In 2015, Tom Pine is a multiple, with lives in several time periods, linked by a space-time flaw within him. He’s in love in Hiroshima in 1945, but when he connects with a third life in 1349 and an ancient alien hijacks his flaw, intent on consuming modern Earth’s resources to breed, he faces the unthinkable: how to prevent a seemingly inevitable future, by exploiting (and dying in) a past that can’t be changed.

SYNOPSIS:

PREINCARNATION by Kendall Castor-Perry

Logline: In 2015, Tom Pine is a multiple, with lives in several time periods, linked by a space-time flaw within him. He’s in love in Hiroshima in 1945, but when he connects with a third life in 1349 and an ancient alien hijacks his flaw, intent on consuming modern Earth’s resources to breed, he faces the unthinkable: how to prevent a seemingly inevitable future, by exploiting (and dying in) a past that can’t be changed.

Personal connection: when we bought an apartment in Westminster, London, we became fascinated by the local area’s checkered history (Dickens called it The Devil’s Acre). Reading of the supposed earthquake in 154 AD that destroyed a Roman temple to the god Apollo, my sci-fi brain went “but that wasn’t an earthquake, was it…” Westminster Abbey was later built on the temple site, Thorney Island, at the time recorded as a barren area said to be “full of eville”.

Format: feature.

Genre: adult sci-fi with historical references.

Periods: present-day (~2015) London, 1349 London and 1945 Hiroshima.

Tone: Dan Brown style investigation; weird science; love conquers all.

Comps: ‘Angels and Demons’ & ‘Pacific Rim’ meets “Black Death’ & ‘Name of the Rose’.

Rating: PG-13, no sex, violence is mild and stylized, some stomach-churning alien effects.

Key characters:

• Tom Pine (30s) – troubled historian and multiple, living in the shadow of his dead father Peter whose medieval adventure books spawned a GoT-like TV series (and who was also a multiple, writing compellingly about the 14th century because he had a life in 1349).
• Joth – powerful alien, last of its race, stranded on Earth in 154 AD, sensed Tom’s flaw in 1349 and will use it to jump to the present-day and consume the Earth while reproducing.
• Melissa Pine (60s) – Tom’s mother, last member of an ancient order of women devoted to preventing the catastrophe that will befall Earth when Joth arrives – by killing all multiples. Disappeared in 1989 after apparently murdering her mother Helena and Tom’s father Peter.
• Aldritch Charteris (60s) – Canon at Westminster Abbey, keeper of ancient knowledge to help Joth to force his way through Tom’s flaw. Tom’s guardian after Melissa disappeared.
• ‘EJ’ Fentiman (30s) – schoolmate of Tom who has become a smarter-than-Einstein nerd whose theories predict the ‘flaw’ that makes Tom a ‘multiple’ and who has equipment that can interact with space-time to detect and influence this. When it works…

Rules: Not time-travel with change-the-past paradoxes. There’s just one Tom ‘inside’ his multiple lives. He’s not traveling, he exists physically in all of them (as Douglas in 1945 and Timothy in 1349). Jumping between lives, he picks up each (unchangeable) past where it left off, with no gaps.

Conflict/Stakes: If Tom rejects the challenge, not only will Earth be devastated by Joth’s breeding, but Melissa’s life-long disobedience to the demands of her order, placing Tom at the epicenter of all this, will have been for nothing. To succeed, he’ll have to die – in all three of his lives.

Key plot / story strands in the three time periods (interleaved throughout):

1945: Tom’s life here is as disabled Douglas Sakai, adopted by Japanese Christian missionaries as a polio baby. Deeply in love here with Miho, daughter of the superintendent of the missionaries’ school. The story spans the morning of August 6th, the day of the bomb. Tom (and his therapist Dr Harper in 2015) thinks he might have been imagining or hallucinating this entire life in Japan, its realism coming from his academic specialty as a historian of the era. When Tom discovers that what he’s experiencing really is what’s happening in 1945 to Douglas, the stakes and the pain of the imminent loss of the love of his life become almost unbearable for him.

1349: Tom’s 1349 life is as Brother Timothy at West Minster Abbey, dying of the Plague. He investigates a huge Plague Pit near the Abbey mentioned in his father Peter’s unpublished notes and discovers Peter is alive, stranded – as Gregory. Alien Joth is first observed as The Devil’s Breath, a seemingly intelligent toxic fog. Timothy is captured by necromancer Martineau, who’s working to reanimate Joth, later seen gruesomely reassembled (FX!) from hundreds of corpses deposited in the pit. As Timothy, Tom must face off with the reconstituted Joth, whose destructive powers are now restored. He must close off his ‘flaw’ to 2015 to prevent Joth jumping through it. Except... written records from this time confirm that the Joth did disappear through Timothy.

2015: Tom is reluctantly persuaded by ‘mentor’ Charteris to return to England from self-imposed teaching exile in Canada, to help with the adaptation of more of his father’s stories into a new season of ‘Tales of Gregory’. Charteris always knew about Tom’s flaw; it’s the key for bringing Joth to the present-day Earth, where it will exhaust our resources, ravaging the planet to construct billions more Joth, which will spread through the Universe to once again rule over all other species.

Another incentive for Tom’s return is that, after 26 years on the run, his mother Melissa has finally been caught by Detective Burroughs for the murder of Tom’s father Peter in 1989. Not comprehending why she would do this is yet another trauma that Tom has needed therapy for. At the airport, he has a run-in with Celine, later revealed as the granddaughter of Miho. The first of many coincidences that pile up – the results of local space-time interacting with Tom’s ‘flaw’.

In the UK, Melissa inexplicably escapes from her holding cell. Tom encounters his old school chum EJ at a conference; EJ has equipment that can detect Tom’s flaw but when he identifies 1349 as the locus of Tom’s other life, Tom is furious; he thinks EJ is ‘trying it on’, knowing this was his father’s specialty. Later, mollified, Tom visits EJ, who claims he can connect Tom to his 1349 life, so Tom can discover what intrigued his father. To make it possible, EJ must first close off Tom’s access to 1945 – just as Miho is assaulted by a Japanese soldier. No!! And it’s probably irreversible…

A visit to Melissa’s hideout reveals Charteris’s plan to bring Joth to the present day. Charteris traps Tom, EJ, Celine and her grandmother (elderly Miho) inside a force-field in Westminster Abbey. Tom is forcibly held in 1349 by Charteris, using mysterious equipment repaired for him by EJ. Because of those written records from 1349, it seems like Joth’s arrival is inevitable. Melissa kills Charteris but is mortally wounded. Tom asks Melissa to kill him; he diverts Joth to Hiroshima in 1945, where both he and Joth are disintegrated by the bomb. But then EJ, regretful of having been used by Charteris, exploits a quirk of his own equipment, allowing Tom to stop Melissa killing him – though elderly Miho sacrificed herself to make this possible. Tom asks EJ to ‘send’ him to wherever Miho went. In the epilog, they meet in an alternative Hiroshima where the bomb was not dropped.

PREINCARNATION