any more reliable since the dawn of agriculture. Africa is a desert with little population, and Northern Ukraine and China supply the world with most of the grain and cereal products of the world. China and India run the United Nations, and the U.S. has been at war with South America for over a decade. Most adults in the United States of America read at a third-grade level and illiteracy is at an all-time high. Holographic movies and acoustical folk bands dominate the culture of the Midwest, in lieu of the fact that the government cranks-out propaganda that countermands individual liberty or state sovereignty. Internment and burial-at-sea are reserved for the very wealthy while most of America is forced to be cremated. Blind patriotism runs the oligarchy and few can remember anything from history that hasn’t been reworded, changed or glossed over by political hogwash. The oldest United States Citizen is 179 years old and is using nano-bot viruses and invasive life support to sustain his every organ and he is solely able to communicate via logic-chip implant and brainwave sensors. The oldest woman in the world is 193 years old and still does gardening in her hometown of Chen Zhen, China, and claims to have never been sick a day in her life. Disco has made a monstrous and violent revival, and heavy-metal bands like Tartarus might as well be The Glen Miller Orchestra, considering the average fan’s age is over fifty years old. BOBBY is a living legend, just getting his first touch of grey after turning 100 last June. Medical science has poked and prodded him a thousand times with no explanation to how he appears to be only a day shy of 30. Cancer still hasn’t been cured, although HIV is thankfully an ancient memory. PANDORA is a sweet, 23-year-old virgin who recently ditched her religious convictions to tour with BOBBY in hopes of promoting her latest time-share venture and she spends most of her time plugged into the internet or practicing government-sanctioned Wicca. Halloween itself has degraded to complete commercialism, and trick-or-treating hasn’t occured openly in over twenty-five years, although vandals still have been known to pull a few pranks here and there. The Holy Roman Catholic Church, The Church Of Latter-Day Saints and The Family Of Mankind are the dominant U.S. Christian religions. Due to strict laws governing the practice of certain religions, Islam is nearly unknown on the Western Hemisphere while encompassing the rest of the world outside of Christian Europe, Hindu South Asia and Bhuddist East Asia. Isolationist Texas has partially-seceded from the Union, and Hawaii is still sparsely populated after the Great Tsunami of 2038. Alaska has seen over 60 million immigrants in the last fifty years and rivals California as the most populated state, even though many Alaskans are not technically U.S. citizens. Mexico is a host of genocide while Canada tops the world’s tourism trade. Hollywood is mostly run by the state and Washington D.C. has a 30-foot-high barricade surrounding it. [Anyone accompanying a person under 18 into Washington D.C. without a permit is promptly arrested for endangerment of a child.] A new toy, called The Odd-Boy Trickster, is the focus of this year’s Christmas shopping season and cannot be found outside of the internet for less than five-hundred dollars. What the Odd-Boy Trickster actually does is still uncertain to most, although it appears to engage people with short attention spans for an inordinate amount of time and has been described as addictive. Such is the life and culture in this year of our Lord, October 31, 2069.)
FTB