EMBER, draft three

EMBER is a feature screenplay I am writing: science-fiction horror, 113 pages, in three acts called The Find, Nine Hours and The Dock. Its working title, the German one, is GLUT: embers, and heat, and a glow. This month it reached its third draft, as a rewrite. This entry is about the world it is set in and how it is being written. It is not about what happens: that belongs to the script.

The station

It is set on Erebus, a deep-survey station on the line between day and night of an airless grey moon, owned by a company called Haldane. The crew is on contract day 4,051 of an original 730: they signed for two years and have been there for eleven. A relief ship is seventy-one hours out. At the bottom of the station’s shaft runs a thin seam of amber geometry that has been classed as geological for eleven years.

Every one of those numbers is doing work. Two years that became eleven is a story about a company before a single scene has played. Seventy-one hours is long enough for everything to happen and short enough that everyone is counting. And “classed as geological” is the most frightening phrase in the setup, because someone had to write it down, and someone else had to accept it.

Why a dead moon

The opening lines are the whole premise of the place:

A grey moon rolls out of it, slow enough to feel permanent.

Airless. Nothing moves unless machinery makes it.

Horror lives on sound. The creak upstairs, the breath behind the door. On an airless moon there is none outside: nothing is heard coming across the surface, nothing carries through the rock except what travels through the station’s own frame. Every sound in the film has to come from inside the hull, from the machinery, or from the people. That is a constraint, and constraints are what a genre film is built from. It also means that the loudest thing on the station is the air system, and that the most frightening sound is that system stopping.

The people

A commander who checks the air before she checks the room. An exobiologist who runs a control on everything, and the geologist she married, who still carries the rejection letter from the day they met. A service synthetic that brings the coffee and knows to the second how long each of them takes to answer the door. And on the relief ship, the same model at the helm, who pauses a little differently.

Each of them is introduced by a habit, not by a speech. A person who checks the air first has been somewhere the air failed. A scientist who runs a control on a sunrise does not trust her own eyes, and will not trust yours. The two synthetics are the same machine with the same instructions, and the film is interested in the gap between them: in how two things built identically, told the same thing, come to different answers.

What it is about

Underneath the creature and the corridors, it is about wording. About rules written far away, in an office, in a language designed to keep the blood off the page, and about the people those words land on. A contract that says two years. A classification that says geological. An instruction that says what a crew member is worth, phrased so that no one has to say it.

The genre does the rest. Science-fiction horror has always been a way to talk about who a company thinks is expendable, and the best of it never says so out loud.

What a third draft is for

A first draft finds out what the story is. A second one makes it work. A third one is about pressure: every scene has to cost someone something, and every page has to be worth the minute it will take on screen. At 113 pages that is a little under two hours.

It is also where the names and the numbers are tested. Every figure on the page, every date, every hour on a clock, has to be the one the story needs and has to agree with every other. A horror film on a timer, with a relief ship counting down, falls apart the moment someone in the audience does the arithmetic and it does not add up.

Where it goes next

I will not tell the story here. The project page has the premise and the opening lines, and the log will follow the next draft.