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Any film with Pam Grier has to be worth something, especially when she’s a sociopathic assassin.

Or psychopathic.

Or just professional, I suppose.

What is her morality in this?

Maybe if I splice it with Paris, Texas, we’ll get an answer?

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FADE IN

*no music, brownish [Nick] landscape, lunar weather sounds*

THE VINDICATOR walks alone through the West Titan desert in a fugue state, before stumbling into a darts bar and losing consciousness.

Two days later, he is revived.

Hanging from the ceiling above the bed he is chained to is a banner with heart iconography and the text:

ARC WELCOMES YOU.

‘No hand movements,’ says a security bot on the far side of the bed.

‘New Paris…’

‘No hand movements and no speaking.’

THE VINDICATOR mouths something, grabs at thin air, pulls down the banner, passes out.

Equipped with ARC’s cutting-edge prosthetics technology, a German doctor, GAIL, begins the process of building THE VINDICATOR a cyborg body.

In nearby cages, monkeys.

After the remote control unit is removed, a short circuit causes THE VINDICATOR to suddenly reboot.

Monkeys rattle bars.

THE VINDICATOR utters the name New Paris again, asking to go there.

Bar rattling kills GAIL. Monkeys celebrate. In the security room, a janitor bot watches the Harry Dean Stanton ‘I am nothing’ clip. The lab itself oscillates.

Nonplussed, THE VINDICATOR sneaks out of the half-complete matte dome and stows away on a garbage pod, which drops him into an incinerator. He doesn’t know it but this incinerator has a 142 year history of death. 

He escapes, unharmed.

HUNTER, a commission-paid mercenary, gives pursuit, along with her team of augmented men. One disobeys a direct order not to smoke in the van and is evaporated.

Meanwhile, across town, THE VINDICATOR acquires a cheap shuttle and borrows credits from an old cop friend called WALT.

WALT’S son wishes to go with him, though he does not have WALT’s or the monkeys’ permission.

Enraged, THE VINDICATOR flees into the helium mines.

HUNTER appears and gives further pursuit, along with her team of augmented men [minus one].

In the mines, there is green light.

An aura of otherness.

THE VINDICATOR creates the building blocks of a massacre by ripping open a plasma line, which leaks a contradiction in the thing itself.

HUNTER on the intercom, haggles.

An hour later, the team of augmented men is dead and HUNTER would be too if she didn’t ape a Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality which pre-exists individuals at the exact right moment.

A partnership is born, sealed by exploding sewer.

THE VINDICATOR and HUNTER cruise to New Houston, while HUNTER recounts the Bigger Bang and the original origins of First Earth [not the Cortazar rip]. 

In New Houston, all the residential pods have been converted into peep-shows.

Realizing that the rage program forbids close contact with nagging prudes, THE VINDICATOR talks to his wife from outside their resi-pod via a faulty ground wire, in the synthesizer, in their living room, that they had earlier discovered receives subspace signals.

 THE VINDICATOR describes a man and a fifteen year-old girl who meet and fall in love. So deep in love that he can’t imagine such a thing being possible. But he has to work and when he works, he’s away from her and he can’t stand that so he quits his job and works only when the money runs out. Pretty soon things become fraught, the wife worries about the future and the man worries that she’s seeing other men on the sly. When she denies it, he trashes the cargo container they’re living in. And drinks. And works more. And accuses her again. And trashes the place cos she has to be lying about the other men. She’s beautiful, after all. Why wouldn’t she stray? And why would she confess it? To test her, he stays out late, walks endlessly by the artificial recreation of the Shing Mun River, smears lipstick on his cheeks, his neck, inputs new numbers on his padd that all end in STUDENT, and, when that doesn’t work, tries all kinds of other things over the course of four months to make her jealous cos jealousy means love. Where have you been, who did you see, why are your flies undone, what’s that green alien bitch doing naked on your padd? These are the questions she should ask, that he needs her to ask. Yet she doesn’t. So he drinks again. Goes back to trashing the furniture that isn’t even his. Talks to himself about new ways to make her feel something for him and old ways to help him care, and maybe this relationship was always going to end this way? Maybe he should be the one to end it. Is this happiness? Pleasure? He doesn’t know, cannot locate the answer. But that soon becomes irrelevant as the woman tells the man she is pregnant. He is shocked, he didn’t notice a thing, but now that she’s carrying his child he changes instantly. Stops drinking, gets a steady job. He is determined to build a life for his wife and his child. Yet he fails to notice one thing, his wife has changed too. After the child is born, she gets easily irritated, accuses him of keeping her captive, tells him that she dreams of escaping from him and this cursed moon. The husband cannot cope with this truth and descends into alcoholism, becomes abusive, mean, imprisons her in the cargo container adjacent to their own, ties a sonic pulse emitter to her ankle. They stop having sex. No longer talk about it. The wife folds her arms across her chest every time he enters the cargo container. The child is neglected. Only one of them drinks. Both containers are dark, miserable. Over time, the woman learns to muffle the sonic pulse with a sock and, one night, attempts to escape, but is caught when the sock falls out. As punishment, the man uses his belt to tie the woman to the plasma rack and goes to bed, dreaming of withdrawing to an unknown place “without language or domes” while his wife and child scream from the kitchen. To him, at that specific moment, they are not real anymore, they are shadow form, an aspect of the language world. On the same level as the plasma rack. The cargo container. He will not answer them. During the night, he wakes up to find himself on fire. The bedsheets are dancing with blue flames and the only thing he can think of is to run towards the two people he loves. But his wife is gone, his son is gone. Only the belt is left. In despair, the man gets in his shuttle and flies for five days without rest until there are no more signs of man and, not long after that, he has left the solar system entirely.

The wife buckles, throws her face at the glass, leaves.

The green light switches off.

Darkness and skewed angles appear.

He is alone.

Aware that she is no match for THE VINDICATOR, HUNTER leaps to her death from a promotional rail-gun.

Grief-stricken, confused, THE VINDICATOR fondles her corpse. Rebukes himself when a vagrant materialises. Takes home the rail gun. Trashes TV.

Collapses against the wall.

Remembers what might have been his wife.

HUNTER’S bear suit and thong.

The green light returns.

On the cracked screen, a bald man buffers then disappears.

‘Cos I have accessed your meaning,’ mutters THE VINDICATOR, reaching for the nearby plasma line.

*triumphant music, glitching neon outside*

FADE OUT