BSA215, Comic Script, 27 August, 2016

from the "Save the Cat!" plot formula
Cover  Title? Dead End V?
inside cover:  Traci Meek bio

P1:
Set-up:  brief synopsis of last comic,
.  M3 floating in the Tides of Time (blue goo bath) and thinking about... everything.
I remember everything when I'm in the bath.
I'm old.  I'm tired.  I'm waiting to die.  Everyone I've ever known is dead.  I've outlived them all.  I can feel the atoms that I'm made of knitting back together.  I'm looking out through (there needs to be an allegory that leads from her extreme old age, rejuvenation, to mission purpose)
P2
The Broken Window (panel  and title)  M3s reverie is broken by Chronohub 7s Section"Agent MacIntosh... Agent Macintosh?" 
McMurdo: Is she OK? 
M3: Yes. Yes... I am...Here.
WSP: A side effect of the Tides of Time*.
Being everywhen at once gives even the most seasoned chrono agent pause to reflect.
M3: I'm fine.
Let's put that famous way with words of yours to better use.
Exposition with dynamic poses!
Chief William S. Pierce's synopsis of the last comic.

P3

Catalyst  William S. Pierce outlines the machine's mischief
We found the genome of the residents had been tinkered with 300 generations ago.  It's been a long game, which has made it hard to trade.  What government,domestic or foreign, what power or person could be responsible for this?   The Machine is at the heart of this. 

The city was full of people and should have gone one for another thousand years, but something happened... the people became listless and unresponsive.  They didn't kill themselves, they just became so passive they stopped breeding, or caring and died of ennui.  Their population was diminishing, so they attempted to bring in migrants but also tried to control the flow with their robot workers (made by Ikea). like any good Ikea product, they were capable of being repurposed.  The robots tried to simultaneously obey their directives of hospitality and border enforcement.  Unfortunately, this led to the meatball processing plants...
To incorporate: is McMurdo eating to make up for lost time/no meatballs?
Dinner theatre
McMurdo "eats" the nanites.  No needs for shots.  ChronoHub7 is just as ruthless and arrogant as The Machine.
M3: you're lucky (you got food).  His mission briefings are usually four hours of him talking to a skull.
Human emotions! So fascinating, so diverse, so turbulent and uncontrollable.
Apathy is the preferred emotional state from the government/corporate perspective.
An empty city.  Ennui killed them all.  it took generations.
(Shakespeare up that language)

* The Reconstitution Bath that brought M3's dust? back together in the first comic.
McM: Bio Terrorism?
M3: in a sense, yes.
McM: a dirty bomb set off in the city center?
M3: No.  
The Machine is playing a long game. The genome of those  people was altered to encourage passivity.  I thought had happened here (this Icelandic volcano eruption)
M3: Here.
M3 in Das Kapital trying to follow particles back to volcano? Back in time to adulteration point?   

P4

Debate  how and who should go
McMurdo has been drafted.  He is a geo-ambulator.  What does this mean?  Why is he important?  What is M3s position on this?  Why was she trying to get to The Machine by herself through 2099?
M3: and THEN.  
McM: How can that be?

P5

Act Two Plot Point M3 has lost a partner, geoambulator Amelia Earhart (A. Hart?), in the past and she doesn't want to take McMurdo any further.  Pierce overrules her objections and gets McMurdo another beer to go with his meal.   McMurdo is sent for further testing, updates and a medical to:
P6

B Story The Librarian
The Librarian looks like a japanese vampire/James Dean wanna-be.  His longevity comes from literary infamy and piggybacks on popular culture trends( everybody thinking about him keeps him going).  He's full of crap and his stories reflect that: dinner with the president, Abraham Lincoln, and his mistress Marilyn Monroe.  Flying with navigator Winston Churchill into the Battle of the Bugles (corn chips).  "Hey!  I was THERE.  I KNOW.  M3 picks McMurdo up after he's gotten a nanite injection.  The Librarian accused M3 of a side project: seeding the redhead gene throughout the world's population in time and space.  She has no patience for The Librarian and reminds him that he's "from  Iowa.  I was THERE.  I KNOW."
panels of him on top of book shelves, close up of eyes, jumping down, floating over floor, full-lenghth
Librarian:  Your blood, McMurdo... it... sings... for me.
M3: Theatrics aside, Junko(?) Dean here is from Little Tokyo, Dubuque, IOWA.
Librarian:  WHO TOLD??!??
M3:  Give the young man a break.  It's been a big day for him.  
Librarian grudgingly checks his vitals with a doohickey, complains that nobody takes him seriously.
Librarian:  Did I ever tell you about the time I had dinner with the president and his mistress, Marilyn Monroe?
M3:  YES.  (to McMurdo) Let's go.
Librarian:  "Mr. Lincoln, I said, ABE Baby, don't go to the theatre tonight... stay home and surf the internet... P7 and P8 

Fun and Games M3 and McMurdo begin their trek overland through her homeland towards the North Pole.  M3 doesn't enjoy the time tunnel through the Arctic.  Past memories keep swirling around her and it makes her sad/angry/regretful.  McMurdo has to keep her balanced.  Macintyre and McMurdo follow the Aurora borealis (which looks at times like a DNA strand) North to the pole where The Machine is pumping out the retrovirus into the atmosphere.  They run across something which frightens McMurdo- a caribou or a baby seal.  He shrieks like he's seen a spider.  Something, a shadowy figure, is following the two as they walk through the snow.   

P9

Midpoint  M3 and McMurdo try to sneak up on The Machine’s camp but are blocked by the polar bear that has been stalking them, an animal that McMurdo considers to be almost  mythical, but in the past that they’re operating in is very much alive.  “No, it can’t be!  You’re… DEAD!”  

 polar bear standing enraged over Agent M3 and McMurdo.

P10

Bad Guys Close In  Armed Men smoking cigarettes appear from nowhere.   They have been sent by The Machine to bring the chrono agents in.  The Machine has used a pacifying agent, like the one used on mcMurdo in the first comic, to get them to see what they think they should kill.  A state trooper sees a fleeing fugitive, a fisherman sees a baby harp seal to club, an Inuit sees THREE polar bears, etc.  They turn their rifles on the polar bear.  McMurdo screams “NO!” and jumps in front of the bear.  He explains that he couldn’t let an animal that he had only read about in books, like a unicorn, die.  Gut shot, he collapses into a snowdrift.   The polar bear falls dead nearby. 
P11  and P12

All is Lost M3 is shot Their would-be saviours are men enthralled by The Machine.  They truss M3 up and drag her off.  Amelia Earhart, M3s old and not dead partner, is The Machine. 
AH quotes: Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done. 
The woman who can create her own job is the woman who will win fame and fortune.  My job, no thanks to you, was being missing.  It's kept me alive in the minds of the world  until I could rejuvenate.  
There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

P13

Dark Night of the Soul: A rogue agent from The Agency, she resents their leaving her on that island in the Pacific to be “discovered by history”.  Earhart was lost trying to Geo-ambulate without a Tempus agent.  Her attempt to circumnavigate the globe was a dry run for spreading the retrovirus by means of “crop dusting”.   Earhart has reprogrammed her nanites to be retroviruses.  Her followers will kill her and burn her body in an erupting volcano, releasing the ashes into the atmosphere, infecting the population. 
text:

M3: but you'll die!

Machine: and I'll be reborn, again and a million times, again!
Machine:  You're part of this now, partner!  You always have been and youalways will be.  
She squeezes M3s bleeding arm into the volcano.  
There!  Your little Pet Project:  The redhead gene.  You  were always so timid.  Now 50 percent of the world's population has it!  

 M3 and Amelia Earhart trade barbs and argue over independence as the dirty bomb ticks down to release.  They had previously been Time and Space agents together and M3 had bailed when she realised what Earhart was up to.  

P14 and P15

Act Three Plot Point:  McMurdo is alive!  (And 20 years older.)  And so is the polar bear.  And they’re pissed!  The shots at the Chronohub have done their work: the freezing temperatures put McMurdo into a suspended status until the automaton’s could fix him up.  He and the bear collapsed in a heap and the automatons in the blood on the ground went searching for the nearest biological signature, which in many cases, was the polar bear.    

 Polar bear and McMurdo save M3.  The Machine falls into a crevasse on an ice cap.      

P16:
Finale:   M3 looks out at the same futuristic cityscape from the opening.  Instead of the ice cold disintegrating buildings of the beginning, she sees a metropolis teeming with life.  The rays of the sunrise of 2099 fall across her and McMurdo’s faces. 

Shakespeare quotes about time
I wasted Time, now Time doth waste me.
If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.
Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant enver taste of death but once.
One man in his time plays many parts.
Expectation is the root of all heartache.
Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so
Away, and mock the time with fairest show; false face must hide what the false heart doth know.
The time is out of joint: O cursed sprite, that ever I was born to set it right!
?My soul is in the sky.?
A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.
Go wisely and slowly.  Those who rush stumble and fall.
It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves
To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.