A Sci-Fi Screenplay by Gary David Ritner

Teaser

A handsome young white male of 25 (Ryan) rides a bicycle on the wooden boardwalk through a wetland preserve. Ryan rides off of the boardwalk, out of the wetland preserve and up to a coffee shop. Inside a Starbucks coffee shop, an attractive twenty-five year old woman (Eva) makes coffee. Ryan enters ...

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.. It all depends on my health. I have Leukemia. Treatments are going well, I guess. It will be a while before doctors know if the bone marrow transplant will restore my blood to the normal range. I am not there yet, but the numbers are moving in the right direction. How's that for an opening greeting? Forgive me for getting right to it, but I worry that I will meet Mr. Right without telling him soon enough. So, I tell my tale right up front."

Ryan smiles and says, "No problem. I understand, Besides I am flattered that you considered me a candidate for Mr. Right. Maybe we could chat some more after you get off work?"

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Three people in Hazmat suits walk along the boardwalk in the wetlands, which are very dry from a severe drought. They are taking several pictures of the wetlands. Each takes out a Geiger counter after they stop at a spot where there is a large circle on the dried reeds about eighteen feet across. Inside the circle, the grass is undisturbed, but there are three depressions like three legs to stabilize a saucer. As they hold the Geiger counters to the depressions, the counter chatters to indicate radioactivity. One agent reaches for a flame thrower as he looks at the landing markings.

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"Ryan, I don't usually talk about having Leukemia much. I keep wishing that it were just a bad dream. However, the doctor told me yesterday that he is very encouraged by the results of my blood test. He can't explain why the good numbers jumped so dramatically in just a week. He has never seen anything like it. He asked if anything unusual had happened this week. I told him that I felt a strange tingling throughout my body when you touched my shoulder with your hand yesterday afternoon. It was like a flow of energy. It felt pleasant. I felt it again today. I thought that it was just my Libido kicking in. Do you have any thoughts about this?"

Ryan looks a little shocked and comes up with a quick answer, "Do you know about Reiki? There is a life force energy in our bodies. When the energy is low, we tend to succumb to illness. When the energy is high, we experience healing and greater wholeness. There are many Reiki practitioners in the world. I studied it with one of them. When I touched your shoulder, I was directing life force energy into you with the intention of giving you peace, relaxation and healing. It is part of a whole philosophy or theology of peace and fulfillment based on joy, love and happiness to the exclusion of anger, hatred and resentment."

Eva listens with interest and replies, "That sounds a little hocus-pocus to me. I am such a rational person. I like science and facts."

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Sitting at a desk in front of a computer, a worker calls out to a co-worker, "Nancy, look at this sighting report from Vero Beach. 'On Tuesday evening around 11 pm, I saw lights in the sky coming toward the beach. They were of various colors. At first, I thought that it was a plane flying low. I looked for the usual pattern of lights. Instead, I saw lights going back and forth across a line close to the water. The lights rose and dropped quickly and then bounced back up again to hover in place a few hundred feet above the ocean. Almost faster than I could follow it, a metallic silvery image the size of a merry-go-round with these lights went over my head and disappeared over the wetlands preserve. I walked in the direction where the lights disappeared. By the time that I reached the top of the sand dune, it came flying over my head really low and fast and then went almost straight up and disappeared into the clouds.' Let's get a team over there asap."

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Eva walks with Ryan as she is talking with excitement, "Ryan, my doctor says that I can stop all medication because there is no indication of Leukemia. He cannot figure out how it happened. He just says that it must be a miracle."

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Ryan smiles at her reaction and answers, "I have always been intrigued by such sightings. I have not doubted that some of it must be real. I always wondered why aliens would come to earth. I wanted to know why the government would not make it public and why the aliens would keep it a secret."

Eva smiles in disbelief and asks, "So you believe there are aliens?"

Ryan smiles for a long moment and eventually replies, "I find it disturbing that the world is in such a sorry state with new diseases, global warming and violence. Predictions of potential total annihilation by meteors and global catastrophe make me wonder if we shouldn't be looking for another place in the universe to live. One recent project involved the storing of seeds in a mountain in case a catastrophe were to destroy all plant life on earth. Those seeds could be used to restore plants as the basic building blocks of life. S.E.T.I. Scientists have been looking for life elsewhere in space. Some have talked about the need for a new home when the earth is no longer inhabitable. Logic would tell us that it is very likely that conditions could exist for supporting life on some other planet. I think that governments and the military would want to keep a lid on anything they knew in order to protect the information that could be used to achieve military superiority. Aliens might want to keep their travels secret to avoid being used by the military."

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A media frenzy breaks out near the wetlands as more witnesses go on camera to describe the lights that they saw.

Eva sees Ryan in the crowd and pushes through to him. She drags him away from the crowd and toward the beach. They walk and talk where no one else can hear them. Eva says, "I have been wondering about your background. You have not said much about where you grew up. I don't know much about you. As I am becoming more convinced that something real has happened here, I am wondering more about how you appeared in my coffee shop the morning after the landing was said to have taken place. Did your appearance here have anything to do with that? Did you come here to research the sightings?"

Ryan smiled and replied, "I have been thinking about writing a novel about why the aliens have been around more frequently for the last sixty years since the Roswell, New Mexico sighting. I came here from Fort Pierce, where I grew up. When I read a blog entry on a UFO sighting web site, I could not resist being close to a sighting so close to home."

Eva looked even more intent in asking, "So, what is the explanation in your novel?"

They stopped and sat down on a public wharf. Ryan said, "I have a lot of the story to write yet. However, here is what I have so far. In 1947, a reconnaissance saucer landed in Roswell. It picked up some people in the night. They were taken to the mother ship hovering not far outside the reach of earth detection. The next night the saucer returned to earth to pick up some other people. It crashed. A military cleanup crew came and took away most of the wreckage to keep the wreck and technology a secret, but some fragments remained. That was the wreckage identified in reports about the Roswell incident."

(A few pictures of the Roswell incident and headline are shown behind this monologue.)

Eva asks, "What about the aliens? Where did they come from?"

(A few pictures of various drawings of saucers are shown behind this part of the monologue. Then a depiction of the meteor hitting the planet Bismuth is showing while he talks.)

Ryan continues, "The extraterrestial beings are called Bismuthians for the planet Bismuth, on which they lived. They gathered up some earth people into the mother ship. They explained that their planet, Bismuth, had been destroyed by a meteor collision. Bismuth is the earth name for a metallic element that Bismuthians used to create their space technology. While the metal is heavy in its natural form, they engineered the atoms to be superstrong and light. Blows with a sledge hammer could not put a mark on the Bismuthian ships. The military is still trying to figure out what it is and how they did it. The survival of about one thousand of them happened when they were on a vast space station when the meteor hit their planet. After their planet was destroyed, they located a planet that could support life. They called it Venus Haven, named after the Goddess of Love and Beauty - Venus. It would be a Heavenly place where love was the primary value to the exclusion of greed and anger and all the vices that follow from them. The new inhabitants would be called Venus Havenites. It would be the equivalent to the notion of a Promised land like that described in Deuteronomy. Bismuthians believe in God, but God looks more like them. I suppose every culture relates better to a God who has their own face. However, Bismuthians did not want to populate that planet with humans, because human nature was so prone to greed and violence. They did not plan to populate Venus Haven with their own kind because they had identified shortcomings in their own DNA. They admired the capabilities and beauty of human earthly bodies. Therefore, they planned to create a new being by genetic engineering. Those beings would inhabit the new planet Venus Haven. Some earth people were chosen for a voluntary study of their DNA. Volunteers were accepted into the program. Those who declined were immediately returned to earth, and their memories of the abduction were wiped clean. A few reported vague memories and revealed some clues to the earth about the existence of the Bismuthians. Thus, you have several sightings and close encounters of the third kind reported. That is the some of my novel. What do you think so far?"

Eva squeezed his arm to her and snuggled into his shoulder, saying, "You are so creative. I am getting cold. Can we go to my place and warm up?"

They walked off along the beach, looking like lovers and friends with their arms around each other. They walked into Eva's apartment and shut the door behind them.

(Melodic and romantic theme repeated.)

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As though he is making this up as he goes along, Ryan spins a yarn for her, "Genetic engineering is theoretically possible for scientists now. You have heard about Dolly, the cloned sheep. However, there are ethical problems that prevent human experimentation. The Bismuthians developed computer models with superior knowledge of genomes. Their computer science is so far advanced that they can see the potential results without having to do trial and error experiments. Their models can foresee all the potential outcomes. This takes the risk out of their genetic manipulation. When they arrive at a conclusion about they want to create, they can do it without risks of side effects."

"They concluded that they want to create a being with extraordinary capacities for love. They located this capacity in several places in the earthling body, mostly in the brain. Identifying the places in the genome where this capacity was located, they increased this tendency. They removed the tendencies toward greed and anger from the DNA. Millions of years of evolution had accentuated these tendencies so that humans could survive in a hostile world. Bismuthians planned to create a world that was not hostile, so these tendencies would only be self destructive and mutually harmful. Not only did they create human beings with such qualities, they also created animals with these qualities. Instead of creating predators, they created vegetarian animals without tendencies to prey upon others."

"The Bismuthians have several powers that humans do not have. Super-intelligence is possible because of the genetic engineering of their brains. They can direct energy in smaller doses with their hands and in larger doses with a magical silver wand. They used this wand to set about a chain reaction with solar energy focused on Venus Haven that turned a watery planet into one with an earth-like atmosphere."

Eva continued to eat faster as she was catching the excitement that Ryan felt about his novel. Ryan had stopped eating to focus his thoughts on telling the story to Eva, "The reason that the new beginning on Venus Haven was delayed since 1947, was that new diseases kept appearing. It took them some time to figure out how to control the aging, regeneration and dying of cells. When they mastered this, they brought aging and cancer under control among their own population. When AIDS and Ebola and other viruses became a big problem on earth, they studied them and developed DNA that could resist viral anomalies. Just recently, they declared that the way was now clear enough and the time was urgent enough to start a new life form on Venus Haven."

"They have gathered desirable animals from the earth and engineered their DNA for vegetarianism and peaceful dispositions. Venus Havenites will eat only plants and no animals. The Bismuthians have thousands of plants and animals on the space station. It is like Noah's Ark, bringing a second chance after greed and anger has destroyed the earth. Two humans will be genetically engineered to be the new Adam and Eve. Other people with genetically engineered DNA will follow until the new planet has all the ethnic groups currently on the earth. Venus Havenites will have all the best tendencies that Adam and Eve did not have when they were born with a human nature. Venus Havenite nature will give them a far better chance of keeping peace in the Garden of Venus Haven. If trouble erupts, they will continue to improve the DNA through engineering so that Venus Havenite nature becomes even more inclined to doing good."

"Venus Haven is ready for Venus Havenite life to start. Buildings and hi tech equipment have been installed by Bismuthians for the first Venus Havenite village. They have called the first village, the Garden of Venus Haven. Adam and Eve will soon go to begin to populate the planet of Venus Haven."

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"So, what do you think of all the UFO talk in town?"

Eva replies, "It has been great for business. I was swamped this morning with tourists who came to town to be in the place where aliens landed. I think it must all be a hoax, but the tips are good. I'll go along with it as long as it is good for business."

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After he finishes, Sophia asks, "What do the Bismuthians look like in your book?"

Ryan replies, "They have large, round dark eyes for seeing on Bismuth in the low light levels with a smaller and more distant sun than ours. Their heads are bigger than ours in proportion to their bodies. They have large brains in those heads. Because they have small lungs, they also have small nostrils. Oxygen on their planet is highly concentrated and breathing is easier than on the earth. They have a small mouth with small teeth for chewing in the back. They eat vegetables and no meat, so they don't need the cutting and tearing teeth that humans have for eating meat. They usually walk around without any clothes, because they don't have reproductive organs to cover up. They reproduce by regeneration. If they want to produce an offspring, they clip a little piece of skin and put it in a sterile pressurized chamber like an incubator where it grows into a full-size person in a few weeks. They wear tan, somewhat burlap-like uniforms when they are around humans, because humans feel uncomfortable with them wearing no clothes."

Sophia asks, "Will your book suggest why they do not trust humans enough to share their technology and make themselves known? Why are they coming here?"

Ryan answers, "They came at first to study human medicine, especially gene technology. They were searching for clues to stopping the aging process and conquering cancer. They might have offered to cooperate with earth scientists, but their evidence suggested that economics and politics controlled earth medicine too much for them to be free to find the cures and answers. So, they worked alone, using information they gleaned from the Internet and research networks. Rather than share their medical successes, they concluded that the results would not be used for the benefit of humankind. It would be used for profit by greedy executives. Their primary motivation was to save the earth population as well as their own with a genetically altered cross between the Bismuthians and earthlings on a new planet. So, what do you think of my theories?"

Sophia answered, "I like them. They are a lot more altruistic than anyone has imagined before. Most people think that they abducted people to perform experiments on them for sadistic reasons or that they are planning an invasion to take over the earth."

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Ryan explains, "Adam was a volunteer from the 1947 Roswell landing. For sixty years he lived on the space station. Adam's DNA was engineered for him to acquire the alien powers of superior brain function and storage capacity, the ability to direct energy for healing, the ability to communicate telepathically and to move things telekinetically, and the capacity to regenerate damaged body parts and functions. With the new discoveries by the Bismuthians since 1947, Adam was engineered to resist all forms of cancer, to resist aging for at least 250 years, to have an immune system that could resist any viruses by learning how they worked and disabling them immediately."

"Eve? In my writing process, they are still looking for Eve. She must be someone who loves Adam so much that she will volunteer to go with him on the Ark to start a new world."

Sophia has a broad smile on her face and says, "I love it. When you need an endorsement for the jacket on this best seller, I will gladly lend my name and our organization to it."

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Eve asked, "Please tell me more about that healing energy you used in curing my Leukemia."

Adam answered, "Our bodies are fields of energy. Having the power to direct energy, we can manipulate the energy in cells. This manipulation activates the powers of the cell itself to remove toxins and restore health to each cell. Each cell has a mechanism that controls the living and dying of the cell. There is a proper time for cells to grow and stop growing. Cancer cells have an out-of-control mechanism that allows them to keep replicating, when they should stop replicating. By manipulating the energy in the cell, the switch is thrown on all cells, resetting them to their proper functions."

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Eve asked, "Is this playing God?"

Adam replied, "I don't think so at all. In fact, it is responding to God's call to go forth and multiply, to have dominion over the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea. I don't think that God created what has come to be known as human nature. That twisted human nature that is destroying the earth is a sign that the project went wrong soon after the innocence of the Garden of Eden. Because of the flaws in human nature, people turned on each other. We see the results on the earth today. God is not destroying the earth and neither are we. People are doing it all by themselves. We are taking Noah's Ark out onto the oceans of space and settling in a new place with a new resolve to be better people the next time around."

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Malcolm talks with his wife, Joanna, their thirty-year-old son, Barack, and his wife, Maia, "Joanna, since Barack and Maia have decided to accept the invitation to join Adam and Eve on Venus Haven in two years, I have been considering our options. They have said that you and I could join them in a year after that if we wished. I have thought long and hard about it. While I can't speak for you, I can't go if it would mean that I would have to leave anyone behind."

"I do hate to let Barack and Maia go because I will miss them, but I am so happy for them and those future generations who will benefit from their decision."

"I feel that I must stay here to help our other children and friends to cope with this world and all the problems of human nature that make this world such a challenge."

"Life here can be so beautiful for those who can see past all the anger and hatred. I have not given up hope for the earth yet."

"While I think that a new start is a wonderful thing, I also think that I need to keep trying to make this world work."

"I feel that I must stay behind even if it means that I will sacrifice my life for those whom I love. I will give up utopia for myself to give some thread of hope for those who have to live here and die. I cannot abandon them."

Everyone is crying around the table. Joanna comes over and hugs Malcolm and says, "I am with you, Malcolm. I will not abandon you either."

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Will Ryan and Eva find the love of their lives with each other? Will the earth survive? Will Project Venus Haven succeed? Will the government prevent the successful completion of the Project? For answers to these questions and all the action and suspense, CLICK HERE to Download the PDF of the screenplay.

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Other romantic works by Gary David Ritner
Courage In the Clutch | Fantasy Love Online | Pickup Games
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