Plus, I wasn't interested in the topic. I had promised myself I would start at the beginning of this book of writing exercises and just do each one, start to finish. But the first one wasn't particularly interesting to me today - it was a mistake to approach it so linearly - I should have randomly picked an exercise that would have let me tackle what was actually in my head this morning. It was an exercise ultimately about 1st person narrative voice.
What was in my head this morning was the outline of a science fiction story that I was semi-dreaming up in the middle of the night. I don't think I could actually write it right now - I think to do it well, it would take some research about stuff I don't know a lot about. And, of course, now that it's morning, all kinds of self-criticism is rushing in and I think the story has already been written in many ways and much better than I could. At any rate, much of the reading I've been doing lately has some underlying theme of Faith, so that's where I think it's coming from.
Here's the idea:
A brilliant Chinese mathematician or physicist working at a US university writes a formula proving theoretically that time travel is possible. That it is mathematically possible to travel faster than the speed of time and not against the laws of physics. I don't know yet why it's important that he's Chinese, except that he's Buddhist.
His work makes it's way to the internet, where it is happened upon by a very wealthy, very egotistical, very vain man who has been searching for a way to become famous. Not just famous, but immortally famous - a man who changes the world. He finances a team to build a vessel that can withstand the physical demands of the trip. Some how it is possible to pick not only the time, but the place where they will "land". He decides that he we go back with a group of select experts and try to prove or disprove the biblical accounts of the life of Christ. He himself doesn't care at all whether anything about the life of Christ is true - he has no faith - he just thinks that being the person who proves or disproves will make him the most famous. Because his motivation is fame, the expedition is highly public, not secret.
The team he assembles includes a biblical scholar, an historian specializing in the time period, a linguist who is "fluent" in ancient Aramaic. I put fluent in quotations because I think one of the problems of the expedition will be of language - that what we think we know of the spoken language of the time and region will be wrong. Also, I think they will bring a physician. I'm not sure who else - 6 seems a good number for an expedition back in time. Maybe 10. All of these people surely will have their own hidden agendas. The plan is to all wear hidden cameras all the time and film the life of Christ, so maybe there needs to be a videographer who is supposed to stay with the ship and receive / catalog all the camera feeds. I think they will try to land one year before the birth so as to find Mary or Joseph and get into the right position and then they intend to stay for five years after the crucifixion to follow the major disciples.
Most importantly, the expedition will include the six-year-old granddaughter of the financier. She will be the narrator telling the story from some distant point in the future. I think her parents are dead and the grandfather is her guardian and his decision to bring her is very controversial.
I think they will bring a bunch of goats, so that when they "land" they will be rich. Having a bunch of goats on a time-travel vessel will be funny. The granddaughter's job on the ship will be to tend the goats. None of the other travellers will really have much to do with her, since they are all big experts caught up in their own agendas and all.
I have a bunch of different endings or outcomes of the expedition, but the important thing is that none of them answers or implies an answer to the question, "Is the life of Christ as presented in the Bible true?"
Here are some of the possible endings:
- There's a technical problem and they come back to the wrong time and can't get to the right time. No one has the right equipment to view the films they have made or to make the equipment to view the films they have made. Everyone thinks they are crazy.
- They come back insane and entirely unable to articulate what they have seen.
- They come back never having been able to find Christ or anything related to what they had been looking for.
- The films are viewable, but somehow there is no audio, so they don't make any sense.
- Only the granddaughter returns, with no films, and she is completely mute. Or she can only speak a version of ancient language that no one can understand. Maybe she's killed off the rest of the expedition or abandoned them in the past to prevent the truth from coming out.
- They all return and have viewable films, but are immediately killed by the Chinese scientist on whose work the whole trip was based.
- They all return and have viewable films, but no one cares. What if, despite their best conscious efforts, they did change something in the past, so that when they return, the answers to the religious questions they went to answer are irrelevant.
- They all return and have viewable films, but they are all carrying an ancient virus - they themselves have built up some immunity by eating the food and drinking the water in the past, but no one that comes in any contact with them or their ship or their films and everyone starts dying - maybe they are eventually quarantined, but it's too late - the population of the modern world is wiped out. Maybe it's a metaphor -- that either disproving or proving the life of Christ will somehow kill faith and, therefore, literally kill all the people.
I think these last two may be my favorite endings. There's more possibilities and lots of questions, but I just got a phone call that interrupted my train of thought and I'm bored with the whole thing now.
Later.
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