This screenplay (or radioplay) was written in the summer of 1997, but I never got around to doing anything with it.


A local tavern, mid-afternoon. TIM is sitting in the corner having a pint, staring out the window. He notices the approach of his friend PLUSSY, who is accompanied by ANNE -- a pretty, downcast girl whom TIM has never met before. She is wearing a silver jumpsuit.

TIM: Hey, Plussy.

PLUSSY: Hey Timmy -- how are you? Oh, allow me to introduce Anne.

TIM: Hello Anne. Um.

PLUSSY: Oh, you'll have to excuse her -- she can't talk.

TIM (to Anne): You can't talk?

PLUSSY: No, she can't talk.

TIM: Really. Why is that, if you don't mind my asking.

PLUSSY: Well.

TIM: I mean, I don't mean to be nosey, I was just...

PLUSSY: It's like this, Tim: Anne is sort of an android. She can do anything a person can do, except talk.

TIM: Are you serious?

PLUSSY: Uh-huh.

TIM: Really!

ANNE looks tragic.

PLUSSY: There there, Anne.

TIM: Oh!

PLUSSY: She's pretty sensitive about it.

TIM: I didn't mean to um.

PLUSSY: It's a pretty sad story, actually. The only sounds she can make are sounds of shameless sexual pleasure.

TIM: No!

PLUSSY: I'm afraid that's the case.

TIM: My goodness!

PLUSSY: Yeah, I know.

TIM: But why is that?

PLUSSY: Well, have you ever heard about the Lazarus Technique?

TIM: I'm sure I haven't.

PLUSSY: It's been in all of the scientific magazines lately. Every editorial seems to be about nothing but the Lazarus Technique -- it's getting tedious to be completely honest.

TIM: But what is it?

PLUSSY: You see, Swedish scientists have developed a method for raising the dead from the grave.

TIM: Are you sure?

PLUSSY: Oh yes. It's in all the magazines.

TIM: I guess I'm out of touch.

PLUSSY: Of course, upon dying there's a pretty small window of opportunity to use the technique. I'm just saying that no one's going to resurrect Beethoven any time soon.

TIM: Wouldn't he be surprised!

PLUSSY: The thing is, though, is that the technique -- this Lazarus Technique -- apparently puts the subject into some discomfort during their revival.

TIM: I guess that's to be expected.

PLUSSY: Well, it's quite severe. In fact, most of the subjects do not wish to go on living upon reviving, and some have even taken to suicide a short time later.

TIM: Jesus.

PLUSSY: Yes - and so there's a lot of controversy and all that. I mean, the test subjects have been people who checked out some little box on their driving licence. They've certainly not approved it for medical use yet.

TIM: Sort of makes medicine beside the point, a bit.

PLUSSY: Maybe -- the point is: there was one scientist, a brilliant but obsessive man named Doctor Glocken, who decided to continue the experiments even after the Swedish authorities began to act to suppress the technique.

TIM: That's just like authorities, isn't it? Swedish or otherwise.

PLUSSY: Uh-huh. So what he did was, he copied all of the data from the Lazarus computer following a particularly nasty resurrection followed by a very flashy auto-multilation on the part of the subject...

TIM: Oh my!

PLUSSY: ...And he took that data to his own laboratory. There, he began his experiments. He became so involved in them, in fact, that his career began to suffer. His wife left him for a physicist - which I can tell you is just about the worst way for that kind of thing to happen among scientists. It's always the bloody physicists.

TIM: They're punks.

PLUSSY: They are punks. So this fellow Glocken ends up ripping off quite a lot of ground-breaking robotics research from his own son; his son's name is Nolan -- he's some kind of eight-year-old prodigy, goes to some special school or something.

TIM: I see.

PLUSSY: The research consumed Glocken. He went too far. He started to fall in love with the dead human being encoded in the Lazarus data. He worked day and night. Some say he went mad some where along the way.

TIM: It's only a cliche because it's so true.

PLUSSY: Exactly. So Glocken created Anne to be his android sex kitten, manufactured with her genetic code and her neuronal structure, build on a flexible polymer frame and all that.

TIM: Amazing stuff, the things they're doing these days.

PLUSSY: Naturally, Anne used her superior android strength to crush him like a gnat between her android thighs.

TIM: Wow!

PLUSSY: So now she is on a quest to find eight-year-old Nolan, because she believes he has the robotics genius to give her the gift of speech.

TIM: Where is he?

PLUSSY: As it turns out, young Nolan's precocious powers gave him a deep insight into the true nature of economic cycles, so he made a billion dollars playing the stock markets.

TIM: I'd sure like to have a billion dollars.

PLUSSY: Who wouldn't? But it's not all silk and caviar, as they say -- not for Nolan. You see, he's been kidnapped by blood-thirsty gypsies, conniving for a ransom.

TIM: That's terrible. What about Interpol?

PLUSSY: What about Interpol?

TIM: Well, isn't Interpol going to chase down those gypsies and free poor Nolan? It seems he's scarcely better off than poor Anne must have been with that scientist.

PLUSSY: First of all, Interpol is after Anne, not Nolan. They want to use Anne for their dark, nefarious purposes.

TIM: Dark, nefarious Interpol?

PLUSSY: You heard it here first.

TIM: Really!

PLUSSY: Anne has an auxiliary quest as well.

TIM: An auxiliary quest?

PLUSSY: A sort of secondary quest.

TIM: What is it?

PLUSSY: She wants to find her family, and tell her that she isn't dead any longer, and that's she's living inside an android's body, and all that. But first she wants be able to say something intelligible to them. It means quite a lot to her, actually.

ANNE: Ooooohh.....uhhhhh......yum.

PLUSSY: There, there Anne.

TIM: Is she crying?

PLUSSY: Yes, the whole thing's a pretty emotional issue for her right now. There there. Do you have a Kleenex?

TIM: I'm afraid not. Here -- use the napkin Anne.

ANNE: Yessss....yesssss......oooohhh.

TIM: Um.

PLUSSY: There, there.

There is a commotion by the entrance as a white-haired man in a lapcoat flanked by two Viking body-guards bursts in and casts about the tavern wildly in search of PLUSSY and ANNE. It is DOCTOR GLOCKEN.

DOCTOR GLOCKEN: Ho! You there!

ANNE: Ooooohhhh --! Yum! Yeah! Whoa!

PLUSSY: Oh my God!

DOCTOR GLOCKEN: Hey you there! I want a word with you!

TIM: Who is that?

DOCTOR GLOCKEN: You have stolen my android!

ANNE: Fuuuuuuuck meeeee....!

PLUSSY: It's Doctor Glocken, the mad Swede -- RUN!

As they get up to run, the picture freezes on TIM.
He continues, in sedate voice-over:

TIM (voice only): Yeah, so that's how it was when I first met Anne -- adrenelin and plastic, tears and bile. In a way, I guess I knew from that very moment how Anne and I would get married and live in Newfoundland, fishing for robot cod and listening to chat shows on the CBC. You know -- it was like I could just tell.

Freeze ends, and actions continues to roll for a split second before fading to black.

Superimposed: Cast, production credits, and so on.

Fin.