Callisto

Callisto

image

Sleek, silver. No shadow. Silver.

You acquaint yourself with what you’re looking at. The fog around the corners of your eyes dissolves. Slowly, the ceiling above you begins to materialise. “I am alive,” you think, “but too soon.”

This was wrong. Surely, this is wrong. You had heard that time doesn’t seem to pass when you’re under, but this seems distinctly different. Something was looming over you - the sleek silver ceiling that bore no shadow seemed like a distant, yet familiar threat. That was it - there should be a shadow there! If you in orbit of Callisto by now there would be a shadow. You turn your head -

No. You can’t. Something is wrong. You can’t move - you can’t even feel. Not like a numbness, no, like an absence. Your eyes dart down - the position of your body makes hardly anything visible. You just want to check - is it still there? Are you all still even there? Then you remember;

The Cells Alive.

The Cells Alive System was revolutionary. Loosely based on a process used in a Japanese Fridge of all things, the process involved freezing living tissue without the risk of damage or liquid crystallisation. For longhaul journeys like this, it was a Godsend.

By why were you awake? Why had your brain awoken without the rest of you? You wondered if something similar had happened to the rest of the crew - if you could just turn your head, you could check on them. A hot wave passes over you - or more accurately, your brain. Your mind. That’s the part of you you can feel. What was happening?

Sleek, shadowless ceiling. Just look at something else.

Memory ekes back in, slowly. You remember now - something had gone wrong. The ship lost power. You had no idea why - you were in a pod, for God’s sake. Either way, the hum of the ship was gone.

Well, “hum” is an embellishment. You have no sense of hearing presently, but when the ship is moving, you can feel the vibrations in your skull. If you can move your eyes, it’s a safe bet you’d be able to feel the ship’s engine, rocking them ever so slightly.

Or maybe your ears did work. Maybe there was just nothing to hear.

The ship was at a standstill - yet here you were. You remember, in your earlier days, before the mission, asking about the safety of the pods. In the dim blue light of a distant memory, nestled deep in the canopy of your faraway world, you remember, and are overcome with horror.

Early in the morning, the engineer reassures you. The pods run on a separate power source. They’ll keep you frozen, and keep you fed, even if the main ships power dies. Your body needs so little food in this state, and the machine will even exercise your muscles a little while you sleep.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Why are you awake? How long will you be awake? Does Earth know you are?

It is frustrating that the overwhelming panic that grips you has no outlet - no sweat, no swearing, no screaming - nothing. Even your eye control is limited - you can’t even blink. The pod is keeping your eye moist. Were the settings jumbled? Why was your brain awake? Why were your eyes?

“Send me to sleep,” you pray. “Send me to sleep, send me to sleep until we’re rescued, please.” Like a child, you wish you could tighten your eyes, to amplify the strength of the wish.

Then another terrifying thought overcomes you; what if they aren’t coming for you? What if, back home, all they see is that the power is out? What if they assume you dead? What if they never come? How long will you be this way?

Silver, sleek, featureless. This image would burn into your eyes until, even if you escaped, it would have long since shrivelled up your retinas. Please, you ask, give me a shadow. Give me a detail to latch on to - give me something.

“The CAS system will keep you going,” I remembered, “pretty much indefinitely.”

Send me to sleep and kill me. Please. Send me to sleep and kill me. Cut the feeding tube off. Let your muscles atrophy. Please. God. Please.

Deja Vu. You remember thinking this before. What time was this? Has this happened before to me? How long have I… You remember… Yes, this did happen before, you woke up. But something was different.

Christ, God, no. The ceiling, you remember now. It wasn’t featureless. There was a mural on it. Where was it? Where had it gone? It was a schematic of the ship, where had it gone?! Was this the same ship? had you been taken, somehow? Was I home?! Wait, no, have I -

had you just been here long enough for your eyesight to fade?

How long have you been here?

No, I can’t have… This is all… Ah yes. Now you remember. Silver. Sleek. Featureless. You hadn’t woken up just now. It was… something else. A moment of clarity… You think. Alzheimer’s? Dementia? Not a physical thing, though. It was time, gnawing at me… Something… Else.

They say that time passes quicker the older you are. I wonder how long I have been here… Time doesn’t seem to be passing quicker, though maybe i would only notice if I had a point of reference… Something besides this ceiling… Maybe if I tried to have a conversation, everything would be moving too fast for me to follow. How long does it take a human brain to rot from the inside out, on its own accord?

I wonder if they mourned me, on the news… I wonder what a human face looks like. What do shapes look like?

The moments of clarity are the worst. I want it to take me over completely. I wonder how scared I was, the first time. The first time I realised this was everything… I wonder how different I really have it from people back home. This is ageing, this is just… Time… That’s all it is. The time we’re all afflicted by… condensed… into a…

How old are you? I remember now… Laying here… you remember the schematic fading… You could even notice it happening. Almost in real time, I saw it fade. Let me close my eyes.

Callisto, you think, must be beautiful. A beautiful silver. Sleek. Featureless.

More Posts from Infranaut and Others

6 years ago

Hey everybody. Here’s a video I made about animation, what it means to me and the psychological idea of “Flow” - or when a task becomes meditative. 

If you enjoy this video, please feel free to let me know if there’s another topic you’d like me to talk about. Similarly, any advice/general comments are much obliged. 

Oh! And I went and did a twitter now because people on my videos kept asking. Feel free to follow me @The_Infranaut

Thanks everybody!


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7 years ago

ok so i generally don't find guys attractive but you cute 👌🏼👀

As a long-decaying malevolent skeleton I don’t hear that much, so thanks

9 years ago

Is it insecurity or ego which drives men to so ferociously want to uncomplicate complicated women?


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9 years ago

Music as Metaphor

In the video above, India sits at the piano, playing a soft melody to herself. In this moment, she is alone, reflecting on her predicament. She has a violent darkness in her that at this moment, causes her more sadness than anything else. This is her meditation.

Charlie enters, the looming figure that is representative of this darkness made flesh. Charlie is outwardly violent, unashamedly manipulative, and takes immense joy in his cruelty. Throughout the film, he attempts to indoctrinate India into this ideology. He interrupts her melody with the kind of deep, foreboding chords you would expect, which India futilely attempts to rebuff with her original, soft melody. The following scene perfectly illustrates the relationship between the two characters without a word being said.

While India is still technically in control of the song, Charlie is controlling it’s tone and atmosphere with these dark bass notes. Much like in life, he is trying to get under her skin, and seduce her into his psychosis. Note how he ever-so-gently let’s their hands touch 19 seconds in, daring her to get closer to him, daring her to let him lead. Perhaps excited by this touch, India gives in, and at this point the song becomes a duet.

This is music as metaphor.

Closing her eyes, India allows the music to naturally progress, lowering her defenses, entertaining the idea of harmony. Charlie brilliantly picks up on this moment of weakness, and utilities it to completely take control, changing the music dramatically as well as closing the gap between them physically. She loses all her autonomy in the song, and for a moment plays nothing. She should not have thought cooperation would come so easily.

Unwilling to accept this, she herself makes a bold move; changing the mood of the song. She enters with a lighter, much more playful flourish, as if this is all a game or competition. Look at how she looks at Charlie; she wants to know just how much she can control him, to what extent she can lead (or equally, to what extent he’ll let her lead). She studies his face intensely, desperately curious how he will react. she has been baited, and by engaging Charlie rather than ignoring him, she is already letting him take control. This is especially pertinent given how light and and playful the song has become.

That said, listen to what happens when their eyes meet; however playful, the notes start to sting.

India realises her mistake, and yet again tries to rectify it. However, it is too late, in this moment they connected, and a sad, dark honesty comes out in the song. India knows she is like Charlie, sh knows it but she hates it, and right now she cannot deny it. Charlie realises that he has more power over India now by allowing her to take the lead, and allows her the spiral downwards around the 1:25 mark. He knows what it will lead to; the ostinato.

This is the moment when India and Charlie are truly working together; India allows herself not to lead or follow, but to work in unison with this monster. This is when she has fallen completely under his spell, and she allows herself to. Charlie understands this, and the physical barrier between them completely breaks down. The music grows somewhat sadder as India feels the lust and longing in her grow from this physical contact. She knows what Charlie is. She knows what she is. She cannot help what she wants. This is the closest the two get to having a sex scene in the film, and honestly, it’s an infinitely more effective way of conveying their relationship to one another. Charlie moves out from behind India, knowing his seduction has worked. India closes her eyes, her legs tense, and she is lost in the song.

The song abruptly stops, and there is a clear look of both exhaustion, horror and realisation on India’s face. She pants and takes the silence in. Charlie leans in to kiss her, and also disappears behind her in the shot. When she turns to him, she see’s he was never actually there.

This is the power he holds over her.

Stoker is a fantastic film from one of my favourite working Directors, and I feel this scene perfectly illustrates the idea of music as metaphor in cinema.


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8 years ago

The way my life is going... I know if I don't do it now, I'll never die with dignity.

Owen from “Lilytooth”, a work in progress


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6 years ago

Jordan Peterson is debating Slavoj Zizek! For money! For only a thousand dollars, you can watch two old men read a script where they luke-warm agree with each other so as to not look bad!

I am very sick and this was easy to make. Give me a like, share or sub if you can, it means a lot!


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8 years ago
Rolling

Rolling

I always enjoyed the sound of the projector clicking and sputtering to life.

I work in an arthouse cinema. We show oldies and obscure flicks. A lot of what some people would call “classics” mixed with trash to appease the ironic, younger crowd. Personally I think if a movie is bad you shouldn't watch it, and if it's old... Well, older movies always me uneasy. I never liked seeing moving, colourless faces. The more faded and grainy the film the sicker it made me. Like I said, I'm not really a movie buff.

We do have them though. I've found that people can summon the most passionate responses to anything, especially things you don't understand. The cinema is small, but always full of people and rhetoric, a bustling hipster exchange where it's hard to even finish a thought.

Every night but Thursday. Thursday, at eight o'clock, the places is vacated. Completely empty except for me, and our patron. I never speak to the guy – I don't ever even see him, but he's worked something out with the manager. Every week on Thursday, eight o'clock, he has the place to himself, and he watches “his movie”. If it weren't on film, he wouldn't even need me there.

There's an uncanny aspect to these old movies that extends beyond the sound and visuals. We're the first people on Earth to be able to see these long-dead, moving faces. Have you ever considered that? For all of human history, when someone was dead, they were still. An image or a painting. That's not true for us anymore.

Though the people on the screen remain youthful, the stock expires and becomes grainy. I always felt like it's as if the film itself is trying to break the illusion of immortality we've granted these characters. The projector reassures us – it provides us with a distraction from our dissatisfaction whilst also allowing us to pretend for a while. We laugh at those zombies up there, and by doing so breathe life back into them, and into the audiences decades ago. The same feelings – things are alive.

The film itself, though? That's another matter. That's an impermanent, physical, fleshy thing that ages and dies just like us. It breaks the spell. Call me nihilistic, but I think the movement to abandon the medium in favour of  digital is laced with the sad tinge of denial. We need to preserve our idols, and in doing so, ourselves. When I watch those young-but-weathered faces up there, all I can think about is denial. How much of what I do, day to day, comes down to denying mortality? I don't know about you, but I feel it's... Something you can only ever not think about. It's not something to conquer. Maybe watching the screen so long has opened my eyes to it, but I think film is too honest to survive.

He needs me, you see, because it's on film. Maybe you've never seen anything on film before, but if you have you may have noticed a black oval appearing in the upper-right hand corner of the frame from time to time. That's a cue mark – it's meant to signal to me, the person running the projector, that it's time to change reels. I'm no good with just remembering or timing it, so I have to pay attention. I've seen this movie... Maybe a hundred times. It makes me afraid.

It's avant-garde. Or maybe dada? I'm not a humanities major, so I couldn't tell you, but it's... unsettling. There's no title card, and there are no end credits. Maybe the film itself isn't what gets to me, so much as that man's devotion to it. How can anyone care so much about something – about one, specific thing? How can anyone ever dedicate themselves like that? I wonder what's stranger... If he sits down there, eyes glazed over, in a routine, or if... He's down there, feeling it all. Feeling the things he felt before, again and again. That scares me.

Time to change over. Sounds and shapes I can hear in my room. Images that project on the back of my eyelids and echo through the halls of my apartment. They mean so much to that man, but to me they're abstract uneasiness, and they follow me home.

Sometimes I feel like my life is one long lead-up to a jump scare. The sinking and uncertain feeling that it could be coming any minute now. Now could be the moment when it – whatever it is – happens. I let my mind wander. I try not to pay attention when I don't have to.

Am I on the screen, am I in the audience, or am I up here, waiting to transition?

Cue mark. I reach out to change reels but there's nothing there. I look down, and my hands look old.


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6 years ago
SCRIPT DOCTOR! Hereditary has AMNESIA
In a potentially new series, you get to look at my slack-jawed mug as I bloviate about film scripts and the changes I'd make to them. If you have any films y...

Hello all! I just started a video series on screenwriting and editing. I’ll hopefully be going over some general advice, common mistakes and even sharing some stories from my time in script editing.

Also, this is my ugly mug.

If there’s anything you’d like me to talk about, let me know! The first episode is on the film Hereditary, and sacrificing thematic value for story.


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7 years ago

Now with some supporting evidence! Check out the crazy use of text in this film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gzOmk5-ji0

New video! It’s about The Forbidden Room, and how Guy Maddin visualises aspects of memory and fantasy. Plus - it’s short!

If you enjoy the video, a sub/like/share/comment/box of roses would go a really long way!

9 years ago
The Cradle

The Cradle

We assumed we were in the box.

It was only natural, after all. It’s what anyone would have thought. We had been away for almost six years. A little silver glint in space; not even enough to catch the eye. The CAS system kept us asleep most of it, of course. If we’re talking waking hours, we had been away from Earth maybe eight months.

Space is full of radiation. There’s a reason so many old astronauts have cancer - it comes from everywhere. Our ship had a ridiculously simple monitor, a light really, that was meant to alert us when radiation levels were about to get too high. The trouble was, when we were under, something went wrong. No way of knowing what, but this little green light was on the fritz. We looked at it and no one could figure the thing out - our chief engineer, after some tinkering, told us that the thing was garbage. That there was a 50/50 chance it was accurately indicating high levels of radiation. When you’re in a little metal tube, surrounded on all sides by death, those odds really don’t sound so bad.

Still, it was enough to get to you. It turns out an even chance was the worst thing we could have heard. I would gladly have taken 90/10, or even 99/1 odds. The certainty of death would have been infinitely more comforting.

After a few days, someone brought up we were exactly like the cat in the box. I’m sure everyone is aware, but if you’re not, I can give my two cents. Schrödinger’s cat is a kind of tawdry metaphor that was never really meant to be taken seriously, but the basic premise is as follows; a cat is placed in a box with a Geiger counter containing a trace amount of some radioactive substance. In the space of an hour, it’s equally possible that the substance  remains unchanged as it is the substance decays. If the substance decays, a flask of poisonous shatters and kills the cat. In the hour before the box is opened, the contents of the box are a superposition, wherein the cat is both alive and dead. Upon observing the contents of the box, the superposition “chooses” an outcome. It was a metaphor that, to my foggy recollection, was meant to mock the idea of a contradictory harmonious state. However, it caught the public imagination and became accepted into the vast sea of pop-science.

What is interesting, however, is the notion that an action in the present, ie opening the box, can in fact change an event in the past, in this case whether the cat has been alive or dead the last hour.

We were currently the cat in the box; there was a 50/50 chance that we had been poisoned. The monitors on Earth would know for certain whether we were or not, but we were not due to communicate with them for another six months. It was funny, in a way. We joked about being zombies. That we were just waiting for the boys back open to crack open the lid.

After a month, it stopped being funny. I became unsure whether I was feeling the effects of radiation poisoning. Maybe it was a placebo, maybe it was all in my head, but I swear I could feel it. I could feel this looming dread, this decay deep in my bones. Examining the path the ship had taken, one of my peers figured out exactly where the radiation source must have been, if it indeed existed at all. After two months of uncertainty, we decided to open the box ourselves. 

It was not our decision to make.

We put ourselves to sleep and turned the ship around. We had a six month timer; that would put us in range of Earth.

In that sleep, you are meant to dream. I had nothing. When I think back to my time under, I recall nothing. Only the darkness and a strange anxiety.

We awoke, looked out the window, and realised we were wrong. We were wrong all along. 

We were never in the box.

A neutron star is the result of a collapsed star. While relatively tiny in size, their density is incredible. A neutron star with a radius of only 7 miles can have a mass of over twice our sun. They also give out enormous amounts of radiation. A tiny, blinding usher. A calamitous angel. The scroll, rolling up the night sky.

Swallowing whole the world entire.

Uncertainty was the curse. There was an even chance that there was no radiation source. There was an even chance the monitor was faulty. There was an even chance we were all fine.

But we had to know, and in our knowing, we became fate. We were the observers. We forced the choice. We changed the past and smashed the vial.

It wasn’t us in the box, it was the world. But we needed to look. We needed to.

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