VSFX 406 Blog 1: MacGuffin Concept Variation

Progress Report 1

For the first day of class, I brought in the Rolodex which I've been using as a sketchbook/collage project (This model of Rolodex is called the Telepon). Now the goal is to ideate on different ways my object might drive a story.

I'd like to collect more of these things and turn them into different projects. It could be a flipbook, a puzzle, or a fortune teller.

If it was a puzzle it could work in all sorts of ways. One page could have a decoder key, other pages could have written artifacts with hidden messages, and others could have maps or pictures. Since the device was created to store phone numbers, maybe the codes could be stored as phone numbers, numbers that have to be called to make progress in the puzzle. Maybe this is all an elaborate confession designed by a murderer and placed on the desk of a detective.

My next idea is that the Telepon once belonged to the president. Locked up in white house storage for decades, modern-day white house employees realize that it stores key intelligence and that there's more to its mechanics than meets the eye. The key intelligence is cleverly hidden so that it can only be accessed by the president. Depending on what order you press the buttons in, different fragments of info are revealed. And if the wrong sequence is input enough times, or you try to take the Telepon apart, it incinerates itself instantaneously.

Professor Pasquale's first idea was that the Telepon might tell the future. This would fall in line with the fortune teller idea. My final idea is in line with this.

Modern society stumbles upon an old Telepon Rolodex that shows you something new every time you press a button. It doesn't take long for people to realize that it's telling them the future. There's no clear rhyme or reason to what it chooses to show. Sometimes it's a word from 100 years in the future. Once it was the exact coordinates of the birthplace and subsequent resting place of an ant in August of 2090. Sometimes it tells you how you will die, or someone you know, or someone you hate. But everything it says is sure to change you, somehow.

People spend years waiting in line, waiting to press the button just once, only to get in line again. What a blessing! What a superpower! The Telepon is kept in a dark room, visitors enter one at a time. They leave the room puzzled, or laughing, or crying, or momentarily silent, or silent for a very long time. But so long as looking at it remains a choice, the Telepon remains free to all, tempting us, threatening us.

One day the Telepon reveals the greatest scientific discovery ever made. It invalidates every book on theoretical physics that has ever been written. It is the Black Monday of Academia. On the same day, there are reports of a 1984 Motorola DynaTac Mobile phone that will not stop screaming. The signal cannot be traced. Sometimes its voice sounds like a man in pain, sometimes it doesn't sound human at all, but it too tells the future. Louder every day. Now the Telopon flips to new pages spontaneously, it clicks violently as truth falls out of it. Soon, any electronic appliance from the last century is screaming. Radios, scooters, the toasters, the goddamn light bulbs are screaming. The future screams through them. They're screaming at us to go back. Screaming about the singularity; that it was a mistake. That when we finally do all we can do, make all we can make, and learn all we can learn, we lose all that we are. We create a thoughtless world paralyzed in agony. That when science discovers the end, it all ends. That once you truly behold the unbridled nothingness of the universe, you too become nothing. They're screaming at us to treasure our naive fiction, to worship the question marks in the sky, and hold together the mirage of consciousness with all the tape and rubber bands we have.

The entire planet is infected with the screaming. And what can we do? What can we do but shut it up? To kill it? To smash every piece of plastic and silicone, to cut every wire, to bleed out every battery, burn every book, and demolish every building until finally the screaming stops? Until we can finally sleep again? What can we do but retreat into darkness and leave behind our doomed science? To live out our days trying to forget what we had, what it all could have become? How else could we stop it, really? And, between you and me, why isn't it gone?

Admittedly I went overboard with the last one but it won't stop me from considering every variation just as thoroughly.