Scene 6.05 - Pit Stop
INT. Leah’s Luxury Suites
FADE IN
(RAMONA is straddling VERNE, who is unconscious and lying on his back, face up. RAMONA is lightly-slapping VERNE. The earth-shaking footsteps are heard receding in the distance.)
RAMONA
Hey! Mister! Wake up! Hey! Mister Verne! Wake up!
VERNE
Wha? (Lightly-grabs RAMONA’S wrist, stopping the slapping action.) What are you doing?
RAMONA
(Getting up:) You fainted.
VERNE
(Also gets up, brushes off.) I- I never faint.
RAMONA
Swooned, passed-out, whatever, you were out cold, man.
VERNE
What on Earth was that... thing?
RAMONA
I dunno, but it went past us towards the coast. I was gonna jump into your beer-portal thing, but the portal evaporated -- and besides, you’re pretty heavy, anyway.
VERNE
I weigh one-hundred and ninety-six pounds, not one single ounce more.
RAMONA
Yeah. I gotcha. I’m still twenty-two and holding. Hold on, things are different, man. Why does everything look like; so hazy? What happened to everybody?
VERNE
I told you, the Time-Police must have gotten them.
RAMONA
No, I mean everyone. The streets are empty, man. There’s no lights on or nothing. Kinda cool, actually...
VERNE
What? What do you mean? You mean the world is uninhabited? (Checks it visually:) Oh no! Why didn’t you mention this before?
(VERNE lightly taps his forehead against the glass window, he closes his eyes and does a number of futile, mental equations.)
RAMONA
I didn’t notice before --what’s going on?
VERNE
My worst fear, baby. The Zeta anomaly has occurred, we’ve missed the deadline and we got chucked to the wayside.
RAMONA
Deadline?
VERNE
In weird science, or the science your time considers mystical or theoretical or hocus-pocus -- studies like real quantum physics, in those ways, there’s a fixed amount of time for a phantasm and its host to rejoin, or for someone to solve a paradox, or whatever the case may be that throws you into a world of confusion.
RAMONA
Huh?
VERNE
After all the time-travels and paradoxes heaped on top of the mess I made back at New Trinity, it’s no wonder the hidey-hole shielded us from the Zeta-event and we ended up here instead.
RAMONA
What are you talking about?
VERNE
The Internexus led us here; where we started with an additional paradox outside the Q-S-I-2. With all the paradox I’ve racked up, one more makes little difference to me, but why you... maybe I’ve entangled you somehow...
RAMONA
What are you saying?
VERNE
I thought we had returned, but instead we created a paradox that was outside, looking in -- and instead of going to Zeta, we were sent to this pit of unholy darkness.
RAMONA
What do you mean? It all looks the same, except everybody’s gone. (Tries to console him as VERNE taps his head on the pane in a futile hope of coming up with a plan.) What's a Q-S-I-2?
VERNE
Quantum sphere of immediate influence.
RAMONA
What does that mean?
VERNE
If I try to throw a ball to you, I can use hard numbers cuz you’re only a heartbeat away. I don’t have to take into account the curvature of the Earth or the gravitational pull of other galaxies or magnetic fields of celestial bodies or even solar flares or radiation, for that matter. If I’m trying to turn you into pure energy and beam you to another place across The Universe and put you back together again without really moving at all -- instantaneously, and also without making anything implode or explode anywhere else, and really without beaming you anywhere at all, and without causing quantum displacement, which prehistoric people like you don't understand ALWAYS results in the formation of near-matter -- apparently in my case, clones of myself -- all those variables and a host of others too numerous to mention must taken into account.
RAMONA
Is this like Algebra? I totally suck at math...
VERNE
You’ve got it! That’s what I’m trying to say about modern Q-P analysis. See, we hate math, too, cuz there’s too many formulas that apply only under one set of circumstances, a billion exceptions and never a cohesive theory to make it agree -- except for one truth.
RAMONA
Really? What’s that?
VERNE
You cannot divide by Zero.
RAMONA
Okay...
VERNE
Two positives multiplied make a positive. A positive multiplied by a negative make a negative. A negative multiplied by a negative make a positive.
RAMONA
Yeah, I know. What does it all mean, tho? Life is kinda short, ya know...
VERNE
What it means is that even in cloning and quantum displacement, nature always follows the rules. If I throw a ball to you, you either will or you won’t catch it. I invented a formula where you always will know you will always catch it before you even throw it, and sometimes you'll catch it when it wasn't thrown, but you'll never miss catching it even if it ISN'T thrown -- that's the most radical part about it! Thus, every time, you can once-in-a-blue-moon divide by zero, you can let positives become negatives as often as the wind blows, and sure as sheep-shearing shysters shucking shameful shinbones, you can walk your way out of any bad situation and, in almost every instance, you find something better.
RAMONA
Huh. Nature doesn’t always make the right choices though.
VERNE
Nature never makes a choice, it only follows rules. Nature cannot round up or down, it simply is what it is. Sure, you can alter and displace it, but you can never completely remove it. Space is NOT empty. What is, is and always will be. You are you and never anyone else. You never need math to throw a baseball, and you never need math to operate a red room -- that's why only the government has them. It's like how the crossbow replaced the longbow -- anyone can pull a trigger, even toddlers. That's why they never wanted kids involved, and that's why in the future there aren't any children left to imagine life anymore -- "somebody's kid" queered it.
RAMONA
This is some killer dank. You've totally lost me. What'dya meen by "queer?"
VERNE
In quantum physics, each quote-unquote "color" has a property, a possibility, a mode which we call a quote-unquote "room" when applied to its core equation -- a Universal Law, Of Sorts. It sometimes allows you with almost absolute certainty to know what is going to happen before you expend the energy to set a quantum event into motion.
RAMONA
Huh?
VERNE
I invented an equation that unilaterally seperates imaginative folly and creative growth from self-hating delusions and psychotic dead weight. With the red room, a conscious being can spend a mental eon solving a problem before tackling it -- before picking up a scalpel, before sketching a masterpiece, before curing self-inflicted mental illness, before jumping across space -- seemingly into the past, or, as I do in my trade -- it lets patients walk out of the room as overall, better-adjusted and healthier human beings. The red-room equation allows a ball of fire to instantly become a paradise and never the other way around. (Pause.) Apparently, it can even bring the near-dead to life. It cures, never kills.
RAMONA
Hmmm. So you're the doctor in the future who brought her back to life?
VERNE
Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I got a theory, but that’s all it is. She might have brought herself back, or maybe the laser didn't really kill her -- I don’t know anymore; I gave up on that conundrum a while back. Then again, maybe we’re all dead already and we just don’t know it.
RAMONA
What do you mean?
VERNE
You’ve swallowed what I’ve fed to ya so far, so you must already at least know about a few things that happen in the future.
RAMONA
Not really. I don't get half of what Leah says about it, but that's half of her charm. As for my future, I don’t even know where I’m going to wake up tomorrow.
VERNE
Neither do I. I do know something, though. It’s something I can’t tell my crew, but I can tell you, because you can’t create a paradox against it because you weren't involved within the Q-S-I-2: (Beaming:) We’re still operating red.
RAMONA
What do you mean, “We’re still operating red?”
VERNE
(Shakes off his mental questioning of the paradox's reality:) I don’t know, it's a fleeting thought I think -- this can’t be a near-matter paradox, right? I mean, you’re real, right?
RAMONA
Last time I checked...
VERNE
You don’t know of any world outside of this one, do you?
RAMONA
You mean like Earth? It’s the only Earth I know- (Pause. Looking out:) Used to know...
VERNE
No, I mean, like that maybe that you’re really not who you think you are and that you’re someone else all stoned out in a bigger and more real world...
RAMONA
I tried acid in college once and some dead-head who kept trying to feel me up between hits of nitrous was feeding me crap like that. I mean, the time-closet was cool and all, but you’re not gonna try to “take me to a new level of experience,” are you?
VERNE
(Pause, almost exasperated; almost condescending:) Look, I know primitive humankind didn’t know squat about these things, so I’ll try to make it simple to you, in a language you may understand -- Let’s say you go on a mathematic picnic in your land car to a park. It's packed. There's nowhere to sit, much less spread out a blanket. Yet, when you arrive you bring a colony of ants and an ionospheric wand to get the storm clouds brewin’, and before you know it, you're in a lonely park where your sandwiches never go stale and get trapped in a time when the fat lady never sings, and then when you eventually come back from the picnic, there's nothing on the radio of your fossil-powered land car except opera and the dish runs away with the spoon to Vegas to elope before the spoon shows.
RAMONA
Hey! Are you trying to confuse me?
VERNE
The Whole Universe is confused. We’re not in the real world anymore, maybe it’s never been real, I don’t know. We’ve been sent to another place, a place you can’t get into no matter how much you might want to -- unless, of course, you trip over it -- and it’s a place you can’t get out of once you’re there unless the Almighty steps in for a cosmic intervention, or some alien artifact comes your way...
RAMONA
Eh? What are you saying?
VERNE
We’re not on Earth, not the Earth we know, anyway... We’re in the Phantom World.
(He gives a somber Nemo look. Subtle mood music for effect. Pause.)
RAMONA
The Phantom World? What are you talking about? What's the Phantom World?
VERNE
This place: A dreaded, dark, dismal abyss of false hope and empty promises. A conundrum of epic preportions. A prison I thought I’d left behind when the Guardian of Infinity so sweetly sacrificed me to the welcoming arms of the Nazis. (Pause.) In a way, it certainly looks like I’ve come full-circle.
RAMONA
Whatever, man. So what you saying? Can we get back to the sane world; er, the real world or what?
(VERNE gently clasps her hands in his; it’s the beginning of some real chemistry...)
VERNE
Mona, I’m gonna need your help. You might not want to believe this, but the world you knew, the world we just were in, is most-likely completely-and-udderly gone.
RAMONA
Gone?
VERNE
Udderly gone. We’re in a parallel world, a Phantom World, one that was created the second we stepped out of the Internexus. It was made because there was nothing for us to go back to, nothing that could stand alone without us; nothing that could exist on its own. It never was really there.
RAMONA
What was with the monster? Is that thing part of this world?
VERNE
No, it can’t be; nothing is ever born here, only brought here -- it must have got sent here just like we did. It must have existed on Earth somewhere, somehow... and when the party disappeared, that left only three possible quantum alternatives; to go to Zeta, which is unlikely; cease to exist, which is truly impossible; or catch a ride with us, which looks like what happened. The question isn’t really how it got here, but how it got to Twenty-First Century Earth in the first place. That thing was... different. The monster is surely a result of a Zetan paradox, perhaps created by The Baron, or Ronnie, or who knows? Maybe one of the concubines got a little imaginative...
RAMONA
Are there more of those things? If things like that can get sent here, what else could be sent here?
VERNE
No telling; just about anything you could think of. That monster is certainly beyond what I’ve ever seen before. Perhaps it’s best that it got sent here, it could be cataclysmic elsewhere. Hmm. Another important question is, if we’re here, what happened to all the others? Did they get to the Internexus? Why were we the only ones sent to the Phantom World? What kind of paradox was created that includes us and excludes them? How in Hades do we get out of this pickle?
RAMONA
I was hoping you could tell me. (Crosses to the verdan.) Look: Leah; at least, her amulet. Think she’s still here?
(RAMONA taps an amulet suspended from a branch of a mature, dried-up, Bonzai tree, it glistens and begins to glow a dim amber.)
VERNE
That’s it! Yes! Azalea’s crystal! It’s still functioning!
RAMONA
What does that mean?
VERNE
It's from a grain of Zeta; it's a passage. It means there’s hope. A slim chance, but hope. (Sly:) Wanna try making us a beer-portal?
RAMONA
(Flabbergasted:) What, you think I can make one?
VERNE
Baby, I know you can. Here, give it a try. Just picture in your mind what you saw in the Internexus. Think of that.
(VERNE hands her a beer. RAMONA shakes it and sprays it across a pristine [replica?] of a large Monet. The painting comes to life. It gains dimension, crispness heretofore unknown. Wind, pollen, fragrances fill the room from the large window painting. VERNE takes a step-inside and picks a flower, puts it into the lapel of a suit that materialized the second he entered the painting. He now wears a suit not unlike those found in a Seraut masterpiece. It’s a strange clash between Abstract and Expressionism that does not escape RAMONA. She steps toward the painting; enchanted.)
RAMONA
Incredible! Wow! I did it! I really did it!
VERNE
Come on, there’s not a lot we can do for the Phantom World, we’ll come back to this problem later. We’ve got to find out what happened to the party. Let’s go see what’s happening on Zeta.
RAMONA
Zeta?
VERNE
Some call it heaven, some call it the other place. It’s really whatever you want it to be.
(RAMONA grabs a bag that she thinks is her purse. It’s actually the hand bag AZALEA retreived from the Zeppelin that does look very similar. Yet, I’m completley sure that it is a mistake that RAMONA shall never make again or repeat in quite the same way. They enter the portal.)
DISSOLVE TO: