THE STAGE 32 LOGLINES

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PRESCIENT PERIL
By Stan Ellis

GENRE: Drama, Action
LOGLINE:

Thrust, by an electrocution accident, into a parallel reality, a defiant maverick’s cutting-edge intellect arms him with strategies to save his future soulmate from impending extermination as he repeatedly confronts a looming massacre by transhumans empowered with superhuman martial arts skills.

SYNOPSIS:

Meet Elijah Landry, a behavioral psychology doctoral candidate whose juvenile delinquency record for brawling and his Krav Maga contact-combat skills render him a social maverick. He is long on intellect and short on emotional commitment.

Eli is on the way to meet his best friend Rachel and her discussion group colleagues on a university commons knoll. A speeding car crashes into a highline tower behind him and a whiplashing power line electrocutes Eli. Dazed and confused, Eli awakens in a parallel reality. Unbeknownst to Eli, Rachelle (Rachel's doppelganger) has replaced Rachel. Suddenly three transhuman thugs appear; Buck, Caleb, and Hunter. Rachelle and her group run, but are easily over-taken by the thugs' amazing speed and bludgeoned to death with their superhuman nunchuck skills. Eli runs for his life and a book falls out of his backpack. The owner’s, name printed on the cover page, is Elias Benoit (Eli's doppelganger). Eli looks at his university I.D. and it’s his picture but not his name. He takes out his driver's license and learns Elias's address.

Eli goes to Elias's apartment, then calls Elias Benoit’s doctoral mentor, Professor Frank Leigh. Eli and Frank meet and argue about Eli having a dissociative identity disorder and whose reality they are both in. Frank performs a regression hypnosis to improve Eli’s recall. In his trance, Eli has a second bilocation to the impending carnage and argues with Rachel who claims to be Rachelle. Rachelle's group colleague Dave, spots the three transhuman thugs approaching and yells “Borgans run.” Eli watches as the thugs catch them and bludgeon them to death with nunchucks. Eli awakens and commits to returning to the imminent massacre to save Rachelle and Frank gives him a recorded self-hypnosis induction.

Eli learns from Frank that borgans are a secretive society empowered by injected microscopic nanorobotics (nanobots) that intensify their speed and ninja skills to enhance their mission to kill the rest of the population, called teckees (technical humans). Teckees are super-intelligent due to having augmented their mental acuity, for the good of humanity, with highly advanced digital downloads. The borgans are physically superior, but mentally inferior to the teckees. Eli convinces Frank to help him boot the teckee download so he can outwit the borgans. Eli joins Rachelle's group.

Eli has three defeated bilocations to the massacre as he escalates his strategies and his risks of being killed. Eli exhausts his logical schemes and feels all is lost. He turns to living an inner-city hood life and joins a biker gang for protection. Rachelle has fallen in love with Eli, but her love is unrequited. Eli stops attending their group meetings. Later, Rachelle informs Eli, that in a lucid dream she told him “Love has reason that reason knows nothing of” (script theme). Eli is awestricken and tells Rachelle that is, verbatim, the words that Rachel once shared. Eli and Rachelle become lovers and now he finally knows exactly what he has to do.

Eli convinces Frank to help him get the borgan nanobot injections so he can fight the borgans at their speed and intensity. It is a never-been-done risky procedure and Rachelle is skeptical at first, but with her proactive support, Eli prepares their group for the actual massacre.

The day of reckoning arrives and the group courageously stand arm-in-arm as they watch the approaching borgans. Eli, cleverly lures the borgans into fighting him one-at-a-time and wagers freeing the four-person group two-at-a-time for each borgan he kills or maims. Using his intense high-speed nanobot empowered Krav Maga techniques he defeats Caleb and Hunter. Buck concedes and turns to leave, as does Eli. Buck suddenly spins, brandishes his nunchucks, and bludgeons the back of Eli's head. Eli falls to the ground dead. He briefly experiences a revealing afterlife vision before awakening back in his original reality.

Eli suddenly awakens in a hospital room with his best friend Rachel at his side. He shares his mystical transcendence and realizes it was a near-death experience. In saving Rachel’s doppelganger Rachelle, Eli unveils the profound cryptic message concealed within the script’s theme, "love has reason that reason knows nothing of." At last Eli understands that Rachel has always been his one true love and he shares his esoteric knowledge of how they both, in their present reality, will change the future of the dystopian society he existentially witnessed.

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