Disclaimer: I do not own Tomorrowland. Tomorrowland is property of Disney and it is not based on the theme park land. The characters and situations are owned by Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof. Italics are dialogue taken from the movie (or what I remembered. If I have it wrong please let me know).
Reviews welcomed.
Governor David Nix saw as the Eiffel Tower split apart and an ancient rocket lifted off. He stood at the console in the dome with its reflecting panels lighted by the sights and sounds of Paris, while his knuckles paled as he clutched the console. He saw the various messages he got from AA units in Texas and in Paris beep on his wrist controller. The marvel the patrons saw created a headache for him as he saw in the present past (three days give or take). He narrowed his eyes at the image of Frank Walker and Athena, an AA unit, and a young woman with a baseball cap. It would be awhile before they arrived. He shut down the console and his eyebrows knitted.
"Governor?" His wrist controller bleeped.
"Prepare a personal shuttle," he said. His voice clipped, perfunctory.
"Yes, Governor." He stepped into the sleek vessel and a few AA units followed behind him.
The A.A units exteriors were reminiscent of any human being, but their internal programming and construction was anything ordinary with their synthetic skin and advanced sensors. David stood at the front of the hover shuttle as he input the destination. In the distance, he saw Frank's vessel collided with the outer city structures before it landed on what was once the launch pad for space travel, a program he decommissioned (for the time being) due to available resources and productivity concerns.
David saw the three stood together: Frank at the center, Athena to his left, and the young woman to Frank's right. He walked down the plank of the hover tram. Despite the fact that he banished Frank, due to differences in opinion, the once young boy had grown to be an asset before their fall out began. Intuitive, optimistic, and relentless in his zeal for doing learning and helping others. Athena had been right, but he would never say that out loud.
"Frank," David said.
"David," Frank said. Others would call him Governor Nix, but he let it go.
He eyed Frank. Frank's salt and pepper stubble, crow lined eyes, and wrinkles showed him to be much older than he the last time they saw each other.
"Frank, age becomes you." Frank rolled his eyes.
"Yes, and I see you haven't changed."
"I'll keep drinking my shake every morning. It comes in chocolate now."
David gauged Frank as he gave him a sardonic smile, and David wondered what would drive Frank to come back. Before, he remembered. He switched his gaze.
"Athena, I was wondering when you would come home? Did you receive the message about your mission protocols?"
Her, not Its, sensors calculated him, though to any other they would think she, not It, had eyes. It, not she he reminded himself, camouflaged with Its surroundings, Its attire different than the last time he saw It. A pity it came to this.
"Yes, as I remember you wrote about an obsolete pile of junk."
She, no It, bit back words against things he had said, which he cared little for they were just words. Extraneous sounds that made no impact on him, but his eyes lingered on Frank.
"Considering the terms of your exile, Frank I have to ask: what the hell are you doing here?"
Frank pointed to the young woman to his right. The final part of the equation was the young woman who wore a baseball cap with four letters: N-A-S-A. Her blonde hair stuck to her shoulders and stared at him before their introduction as he asked who she might be. Casey Newton she puffed and stumbled to appear dignified before she asked him who he may be.
Frank did not seem to care as he explained why he was here: that Casey Newton could fix it. The problem. Everything it seemed landed onto her. Well, David thought. This could be interesting. Casey's crazed eyes locked on Frank and David, and she asked what she was supposed to fix.
David stared at her, and would have smirked but kept his face neutral. "The world, Casey. Frank thinks you can fix the world."
His eye caught Athena who glanced at Frank and Casey before it returned to him, a sneer made its way onto her, no Its he reminded himself, face. They followed him as he would test Casey Newton. Casey got onto the hover tram, and her eyes widened like a child's. So new, young, and blinded by what she did not understand around her. A young embryo lost in a sea of lies. Athena stood by Frank whose eyes traveled outside, both weariness and pain. This place, a shadow of its former self for proprietary reasons David reminded himself, had been a home to Frank and Athena.
They disembarked from the hover tram. They came to the loading dock where the portal door to Earth was opened and they transferred goods to the city. Casey's eyes grew in their size when she asked if that was a doorway to Earth, and he mentioned offhandedly a portal to Earth.
Frank stared at the portal and him, before his gaze turned to Casey. Athena's sensors studied the scene before her. He touched a panel on his wristwatch and watched as the dais lowered from the Monitor, where the energy from the tachyon fusion collided with the Monitor in a hypnotic violet dance. The beams buzzed and collided, as the tachyon particles moved faster than light. When the dais was in front of them, they got on it to be raised up to the Monitor.
David explained to Casey, knowing she would not understand half of what he said but would humor Frank, how the dais worked from the light show which presented the future in two seconds time. He watched as her baseball cap flew off of her head and her hands too slow to catch it. Some remark came out of his mouth, but once they entered the Monitor he watched Frank. After all, Frank Walker had designed the software.
"The algorithms have been upgraded, but it still works to your design."
The Monitor was shaped like a sphere and inside comprised of many screens that surrounded them, red in color but once the interface turned on would give them an image. Not the city they were in, Frank's 'Tomorrowland' he called it, but Earth. Frank placed his hands on the globe and asked Casey to pick a place anywhere in the world. She chose Canaveral. He rotated the map to show the United States and zeroed in on Florida. David watched in detachment as the screens lit up into clouds, and saw Casey took over. At first, her touch too fast as the picture shifted at an awkward angle. Frank told her to take it easy and how to direct the interface. She nodded her head and said, "I know, I know."
David knew he was wasting his time, but as the young woman took to the controls faster than he expected.
"You've been training her, I see." Frank looked over his shoulder. "I've known her for a day." He shrugged. "She knows how things work."
Clearly, Casey did as screen in front of them zoomed through images of traffic and came before a scene where he saw Casey with an older man, not Frank. Her father, David presumed as she stared at the image before her. Casey's questions were naïve to David, but he answered them as to how Frank's innovation worked. The image happened three days ago, and David wondered when Frank would test the young girl. When Frank eluded to the fact that she could see the future, she switched the interface to a new destination. A picture of a launch pad dissembled before them, before the screen cracked and fuzzed.
"What happened?" Casey said and David told her to just go a little further.
Images swam before them as the screen showed the previous launch pad in flames. Casey chagrined took to the interface and changed locations. The next image of a fire. Glaciers melted at the ice caps. Floods overtook a large city. Each sight as devastating as the last, he watched in detachment. He saw Casey's shoulders shake and Frank put his hand on her shoulder and told her that was enough. The last image was Casey's house, flooded with water from a storm. David did not smile, the images before him were not a sight he wanted to see. The problem he saw was that this was inevitable.
"It would have been nice if Frank prepared you for this," David said.
Casey walked up to him and looked into his eyes and asked him what he was going to do. His voice remained flat. "Nothing. It's a certainty that the Earth is going to end."
When he told her he would do nothing, she demanded why. The whole Earth was going to die. Millions of people, didn't he care? He blinked. "We'll be perfectly fine here." The city had no cause for alarm.
She narrowed her eyes at him, so much emotion and no filter as her cheeks blushed. Tears crept down her cheeks. Her voice spat at him, he could let them come here and he shook his head.
"Those people live like savages. They would do the same here as they did over there."
Frank watched the two of them, but he came up to him. Eyes wild and pointed at him as to why he would propose such an idea. Casey flung words at David about helping and he repeated that she did not comprehend the certainty. She spat back at him some defense, and the screens flickered. No flood. The house was fine. Then it returned to the flood. Athena saw it. Frank asked if he saw it. In fact, he came up to him and told him he saw it. A millisecond was not enough evidence for him, and he struck Frank on the neck with the silver fork when he became unbearable and Casey. Athena would be difficult, but he needed to have a private discussion with the AA unit.
The dais was loaded with David Nix at the center and Frank and Casey both unconscious. He had his guards take them to a holding cell. Frank and Casey would be banished back to Earth in a short period of time. Athena was escorted to his office. Athena scowled at him, the way only a prepubescent female AA unit could. Her gears shifted, synthetic skin stretched over her mechanical frame. Despite her age, she withheld it well. A part of him swelled at the thought but clamped it down.
"You did not have to do that to them."
He sat back in his office, sparse and large. He waved for Athena to take a seat, but she stood. "It was necessary." He arched an eyebrow.
"Why?" She said.
He steepled his hands. "For protection."
She glared at him. "You saw the flicker."
He said nothing as she continued. "Isn't that evidence enough that things can change?"
"It's a minuscule percent. I'm sure you can work out the statistical disadvantages without other data at what the end result would be."
Her, no It he reminded himself (yet again), face remained stoic.
"What will happen to them?"
He got up from his seat and walked around his desk. Unusual that an AA unit like Athena's empathy programming exerted so much more than it should.
"Why does it matter to you? It does not go against your primary programming."
"My programming," she said, "concerns the needs of my mission, which includes the well being of Frank Walker and Casey Newton."
He sighed. "They will return back to the other dimension to live out their lives till the end. You," he paused. "Can go with them, assuming you will keep a low profile and do not come back. Not that you can." He smiled. "The last transport on that side is gone."
Athena blinked, not a necessity but it allowed her to blend in with others. His hands fingered a few data pads of information he needed to go through. Programs that were exceeding their usage of available materials, another program he would have to halt for the time being. I need to do what I must, he reminded himself. This place would survive, but they had to make compromises.
"You know, this isn't what you wanted," Athena said.
He turned his head to look at her. "There are a lot of things I don't want, and your escape was one of them."
"Then why haven't you deprogrammed me and made me into scrap parts?"
The question stunned him. It made sense and it was a rational decision, he should have her, It, deactivated. Her programming made her lethal, as she stood at a petite height but could withstand more pressure per a square millimeter than any dock machinery. Her combat skills were impressive, due to his upgrades and specifications as to what an AA unit should do. Damn my younger self, he thought. Athena had been his greatest creation, an AA unit that, unlike many other AA units that worked in the other dimension, showed a depth of perception of human behavior and internalized it. His design for an AA unit to seamlessly fit into the human race and find recruits, and the innovation that caught the attention of the then-Governor of the city when he was a young lad at the Academy.
Athena watched him, his pause too long and he knew she was thinking. "It isn't a necessity. When Frank and Casey wake up they will go back, if you care to join them you can go too. Otherwise, if you stay here you will be deprogrammed."
She stared at him. "I will go with them."
He arched an eyebrow. "Why would you go back with Frank and Casey? Your mission, or prime directive, is of no consequence and no longer a concern. They have no need for an AA unit."
She stared at him. "It is a part of my mission and my programming."
He chuckled, but it came out more like a cough. "What mission?"
She glared at him. "To find the dreamers."
He shook his head. "That's obsolete."
She crossed her arms, he would have thought it cute. "You shut it down."
Her movements were precise as she walked away from him. His office had a large glass pane window that looked over the city and the fields of grain, which stretched kilometers into the distance. She turned on her heel and pointed out the window.
"This isn't what you wanted to see, so why is it this way?"
His eyes watched as she explained about the decay of the launch platforms, the pools that people swam up and down in, and the Academy where new recruits were taught advanced mathematics, sciences, and arts. The city had seen better days, but necessities had to be made to survive.
"This city will recover."
He went back to his desk and sat down. He called for his AA guards to take Athena to Frank and Casey's holding cell.
"Why don't you help? You're holding back, I know you are."
He watched as she came up to his desk. He put down his data pad.
"What makes you think I'm, as you call it "holding back"?"
Her servers strained as she narrowed her eyes at him. "The city has the capacity to fit many people in it. The technology we hold here can help those on the other side. The portals can be opened and this place can become what it was supposed to be."
He said nothing, her words were not because of her prime directive or mission. No, she internalized far more than he could have ever believed or thought possible.
"Athena, that's not a possibility."
She stared at him.
"I don't understand."
"Think of it this way, but no," he paused and raised an eyebrow, "you don't think. You do." He chuckled. "The people on the other side would ruin this place like I mentioned in the Monitor. They're savages. They would take their preconceived notions and never adapt. They would ruin the city."
He stretched his hands out. "They had all the warning signs in front of them for decades, and they still run to the apocalypse. This city will survive, but they are running towards their end. Why should they be helped?"
Athena's servers blinked. "You think that little of them? You came from there."
He chuckled, dark. "I grew up when one war ended and another took place. Any scientific breakthrough had to be for the good of the country to win the war, and not for the better of human kind."
Images, ones long surpassed, of him in the country side to get away from the war. The fact that his parents did not survive, and his thirst to work with his hands and conceive machines that people thought as the works of H.G Wells and fiction made him a target of childhood taunts.
"I know the history of the other side, but afterwards the United Nations was created. The Nazi regime disbanded. Reconstruction happened, and things were rebuilt."
He paid her no mind as he waited for his guards to escort her away.
"You used to have optimism and new ideas."
He looked up at her. "You can't understand what it's like to watch people tumble forward without stopping it. They can, they just prefer not to."
His doors opened and two AA units came in. He had them escort Athena out and she looked at him before she left. "Tell them they are going to be sent back. I'm rather busy at the moment." He paused. "Also, I command you not to let any details of our discussion be leaked to Frank, Casey, or anyone you might want to speak to." She would not say a word, her programming would not allow it.
Athena did not turn her head away as the units grabbed her hands. "You used to respectable, David Nix. You know this isn't right."
He did not watch her as she left his office. The doors swished closed and he would see Frank, Casey, and Athena again. He turned his chair around to look at the city in front of him. There was no new construction, the outer parts of the city decayed with lack of upkeep, and a part of him knew this was not a future he wanted for this city. People left because they saw no reason to stay. He let them go, banished them all and to keep this place a secret. Their skills, knowledge, and beliefs would not be wanted back over there, but who was he to keep them here against their own free will? He was no dictator, but a Governor chosen to do what was necessary to keep this city running.
Athena wanted him to bring others in, but he shook his head. They would not understand what they had if they came here, and that was the exact reason he kept them out. It was also the exact reason he knew they barreled forward. The tachyon particles powered the city and the Monitor that Frank created to watch the progress of the other side, but the particles also traveled to other receivers. The particles amplified the noxious thoughts of a world which could not be saved. It could be considered unethical, but he had not done it out of spite. They had signs to improve, and 'Tomorrowland' was supposed to launch to the public on the other side. He stopped it, even when Frank wanted it to happen and their falling out began.
Before he got up to open the portal back to the other side to watch Frank, Athena, and Casey crossover he unlocked a drawer in his desk. In it, he kept the original designs that made up Athena. His own patents and sketches stored on data pads and notebooks, the ones he drew when he was a young lad in England. The same ones that captured the attention Plus Ultra who would change his life, but those years were passed. Realities had set in. The city needed to be safe, and he did what he had to do.
David Nix sat in the very same holding cell he had put Frank, Casey, and Athena in. When the Tachyon power source was destroyed, so was Athena. He had meant to shoot Frank, but the Tachyon particles floated around, and Athena must have seen Frank's future. It shocked him that she sacrificed herself for Frank, much more than her empathy programming should have allowed. Hell, Athena cared for Frank. Really cared, but she shouldn't have felt any feelings at all.
The other part was that David cared for Athena, but as a creator watching the destruction of his prized project. He spent countless hours perfecting an AA unit that had personality and distinction, he named her Athena after the goddess of wisdom. Though, he would come to loathe his teenage sensibilities as he aged, he still marveled at what he produced. When Frank came in, Casey was not at his heels this time and he was in a anti-grav chair with a cast on both of his legs. Frank stood in front of him.
"Come to gloat?"
Frank gave him a tight smile.
"I'm not a fan of gloating. However, it's funny, but I need your help."
David arched an eyebrow.
"Here I thought you would be having me go under a tribunal."
"Oh, you are. However, we're starting up the program again."
David sighed.
"What do you hope to gain from this expenditure?"
Frank sat down on the bench and fiddled with a pin before he looked up at him. "Hope."
He rolled his eyes. "Ah, the eternal hope. You do realize that destroying the tachyon fusion power core and the Monitor is not the answer to all of your dreams."
Frank gave a small smile, the first one he'd seen in decades. "You're right, it's not. However, we want to rebuild both worlds to what they once were and can be."
"How do you suppose you're going to create this utopian ideal?"
Frank showed him the pin that once gave entrance to innovators, artists, and scientists into the city. "We're sending out recruiters, but," Frank paused.
"What?" David said, his voice flat.
"We don't have the designs for a particular AA unit."
David knew what he wanted, but was unsure how Frank found out. Athena's programming never allowed her to tell anyone who her main designer was.
"There are templates for many AA units, Frank. I'm sure you do remember where to find them."
Frank shook his head. "No, Casey and I want a unit like Athena."
David blinked. "Why do you think I would have the plans?"
"You were the former Governor, and I have a feeling you designed her." David moved his chair away from Frank. The back of the chair faced Frank, who got up from his seat.
"Why would you think such a thought?" David said.
"Because the pieces fit together. You put your younger self into her."
He rolled his eyes at such a cliché, and said not another word.
He heard Frank sigh. "You know," Frank said but was interrupted.
"If you let me out of here, I'll be able to open my former desk. The plans are in there." Frank widened his eyes as David turned his chair around.
The words that came out of his mouth were foreign, and tasted sour in his own mouth. "I would ask you not to duplicate the exact design."
When Frank was at the doors he nodded his head. "I wasn't planning to. Your tribunal will be in the morning."
David watched as the doors closed and Frank became a shadow through the translucent doors. There were many things he did that he'd thought were for the best, but a part of time. A tiny percentage, considered that maybe he was wrong when he picked up the pin that Frank left behind.
A/N:
I have a history of liking films other people hated, and Tomorrowland fits that narrative. The film is an important movie to see, but unfortunately people aren't going to own up to the fact that this movie punches you in the gut because it makes us look at ourselves. I was interested in writing about David Nix, who is played by the wonderful Hugh Laurie. For me, his character could have been fleshed out further.
I'm unsure if he created Athena or not, since it's debatable. However, there is the scene towards the end of the movie where he does shoot Athena and the look on his face says it all. I think he created her. Anyway, he is the "antagonist" in the film, but I think of him more as a reluctant antagonist who became what he opposed to begin with.
I'm unsure how much to the lingo I got down. I've seen the film three times, but my memory is fuzzy on some dialogue and tech terms. So, if you think I have anything wrong then please tell me.