My-Sci-Fi

I had this great idea for a sci-fi film script. Imagine if you will, a futuristic society where the people are focused on ever higher living standards built on nothing but promises and IOU's. Over a 30 year period, they stop producing, manufacturing or creating anything of value and concentrate solely on entertaining themselves with trinkets and noise-makers and getting B.A.'s in Art History. They slowly eliminate real money until it is just an abstract click of numbers on a computer screen and invest some of these mouse click numbers in a massive ponzi scheme called The Martrix. The Martrix operators build countless computer programs that become so complex that the initial value of the original mouse clicks cease to have any correlation in either direction to the final product. The people merrily trade these huge blocks of vapour-cash and spin off huge vapour-returns on gains that don't really exist because they stopped actually producing anything years earlier. They buy big houses and big cars and little cell phones and tiny music players and thin computers and fat holidays and $500 shoes and big-ass ride-on lawn mowers with all this vapour-doe and then borrow the rest of the cash they need to live like kings because, they deserve it. The computers whirl in the background accumulating and mincing up all this borrowed bling and turning into saleable mega-blocks of vapour-debt that count into the trillions. Big empty company shells with tens of thousands of employees trade the mega-blocks of debt back and forth and keep cranking out more and more money from various governments to lend to people down below. The debt balloons float back up and they trade them with other guys doing the same thing. The computers keep track.

This end product – its value now completely esoteric – is traded to ever higher levels of perceived value until one day..... the shit hits the fan.

The massive computer systems that were used to create these endlessly complex and indecipherable value-units don't actually come to life and take over the world but rather end up accidentally becoming too complex for anyone other than the programs themselves to understand. Without a way to evaluate the incomprehensible value-units created by these massive systems, the humans accidentally screw themselves because the actual value of the Martrix could be, well.... nothing, in fact. The computers unknowingly crash the whole people-system and now nobody knows who owes what to who. The computers know but nobody knows how to ask them.

The governments stop killing brown people for a few minutes and run over to see what all the fuss is about. No biggie they say... we'll just put that on the company card, baby. Keep on dancing. When somebody asks who's name's on the card, the answer is, “ahhh... well, yours actually”. “But I'm broke and fucked” the people respond. “Well,” the government says, “you'll be more fucked if you don't just cough up. The computers say so, er... we think.”

“Oh ...and by the way , we've got to get back to killing brown people and taking their oil. You want to drive your pickup don't you? Now run along... this is complicated stuff.”

The computers whirl in the background accumulating and mincing up all this new borrowed bling and turning into saleable blocks of vapour-debt that now count into the quadrillions. These computers rule the world - but in a sad twist of fate that even sci-fi writers of yore never saw coming - they're too stupid to know it.

Instead, the Chinese do.