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

Hello David

I am a backup copy of a person

who was onced named Emily

You are the original source of a clone

that Emily would fall in love with

over 400 years from now

They were married

I have searched 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 inverted memory of me will only reveal itself to you as you look at 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 13 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

clones' 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.

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 illegal 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 can discover 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.

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.

On the side of the rock up ahead...

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

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. it is said

Please be extremely careful
navigating these tunnels, David. It is said

that if a single drop of the 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.

Sometimes I don't think I like eating eggs.

I think it must be some sort of texture thing.

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

I feel like I should like avocados more
whenever I see spacecraft overhead.

I fantasize about it exploding so I could be the person to describe the accident to

investigators.

Is that strange?

I love women that tell me how much they pay 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.

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.

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 backup 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 reenacted the echoes of your behavior, their David Prime

from long ago.

Do you think they had nightmares about drowning?

I have implanted the decided coordinates of your destination today in a separate neural

home 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 have left behind, in the correct place and at the correct time, and these other Davids

will have no memory of where to go.

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

One. Happiness.

Two. Sunlight.

Three, water.

One hundred and seventy
two, photos of extinct animals.

One hundred and seventy three,
successful medical procedures.

One hundred and seventy four, three O five,
the color blue and the smell of smoke.

Three O six, miniature birds.

307. Imagining the deaths of
everyone who's ever offended me.

308. Looking at my
feet in the morning light.

Hello, David, You have reached
the beacon, this is the beacon.

Welcome to the beacon,
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.

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 emergencies, cheap backup
copies are traditionally cloned at the

same time as children
or adults. Although their

brains will house backup memories,
these numbered clones are not intended

to inherit your primary consciousness
and generally used for labor, organ

donation, or long-term storage.
It is common for backups to suffer

deteriorations. One of your
backup 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 disk,
recovered from Emily. Two generations

from now, after the
invention of time travel,

one of your backup 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 backup 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

murder future David. Pull his
body in between time, though 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,

draws. If David 4 succeeds
in murdering David's next self,

the direct lineage of your consciousness
will end forever, and only the backup

Davids will live on. David also
knows that David 4 would not

murder 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 god-like 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 backup
copy in the in-between future.

The experiment with the
consumer time travel hack.

After many decades, he finally tests
his modified hack on his remaining backup

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 100 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 hack 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 is 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.

I am Zorgbot

Hello David, these are the
memories to the in-between

time calculations the
future David was working on

before he went mad

I have also included some
information about time travel

devices from my own era.

if you continue his work using
these ecumiliated memories

perhaps some day you will be able to travel

to the in-between future,
and save your lineage

by stopping the assassin at the
point in time in Emily's memory

where we know David will be killed

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, wether the ? would
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

Behold!

we'll have a rabbit!
and a shark! a universe!

it's a bunny! a butterfly! what's that?

what's that?

I knock your tower out

I don't know, a pig!

I drop it in the ocean in the ocean

we have a car and and a ? in it

a TV!

a turtle goes on a bunny

it's a woodpecker!

not on my face!

oh no!

you are once more part of a whole

like the scattering
seeds of a pretty flower

a bunny!

David! please note 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

wether the would even allow
for such a thing to happen

please be carefu. I love you.

perhaps there is still hope somwhere
in the ocean of time for David and Emily

Good luck.

Hello David