Imaginary: The Erasure of the Life and Memory of Kyle Ormond

This is a brainstorm for the sci-fi movie I would want to make. It has holes, I know. 

Characters:

Kyle Ormond (Young), Mr. Ormond, Mrs. Ormond, Sophie Williams

Jerry Kent (Second Life), Olivia Kent, Nina Kent, and Sophie Kent

Brian Terrance Jones (Third Life), Terese Jones, Abby Robertson, Jake Weston, Tommy Weston-Jones

Claude Parks (Fourth Life), Gloria (the cat)

Kyle Ormond/Alan Williams (Old Age/Fifth Life), Sophie Williams, her nieces and nephews.

Premise:

A world where rather than medicating people for years on end and forcing them to live lives they continue to hate, there are options to keep on living but ditch the life someone had been living. If their life is what makes them so unhappy, then they are cured by removing them from it. They are evaluated by their doctor and the treatment is covered by government subsidy.

They are put into a coma, and their family has a funeral for them—their family is not given information of their loved one’s future whereabouts or appearance. During the coma they are given a memory therapy treatment which in essence deletes their former personality. A new personality (complete with memories of their youth, etc, and a valid explanation for why they were in a coma) is constructed for them and is inserted into their brain. During this time they also undergo major plastic surgery. 

Once they are a new person inside and out, they are woken from their coma. A car wreck, a space-accident, a rare disease, a shooting, or even routine surgery is used as the explanation of why they are in the hospital. A few “family members” are there to comfort them. These family members are constructed from others who underwent the surgery—spouses, parents, siblings. All personal data belongs to the government and is classified so there is no way to see just how long these marriages, etc have existed. This traceless system basically treats everyone and their relationships as having the same worth in the eyes of the law—the couples created by the surgery/memory modification are treated the same as the ones who came together naturally. 

Everyone undergoes regular brainscans, regardless of if they’ve ever undergone the surgery. This is so that in case of a terrible accident (space accidents being the major culprits because of the risk of asphyxia), a person would have an easier time of rehabilitation because of a saved brain scan. The real reason, however is because of the surgery system—a wife who dies in a car-crash is replaced by a woman who looks like her, and acts like her, because her last brain scan is used as the memory rehabilitation on another woman. The assets of the erased person are allocated differently based on the new person created. 

A reawakened person keeps their funds and assets. A replaced person’s assets are split between their remaining family and the government fund for the surgeries themselves. A new person gets all of the assets from their last life. 

Couples can be composed of Natural-Natural, Natural-Surgery, and Surgery-Surgery—and no one knows the difference because when someone, be they Natural or Surgery, chooses to leave their life they are given a funeral. But it’s a funeral for the life they lived with their family. Everyone in their family knows that they aren’t really dead—they’ve gone on to a hopefully better place, where they’ll be happier. Not everyone accepts this (no one wants their loved ones to die after all), but that’s just how it is. 

Kyle Ormond is one such person. 

His father elected to take the surgery when Kyle was ten, after Kyle’s other brother James was murdered. Kyle couldn’t accept his father’s death, and when he was twenty three he overdosed on (something). He was diagnosed as brain-dead at the hospital after he was found by his girlfriend Sophie. The doctor implied that if they brought Kyle Ormond back from his last brain scan—conducted shortly before his attempted suicide—he would still be suicidal. He would try to kill himself regardless of if they brought Kyle back in Kyle’s body or replaced him with another. But, the doctor also suggested, they could use Kyle’s body to potentially make another family very happy. 

Jerry Kent died in a car crash the same day. The doctors hadn’t yet informed his family that he was dead (died in the operating room) when Kyle’s case was mentioned. The death of the body was not something a brain scan revival would work on—brain scan revival only worked on the brain, damaged or dead, not on the entire body. However Kyle’s body was alive. So Mrs. Ormond decides to hold a funeral for Kyle and donate his body for the benefit of Jerry Kent. 

Jerry Kent is an investment banker with a small personal fortune. He has a seven-months-pregnant wife, Olivia, and a two year old daughter, Nina. They’re told by the doctors that Jerry was badly injured by the wreck and that they’re going to keep him in a medically induced coma for the time being. Because of how horrific he looks they don’t want Olivia to see him until he’s healed somewhat. This is so they have time to do a rush-job on Kyle’s surgery to transform into Jerry. Once he looks like Jerry, they allow him to be awake sometimes and allow Olivia to see him during those times. His disorientation is blamed on the wreck and the coma, so the rush-job on his memory rehab is covered up a bit. But soon enough Kyle and all of his remnants is gone and all that remains is Jerry Kent. When Olivia’s baby is born he irrationally wants to name her Sophie—saying that he heard the name in a dream while he was sick.

Jerry Kent lived for fifteen more years until his daughters, Nina and Sophie, are gunned down in a shopping mall by a “Bad Op,” he and Olivia decide they can’t deal with the loss. A “Bad Op,” is someone with whom the memory rehab didn’t take quite right and the mind drives itself insane trying to differentiate “real life” from the “fantasy.” Bad Ops range from low levels of paranoia, delusions, etc, to full on psychotic meltdowns. Because it was something the gunman couldn’t even help really there is no reason for Nina or Sophie’s deaths—and so Jerry and Olivia Kent go through with the surgery. Olivia goes first, and at her funeral Jerry kisses her (empty) coffin. He knows that she isn’t really dead and that soon she will be living a life without the constant reminder of the tragic deaths of their children. It’s comforting to him. 

Brian Terrance Jones is an entirely new creation. He’s a single thirty-something playboy. He has a clingy mother and a love of expensive suits. His best friend Abby introduces him to Jake Weston and they fall in love and get married. They adopt a little boy and name him Tommy. A few years go by, and when Tommy is ten they are out ice-skating as a family. It’s a holiday tradition and their usual thing is to tease Brian at how poorly he skates whenever he makes a mistake—because he’s typically flawless at it. This is all fun until that particular trip, Tommy loses his balance and Brian dives to save him from falling too badly. But in doing this, he gets a concussion and starts asking where Nina is—he recovers quickly enough after Jake jokes with him that if he wanted to adopt a girl all he had to do was say the word. Worried, Abby convinces Jake to get a doctor to look over Brian. 

During his medical examination the doctor finds that Brian has undergone the surgery twice already before the age of forty. When he tells this to Brian and Jake, they are thrown—this means that everyone Brian knows could be a Surgery. His mother, Abby, his close circle of other friends, could all be constructs. While there is always a possibility that one could be a construct or a replacement, it isn’t generally thought hard on—because the surgery is so commonplace that really to worry overmuch about it would drive a person mad. 

But Brian is struck with guilt that the person he was before could have chosen to abandon his family, and he starts to slide into depression over it. He hides his doubts from Jake for a few years until Jake comes to him and says that he can’t do it anymore. Jake just can’t pretend that Brian and his family are as real as Jake believes himself to be—so rather than forcing Jake to get a surgery and leave Tommy on his own, Brian decides to get it. 

He does so because the surgery gets risky the older someone is, and Jake is likely a Natural—Brian doesn’t want him to ruin that, to abandon Tommy with the “fake” person Brian is. So they spend a last few nights with one another, and Jake says one time that he can’t believe that the surgery can be so flawless that he never noticed that the person he spent so many nights sleeping next to was a construct. Brian asks him if he’ll be able to live his life after Brian goes. Jake shakes his head and says that he’ll probably have Brian’s mother look after Tommy and renew himself. 

They hadn’t told the rest of their families about either Brian’s diagnosis or his decision to leave his life, so there could still be time to change his mind. But Brian knows that he would do the same if it were Jake who were leaving—he couldn’t bear to live knowing that his very existence is why Jake left him. Tommy would come to understand in time, he felt. 

Jake is with him in the hospital as they put him to sleep with the oxygen mask, stroking his hand and forehead. His husband’s face is the last thing he sees as Brian Terrance Jones. 

When the body wakes again, it knows itself as Claude Parks. Claude is a chain-smoking reclusive genius, and one of the men responsible for the advent of modern memory modification technology. There had, in recent years, been a demand for those behind the technology to come forward and give lectures about their past and current research—as well as their vision of a future where things like depression, loss, could be entirely averted somehow. But Claude Parks1 was unable to do this—he had a crippling phobia of public speaking. So he constructed a Claude Parks2 who was able to, was in fact a gifted lecturer. He did this by modifying one of his own brain scans—creating a mind and personality which were both a replacement and a construct at the same time. 

Once Brian’s surgery is complete, so that he looks like a camera-friendly Claude Parks, the interview-friendly Claude Parks is put into his body. Claude Parks1 retreated to a government lab deep in the Northern Nevada wilderness, to forever dedicate himself to research while his double Claude Parks2 went about his life as a retired researcher, a theorist with only the desire to aid the next generation of brain scan developers. 

But after about five years, Claude Parks2 begins to show some glitches. Forever single—an avowed aromantic agender asexual with a hate of companions of all sorts—Claude gets a cat. He needs a cat, he tells people around him. Gloria is a demented old research cat—personality scan research was done on cats, memory scan research was done on dogs and birds—that he adopts from the lab. She switches from sweet, playful female Siamese to murderous orange tomcat in heartbeats, as well as at least five other distinct cat personalities of lesser dominion over her brain. 

Claude says that he feels drawn to her and her struggles. His brain scan is taken to Claude Parks1 in Nevada to look over, and the results are startling. This is the body and brain’s fourth surgery and it is starting to show. Rather than have his double start to crack under the pressure of repressing three other people, Claude edits the brain scan to have the idea that Claude2 plans on being erased into someone new. 

Claude1 watches television alone one night, an interview of Claude2 who is saying that he’s always planned on having the procedure done to himself as a proof-of-concept in the elderly. He cracks a rare smile at the much-easier-bestowed smile of Claude2 as the double jokes that he will perhaps be someone’s grandfather next, a nice end for one such as himself. 

Sophie Williams is dying of Alzheimers—something that memory modification can’t fix yet, because it is a physical degeneration of tissue, and tissue death of any kind can’t be helped by the procedure. Her nieces and nephews decide to see a doctor to get her a companion, a husband for her old age. They give the doctors a picture they found in her house of a young man—a boyfriend who died many years ago. “Don’t make it too close to the original, that’ll startle her. Maybe something about his eyes or his mouth, okay?” At around this time, Claude2 decides that he’ll see if his technology really works and goes through the files looking for someone to be.

He finds the request from Sophie Williams’ family and looks long and hard at the picture provided. He writes the weird feeling off as déjà vu, but informs his team that he wants them to make him into the requested person. So they make him into Alan Williams, an unconventional old codger who took his wife’s name rather than the other way round. Because of Sophie’s illness it is easy to insert him into her life, as the family claims that he was just sick in the hospital for a while and that didn’t she remember her old Alan?

But Alan keeps having nightmares, vivid dreams that have him waking with a shout—he knows that he’s always been married to Sophie, he remembers clearly the feel of her skin against his when they were young, he remembers the faces of their children, their damn cat—how he’d hated the thing—but at the same time there’s something else. Sophie’s face is hazy sometimes, or not all of his children are around, or he’s at funerals for people he knew and loved, and then there’s a man who loves him too fiercely for him to hold onto. His wife is most clearly his wife in the dreams of his youth, and after that she fades. He also starts to wonder why his children are so absent from their lives, after how he and Sophie had doted on them in their childhoods—they only get letters, addressed from far off places with no telephone service to be sure.

Sophie at the same time remembers her youth, and calls him Kyle nearly every day despite being reminded that he is Alan and each day Alan feels a little less attached to the life he led with her and he starts to wonder whether or not he’s really real. His wife, the love of his life, believes him to be someone who never existed—at least, that’s what he thinks until he looks into it. He remembers they had a friend, Kyle something-or-other, who died young, very young. He can’t remember Kyle’s face. So he goes looking through Sophie’s things and finds a picture that looks nearly like him—a man sheepishly holding Sophie close in a posed photograph. On the back it is dated and captioned “Sophie, and her new boyfriend Kyle Ormond.”

And like a keyword, a password, Alan’s entire life is overrun by the lives of four other men.

<and of course we would start with old Alan living his life with dreams of the others interspersed, up until he unlocks it and then we just plunge into the story from the point where Kyle started up way on up at the top>