little earth

shooting script 07.04

1. Incognito

Video: Empty star-field – voices to sound like they are communicating between two spacecraft

Voice of CTR Wilson: What's the last thing you remember?

Voice of Kristian Birkelund: The last thing I remember? The house on Incognitogaten, the boat to Egypt, a garden in Japan.

CTR: Places only? Nothing more specific? Nothing else?

KB: Some things, some… A gun, a bottle of Veronal, the pillar of Hercules, the golden path the Pharaohs trod to take their place among the stars.

CTR: That would be… the Zodiacal light.

KB: No – something else. A blazing trail, vertical – the fire tail of a powerful rocket ship, climbing out of somewhere near the Caucuses, up and up until it burst free from the atmosphere and arrived in outer space.

CTR: And now you're one of us.

KB: You? Who are you?

CTR: We're the eyes that see. The sprites that watch the storm.

2. Journey to Ben Nevis

Video: Transition into fly through animation of landscape littered with space junk/hi-tech debris. Ben Nevis in distance.

CTR: I was on a ship, a flying ship, but a strange ship – no hull, only a mast, and sails – great metal sails, long, thin, rectangular. A ship that tacked across the black silent ocean of the sky, a ship that was measuring, always measuring. Beneath me was a mountain, its peak enshrouded with a scarf of mist.

KB: Beinn-neamh-bhathais.

CTR: And then it came to me. I was here before. An image in the mist, Leonardo's Vitruvian man, that's what I remember. Hands and arms like vessels charting a circumference. A garden of rocks and lichen alive with wee snow buntings. And icicles choking the louvres on the instrument screens like so-many flying spears.

Video: Cuts to summit approach above a deck of cloud. Observatory Ruin appears.

CTR: As I watched the mists began to move, not gently, as before, but violently. the clouds solidified into a series of peculiar, shifting forms, as if trying to emulate the structure of thinking itself. And then, the mists cleared and I found that I was gazing down at the tiny simulacrum of a room, a room I recognised from photographs even though I had never set foot it in myself.

3. The Experiment, Ben Nevis

Video: Cut to empty observatory room table, chair with proto instrument / all visibly wet with water.

KB: What room was it?

CTR: The room that served as living quarters in the observatory, empty save for a table and a single chair.

KB: I know the place.

Video: CTR Looking out of observatory window at ruin, wet, misty etc.

CTR: How was I to know that when I pumped the gas from the vacuum flask I'd seed a whole new universe? That I'd see electrons streaming through the atmosphere, raise the curtain on the play of matter itself? Who would have known all that could be found in clouds, in simple vapour trails? Who could have guessed that from this nest of particle activity, from this adiabatic egg, a demon would emerge, a sprite, a raiser of temples, a destroyer of worlds?

Video: CTR sitting at table evacuating flask.

KB: And if, perhaps, you could cancel the spell? Push the genie back inside the bottle? Retrace your steps, reverse the process, unwind the skein of your own history, erase the tracks you laid around those old stone walls?

Video: Glidecam around table

CTR: But nothing can be undone. The journey made cannot be untravelled, the path chosen cannot be changed. There's nothing for it but to go on and on, round and round and round again, to spin and spin and overlay your self, the Earth, your past, your memory with so many tracks, so many passages, so many particles that everything becomes indistinct and a vortex is created, a vortex that sucks in the atoms of existence and blurs them in a dervish whirl, flattened and immane. Terrible, but beautiful.

Video: CTR sitting at table lights storm lamp and exits observatory through the door.

KB: And beauty is truth, said Keats.

CTR: Keats was wrong. Beauty is information.

Video: Storm lamp transition

4. The Stormlamps

Video: Storm lamp section

KB: There it was, floating before him, a plane in the night –

CTR: The cinema of the very small –

KB: Filled with stars –

CTR: The fame of matter –

KB: Quantum glamour -

CTR: The wonder of the world conjured into view –

KB: By our mediums, the machines.

5. Journey to Haldde

Video: Storm lamp transition into aurora animation & journey to Haldde

CTR: It's over for us now, Kristian. We're the last who'll be able to ever see things on their own. The human eye –

KB: The human eye is no longer set inside the human skull. And I, for one, find that something of a relief.

6. The Experiment, Haldde

Video: K. Birkeland rotating sphere in hand sitting at table in Haldde observatory.

KB: I was in orbit. I was out there looking down at the globe of the earth and people were the thing most invisible to me.

CTR: And then – someone called you and you came.

Video: K. Birkeland exits up stairs to exterior tower

KB: I came but there was no one here. No one, nothing, no instruments. This is not the past but a vision of it. This isn't the past, it's a simulacrum. I don't remember much, but I do remember I was never on my own here. [Pause] And here, this thing, what's this?

Video: Observatory interior - close-up of earth and wire, magnetic experiment.

KB: It's an artificial eye. The human eye sees spheres of light and harmony with darkness on the outside. This eye lets you see the reality of things. It's an eye and finger, both. It lets you touch the fabric of the universe.

CTR: A lodestone disguised as a little earth. [Pause] What were you looking for? What did you want?

KB: I wanted to stand on the mountaintop.

CTR: You wanted to disappear?

KB: I wanted to go into the light.

Video: Stormlamp being lit by K. Birkeland.

Video: K. Birkeland climbs observatory ladder and climbs out hatch bright white light floods through hatch - whiteout

KB: I wanted to become a component in the mechanism.

7. Orbiters

Video: slow walk inside centre of Satellite dish. Cut to satellite exterior moving.

CTR: There are four of us, matched in space, a tetrahedral pyramid.

KB: A structure to focus power, to send a laser light between the heavens and the earth.

CTR: An eye to see.

KB: A telescope for looking upwards, forwards, outwards.

CTR: A surveillance tool for looking inward, downward, back.

KB: A probe that hitched a ride around the planet

CTR: Bound for Saturn, the sphere without a surface, little Sun.

KB: Bound for Titan, ancient Earth, moon of nitrogen and methane smog.

CTR: A chance for a plutonium powercell to vaporise and seep into the atmosphere.

KB: A chance to reach into the velvet night and touch another world.

Video: Transition into starfield

Ida: Connect.

Video: fast transition into under satellite moving

Ida: And interface.

Video: fast transition into starfield and begin cluster animation –earth zoom.

8. Cluster

KB: Ascended from our sacred mountaintops where we dethroned the ancient gods. A dream of light and clarity from a world that's all but gone.

CTR: We hover at the corners of the planet, a trap for particles flying in at five hundred miles a second. From watching trails of light inside a vacuum chamber, we've become trails of light across the sky.

KB: Ideas, man's reflections, placed behind the majesty of the everyday operations of matter. It's war, always war. The solar storms rip at our magnetic field, the earth a wind-driven ship in space. Our iron hearts alone – that's all that saves us being torn to shreds and scattered throughout the corners of the cosmos. The magnetosphere -

[Note: the following should sound like they weak communication signals]

Ida: [ this voice running continuously/intercut with the other voices. The repeated word PEACE should finish the section ] Fluxgate Magnetometer… Electron Drift Instrument… Active Spacecraft Potential Control Experiment… Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Field Fluctuation Experiment… Electric Field and Wave Experiment… Waves of High Frequency Sound for Probing of Electron Density by Relaxation Experiment… Research with Adaptive Particle Imaging Detectors… Plasma Electron and Current Experiment… ASPOC… STAFF… WHISPER… RAPID… PEACE… ASPOC… STAFF… WHISPER… RAPID… PEACE… RAPID… PEACE… PEACE… RAPID… PEACE… PEACE… PEACE… PEACE…

9. Return to Incognito

Video: Empty star-field as beginning.

CTR: I am here no longer; this mountain, the town below, all gone. Nothing but a flux of energy whose pull and gush fills the loch of time, a cosmos of greedy whirlpools of which this matter is the merest spurl. Walker, thinker, dreamer, that's the single destination, that's the life we live, that's the grave we're going to. This nature, the ruin of our science; these jagged walls, these fragments of our folly; these sky-ships, these missiles, these shards of sun held in chains on earth; these broken teeth with which we strove to chew our way through everything: this trembling ground, this sheltering sky, this little earth.

Video END – LOOP to start over