A Code Spun Dark
A serial narrative
Episode 1: The Bus of Lights
Earth. 2005. December 24th. Rolling hills of farmland, covered in a thin layer of snow, give way to dusk skies of light blue and purplish pink. The sign out front reads:
“Consideration Farm Feed & Seed
Home to the World’s Biggest Compost Pile
Consideration, USA.”
CUT TO a close-up of a wrinkly, old, human nose — all runny and wet. It’s veiny. It’s gross. Winfred “Sergeant” Pappy Wood, 84, slumbers in his La-Z-Boy chair, in his smelly office, in his stinky basement below the old farmhouse. White hair balding on top — mouth wide open, our sleeping soldier lets out one super nasty fart while simultaneously, tiny sparks of explosively choreographed electricity dance out of Pappy’s dirty, no doubt stinky, fingertips.
As Pappy farts, sparks, and slumbers inside, a terrible winter storm rolls into the farm and over the planet outside. Images of his granddaughter — Daisy, 21, a beautiful young lady — flash through his slumbering mind’s eye. We see that sparks fly out the end of her fingers too, in this reality of which Pappy dreams.
His eyes twitch hard and weirdly — to the left — to the right — as if he may wake up directly, but he does not. He remains dormant as his mind drifts away to conflict. We are now inside the Korean War inside Pappy’s head. It is 1951. Pappy and the other American forces have endured months of brutal cold retreat. A young radio operator speaks from the peripheral — “Echo six actual, this is bravo one. Come in, over.”
Under a winter rainbow, we zoom in on Pappy and a US Soldier Boy — a replacement (no name needed) — as they dig a single foxhole together. Pappy wears the standard US Army uniform — with the added personal touch of a black bow tie. Pappy has taken a brief break to look at a picture of his son, Johnny. He puts away the photo, then pulls out a letter from Mom, from the farm back home. We can only glimpse some of the words on the dirty, lined paper. In Mom’s sweet, judging voice, it says, “She’s on the bottle again, Winny …she’s fallen…I’m taking good care of Johnny, but…I hope this war ends and you come home soon…love always, Mom.” Pappy violently wads up the note and tosses it hard into the dirt. He steps on it and rams it into the mud, then returns to digging.
We now spin up over and down the other side of the same hill to the enemy — one older child soldier lining up, in four single-file rows, many hundreds (adding up to thousands) of younger child soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, trained to charge up the hill and into war. They have only one set of weapons but are divided into four waves up the hill. The plan going in is that the subsequent waves of child soldiers will pick up and use the guns lying in the bodies of the other child soldiers from the previous waves of attack.
A group of adult soldiers — faces shadowed — stand in the rear, giving orders, out of harm’s way.
We travel through the Earth and out on the other side of the hill to witness Pappy and US Soldier Boy, now in their finished foxhole, gazing out towards the enemy position. Pappy says, in his gruff voice, “Hey, point your weapon out there! My god, do you want to go on living?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Listen …I’ll sleep first. You take the first watch.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Stay awake. Stay alert.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Now, listen, son. You’re new, so I don’t know you. That makes me nervous. You listen to me, OK? You move your weapon from side to side, slowly, methodically; if you see something, don’t react. Keep the weapon moving — left to right. On your way back right, did you see it again? If yes, that’s two times. That’s interesting — just know that anything will move if you look at it long enough, but what you are looking for is a pattern (Pappy shows three fingers). Sweep your weapon back a third time, and if it moves again — point your rifle and take a shot. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Do not think about anything else while I try to sleep here for a couple of hours. Roger that? You just think about the movement, the rifle, what’s out there, and your duty. You believe nothing your eyes tell you until they tell you three times. Your eyes will deceive you if you let them. Your eyes are the biggest “Benedict Arnolds” the universe ever invented.”
“Yes, Sergeant. You sleep. I got it.”
“Do your job, and we might just make it to the next foxhole.”
FADE TO:
Pappy sleeps…US Soldier Boy scans the horizon with his eyes, pointing his weapon toward the enemy. Artillery explodes in the distance, but it is not close enough to be of immediate threat. After the sun goes down over the hill, the rainbow subsides, and the moon rises over a dark and hazy night.
Somewhere between looking out there and trying to stay awake, the boy fell asleep. We come up from under Earth into a chaotic battle scene. Pappy is locked in hand-to-hand combat with a stream of Child Soldiers — explosions surround the battlefield. US Soldier Boy cries in the corner of the foxhole. Right before this enormous onslaught of Child Soldiers is about to overrun and massacre them both…
Right there, under the light of the moon, a little girl (she is 8), Eun-Ji, appears on the battlefield. She holds out a dirty, hairy leather bag made of pig skin. As Pappy begins to witness this little girl, his mind recognizes the narrowing in of the whistle when an artillery shell is coming directly for you! In slow-motion now, Pappy screams to US Soldier Boy, “Get down!” and simultaneously Pappy grabs Eun-Ji, at the precise moment when they are both suddenly engulfed into a sphere and then spun down below the ground, as the artillery strikes in the spot they previously occupied just a moment before.
Pappy and Eun-Ji are now face down, seemingly moving at fast speeds, with their noses pushing against a squishy sphere, apparently made of light. It is very bright now. Pappy is screaming and holding Eun-Ji tight; Eun-Ji is laughing as they spin; dancing around them, all around the sphere, they witness tornados, then hurricanes and fires, then the farm back home, flooded all around. Pappy looks away, but then the girl points out into the darkness; Pappy now sees many different futures flashing before him as if in a dream. Faster and faster, all of existence — ALL possible realities — flash around the sphere- 365 degrees around them — with Pappy screaming louder and louder as they spin.
Pappy, crying like a child now, looks down at smiling little Eun-Ji, who then opens the bag. Pappy looks inside. The bag shines bright against his face, overpowering the sphere’s light. Pappy suddenly stops crying. Looking inside, Pappy smiles, not forgetting, but managing his fear, and he suddenly feels the gravity of love, courage, and wisdom, all three together wrapped around him inside this sphere of light.
But then, rather suddenly, the explosion from the mortar rolls across the ground above. Just behind it, the Earth pulses the sphere back to the surface of the Earth. As the sphere implodes, liquid light bursts all over the battlefield — saturating the ground in a rainbow of colors as it drops the Sergeant’s smoldering body, crashing to the ground with Eun-Ji landing hard on top. Although they are somewhat alive, Pappy and young Eun-Ji have been knocked unconscious. Pappy’s right eye is smoldering a bit. The old Sergeant caught some shrapnel there in the face. Lying motionless inside this otherwise dead scene, they are the only two things living amongst the bodies of Child Soldiers everywhere and other sounds, sights, smells, and colors of war.
