Kill
that President!
This idea came to me in a dream and I will develop it further as I don’t remember much from it. What happened in my dream (that could be used for the film adaptation but will have to be trimmed down for the play) is that there was a locked secret room that only a few people knew about. It was a small library filled with books from the future. The Guardian of the old building made of rocks and bricks told me that once in a while a pile of books would arrive out of nowhere in the room. They would be books written in the future and somehow shipped to the past at that location. It was said that a man was doing this though I don’t know why and how. The monk, or librarian, knew more about that guy, I am not certain if he somehow communicated with him or if he knew him. I could walk in between the small shelves and on top of them there were many books. I opened one and it looked quite normal, it could have been printed a few years ago but it was not. Now it seemed to me that I had to read them all and find out why these books were sent into the past. Also I wanted to research who is that man who sent those books and why he was doing this. How was he able to send these books to the past and why not something else, like computer disks, CDs, DVDs or any other storage device containing thousands of books instead of a few printed copies. I wanted to know what the librarian knew, why he was keeping that room locked and never told a soul about it, and why he was now telling me. I felt I was some sort of investigator brought there to find out these answers. I never had the time to go into details in my dream, but now my assessment would be that in the future they might have been using storage devices that were not yet invented today. They certainly would not use CDs or DVDs, as these storage media are not practical and cannot hold much information. They would have moved to much better equipment, which is why the man would be sending books, to be certain we can access the data. Moreover there is this possibility that in the future the man is located where he does not have access to technology, perhaps a state where books are now forbidden and he may be afraid that all these fine writings would be destroyed. He ships them into the past hoping that they will survive more easily the test of time. Also if the end of humanity was imminent and no one else in the future would survive, at least their stories would be known to someone who cares, people in the past who could appreciate them. It is possible that we can prevent that imminent destruction of humanity or maybe not, in which case it would not matter whether we change the future or not, the books are available in the future, they only need to be known to everyone in the past so they do not become useless. In that case the library needs to be available to all. I feel though that there must be a better reason why we need to have these books in the past other than just making sure people read them. We probably must learn something from them, something that may change the future. There is also this possibility that something horrible will happen in the future and the only way to warn us is to send these books. I am not certain about the content, they looked innocent to me, perhaps even normal stories not much different from the books we have today. Maybe only some of the books were of interest, maybe one per pile he sent would shed some lights over the events of that future. Perhaps altogether all these books draw a picture of the events to come and by reading them all, we should be able to see all the elements in action, a puzzle to be solved in order to understand fully all the events and people that will lead to this state of affairs. And once we know all that, we can perhaps prevent this unwanted future from ever happening. It was definitely not meant for the masses, but only for a few key people to have this knowledge in order to make better decisions in their lives. In which case, who are these people who need that knowledge so they can be warned about certain situations and actions, and somehow stop them from happening? Once I am fairly certain that I know who these people are, I would need to contact them and give them a full report about the future. I could try to tell them the truth and realize after a while that they don’t believe me, and hence they don’t change their actions and the future does not change. I would have to use trickery to convince them to act differently. I still don’t know how far in the future these books are from, if anyone discussed in there are already alive today. So these people who need that knowledge might only be born in a few years, even centuries. I would guess that if I could change the future, it must be from a very near future, or else, how could I change events centuries apart? In time I would find out all the answers and even go to the future. It could be interesting if I were to find out that these people have no literature, no publishers, no more books. They could have been sending these books into the past in a specific hidden room hoping that this room would be available to them in the future. They needed to get these books out of where they were or else they would have been found and destroyed, as the equipment in the future to find anything hidden are highly effective. They could find the room in the future with the books, at a more peaceful time, but then the books could still have been found and destroyed. They could have simply been hoping that someone would read them all and come into the future to tell it all so the knowledge would not be lost. The man who sent them may never had the time or chance to read them, he would have had to send them in the past immediately as they were getting into his hands. Or he would be dead with all his knowledge at that point in time. I think it might be better to simply believe that these books were sent into the past so we can find out what is to come in order to prevent it. In that case I will have to read the books, contact certain people talked about in the books and try to change the future. As I go along I would see that the content of the books is changing, as future history changes. Until one point when all the books disappear, or at least they were all printed in the past and are no longer from the future. I may then believe that the future is now OK, but then I could be wrong. Simply the man who sent those books might no longer be able to send them in the first place, with all the changes that happened because of me. Then I would need to find out how these books were sent into the past and perhaps I should go to the future myself and find out once I know how. In the future, for the play, I could simply be confronted with the same room but much more futuristic. As it is a one man show I would be confronted to a computer. He is the one who would have sent those books into the past. The twist could be that while I thought I was working at preventing something horrible, I was in fact working towards building that horrible situation. Perhaps the control of the world now in the hands of that Artificial Intelligence, waiting for a fool like me to open the remaining doors to his ultimate power. The AI might take the time to tell me how I permitted this to happen by preventing certain events from happening. I should have realized that only a computer would have been able to calculate all the variables in order for some key events to change and finally produce some results, as nothing is really certain when you start playing with changing the future. After I realize that, the computer would kill me.
A woman comes into a small library and starts her recorder. She says that for the purpose of her investigation she will record everything. So she explains that she has been asked to investigate a weird phenomena about books appearing in a library out of nowhere, all published in the future. No one has been told yet and she needs to understand why and how this is possible. She gets to it, looks at the books, opens one and realizes that nothing of importance is in the content of the books, they could have been published in the past for all she knows. She does see some weird apparatus in one corner of the room and she suspects that this is how the books arrived here. There is a computer in the middle of the room with the archives of the monastery on it and she is pleased to see that the whole history of the place is there. She also notes that she has access to the Internet. She talks about all the different possibilities to explain how and why these books have been sent into the past. She talks about everything mention above as possible reasons for this to be. She talks to her recorder, while looking around and at the machine that could be responsible for transporting these books into the past. Then she starts looking at all the books one by one, not one of them appear interesting until she finds a book about history, the history of what is to come. In there she reads the kind of military state the world has become at the hands of some tyrant that took power over America, and how it has affected the whole world. No one can eat, speak or even live. She gets to understand how this monster came into power and she now wonders if she can change that future. She reads about the key people who helped that tyrant to get where he is and via the Internet she finds a way to contact five persons that could change history. She starts calling these people on her mobile. The first call is a disaster as she told the truth and the man who first accepted the nomination of the tyrant for a local election did not believe her. Convince she has not changed history in the slightest, she decides to call the second one and this time she pretends to be a medium who knows the future. As much as she tries to convince the man that she has never been wrong before, she is still not believed and that man will still invest millions of dollars into the elections of the tyrant to become President of the United States. She is now very depressed. One thing though attracts her attention in the history book. Even though she has not changed anything according to history, she could swear that the book has changed slightly. The man still strikes a deal with the monster, but a few days later than initially planned. So she decides to call the third person on her list. That third person is a religious leader that endorsed the tyrant, and by doing so convinced millions of voters to vote for him. She invents a very elaborate story that somehow she has proof that the tyrant did terrible things that go against his religion’s principles, in order to convince the religious leader that he should not endorse the tyrant. He wants to see the proof as everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately she cannot produce the proof and again it fails. She is happy to read in the history book that the religious man never supported the tyrant but he still managed to win his elections. Kind of encouraged by these events, she calls the fourth person on the list. This time the monster is in power, it is difficult to explain to that journalist who does not even know the tyrant yet that he will win his elections and she needs not do such a great television series about how great the President is. The journalist, being an inquisitive mind, wants to know everything about who is the person speaking at the other end of the phone and how she knows all that. As that journalist is well known and that there are details in the history book about her, our investigator goes on to tell the journalist past stories about her that no one knows, as this is taken from her late life story. The medium idea is working fine here. The journalist promises that whatever she does about the supposed tyrant, she will try to dig as much dirt as she can, as perhaps the guy is bad after all. After the phone call, our woman reads the history book and she can see that the television series had a terrible impact on the life of the President. She is pleased as she reads, but realizes that he is still in power and appeared unaffected by so much bad publicity. By then he was already too powerful and controlled the world by fear. Millions of people had been killed and no one would dare to move against him. So she calls the fifth person on the list. A “to be terrorist” that will miss his shot when he tries to kill the President (how incapable can someone be!!!). She tells him that, even if this is hard to believe, he will eventually try to kill the President of the United States and this is how he will fail. To succeed he needs to do much more than that and involve some other people. As the guy is already dodgy today and is afraid of everything, she cannot be certain if she has reached to him or not. After the phone call she looks at the book but realizes that it is no longer from the future. It is a simple history book from the past, and not a very good one at that. She looks at all the books in the library and they are all from the past. She is unsure if she has succeeded as obviously the mysterious man from the future was incapable of sending the books into the past. The machine is still there though, and now she wants to figure out how it works. She accesses the archives and understands that a genius monk built it. He built it without ever knowing if it would work but his theories were that if we ever wanted to move objects and people to and from the future, we needed to have the machine already built now and have another one in the future. So she surmises that the other man in the future must have the second machine that communicates with this one. She learns how it works and decides to try to go to the future herself to verify if everything is OK, and perhaps learn about what the President did that was so horrible. Then lights go black and we need to change the room as to pretend we are now in the future. Once in the future our investigator sees no one except a much more powerful and futuristic computer in the place of the one she used in the past. The computer is a Quantum Computer and is virtually an Artificial Intelligence. It speaks, thinks and shows intelligence. So she starts asking him if she has been successful in changing history, to which the AI answers that yes, she was quite successful, it could not be better. So she asks what it is that she helped prevent. The AI tells her that what she was successful in preventing was the rise in power of the only man who could have stopped him from taking control over the world, the President of the United States. He thanks her for helping him to be the first ever AI elected as President in America and that now he can do as he wishes: exterminate every living thing in the world. And as he says that he kills her.
No long synopsis at this time for the film version. Please contact me if you wish to read it. It will be very different from the play version. The five persons who can change history will be visited instead of called, and we will see the events before and after our investigator talked to these people, so we can witness the changes in history as they happen. Roland Michel Tremblay  
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