"The world of the future will
be an ever more demanding
struggle against the limitations
of our intelligence..."
Norbert Wiener
"On the whole, I'd rather be in
Philadelphia..."
W.C. Fields
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Night. Dark, ominous clouds of smoke. A beat of semi-calm. And then... A long blast of TRACER FIRE cuts through. And another. And another.
A city on fire. A block here, block there. More tracer fire. A cross between the LA riots and Gulf War. LA RIOT III.
We continue moving above the ravaged city –
A filtered voice "You imagine what it was like when they had to fly choppers through this shit?"
"Not even." Someone replies.
Gliding totally silently along is the biggest, darkest, midnight blue blimp you've ever seen. Small gold letters on the side - LAPD. Fully armored beneath. Woven kevlar on the sides. Bullets rebound with a long ZZZZZIP off the sides. Ping softy off the plastic armor on the bottom.
The first person speaks again "I don't understand where we're
going and why the hell we're bothering anyhow..".
A new voice responds. This one brooks no discussion, Harkness growls "Because there's anger and there's frustration, and then there's pure fucking evil..."
"Where we're going is pure fucking evil." Jack Harkness peers down into the fiery landscape. "Thirty people who were riding that mini bus are still missing. I've got this bad hunch about who took them and where they are..."
Way up ahead, amid the flames, is a fortress. A square city block. Walled. Something out of the middle ages. The walls are entirely made from stacked abandoned cars.
Harkness is dragging a heavy bag up towards the door. PILOT #2 looks at him curiously. "How come they call you Demolition Man? Are you with the bomb squad?"
Harkness gets his bag into position.
"I just..." Jack shrugs apologetically "... demolish things."
He checks out the window. They're not quite there.
"I do my job, shit happens." Jack says to Pilot #1 "Get a thermo."
The Pilot takes a thermogram of the building in the middle of the compound. We see a series of heat-outlined figures moving inside. "Six. One still, in the middle. The rest moving around. I don't see any thirty people."
checking the thermo Jack asks "What's that?"
To the naked eye, out the window, tucked against the wall of cars, a large tarp. To the thermo, the still warm inner workings of the mini bus. Faint outlines of the engine, drive train, even seats and frame. Bingo.
Harkness takes a deep breath. Loosens up his right shoulder. Loosens up his left. Checks the gun on his right hip. Checks the gun on his left. They both cross draw. Reaches down to the bag at his feet. LAPD in reflective letters on the side of a backpack. Harkness yanks some kind of rope out of it.
"Isn't that for getting people out of burning buildings..." the pilot asks.
"Yeah, sometimes..." Jack huffs. Slaps a carabineer onto a big eyebolt by the door. They're dead center now over the complex below. He opens the door. Jumps out.
Harkness falls three hundred feet from the blimp. Dead silent. The line runs free behind him. It's a giant fireproof bungee cord. As the downward force of gravity and the upward pull of the bungee become exactly the same, Harkness stops dead in the air for just the briefest moment. Whips out a Bowie knife and slashes the cord above his head. Falls free the last ten feet to the roof of the building. Lands on his feet. Lightning cross draw. A gun appears in each hand.
A lookout pops up on Harkness's right. Harkness clobbers him. Another lookout pops up on Harkness's left. Harkness ducks, rolls quietly, clobbers him, too. Listens. No one's taken notice. Holsters the guns. Moves in towards the roof hatch.
Inside the building is stacked with armaments and stolen goods. M70's straight outta the National Guard Armory. Crates of ammo. Stacks of looted Sony HoloSets still in the boxes.
Harkness makes his way carefully along. Ready. Spins at a SOUND. Nothing there. Harkness crouches low. Slips around the crates. At the far end, a very large guard is doing just the same thing to peer at where Harkness just was.
Harkness launches himself at the guard. Hammers his head against the floor. This guy is not getting up again for a long time. Harkness spins at a SOUND. Another equally large guard dives on Harkness from behind. He never makes contact. Harkness uses his momentum to fling him past and into the wall. This guy isn't getting up again in the near future either. Now the room is clear. Moves towards the stairs.
John Hart snorts a long pale blue line up one nostril. A long pink line up the other. One blue eye, one brown eye. Blond hair. White skin. Looks up at another thug. Punches up the security cams on half a dozen slightly futuristic monitors. Unconscious guards can be seen on all of them. And on the last, Harkness, coming... Hart jabs a loaded orange syringe into an arm. The drugs all hit various lobes. "Motherfucker."
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Harkness creeps quietly down. Looking, watching, listening. Suddenly, the stairs are racked with machine gun fire. Chips of concrete fly from around his feet. Harkness flattens against the wall. Half a beat. Steps out firing. The machine gun stops. A body plummets by down the center shaft of the stairs.
"That's a warm welcome." Jack grins.
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Hart is dumping can after can of gas all over the floor, the walls, everything.
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Harkness steps onto the landing. Checks high and low. Room is clear. He can smell the gas.
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John pries open the fuse box. Flips off all the breakers. Building is plunged into darkness.
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Harkness quietly speaks into the LAPD button mike on his lapel.
"How 'bout some light, guys?"
Half a beat later, blinding white light blows through the windows.
The blimp casts down a wall of light. 32 million candlepower pours straight down.
A wild mélange of white, white light and dark, dark shadows. The gas fumes ripple, refract in the air. Lights bounce off the pools of gasoline. Harkness rolls into the room. Both guns come up.
"John Hart. You're under arrest." Jack yells, then demands "Where are the mini bus passengers?"
"Fuck you, Harkness. They're gone. I told the city no one comes down here anymore. Cops figured it out, postmen figured it out. Damn bus drivers wouldn't listen. Arrest me? You've got no jurisdiction here. You're in my kingdom now. Fifty blocks in every direction. And it's mine."
Jack simply replies "It's over."
"It's over?!" Hart repeats, knows it's true "Yeah. It's over. But I've been king once, and I ain't ever going back to jail."
Harkness keeps the guns trained on Hart. John scratches his arm. It's a junkie's twitch. Or is it... Harkness can't see it, but there's a kitchen match tucked behind John's ear. Hart reaches up to scratch another itch. Frees the match in one gestures, strikes it and tosses it into the pool of gas. Smiles. A friendly happy smile.
The room bursts into flames. He throws back his head and laughs. Harkness dives on him. Tries to hurl them both through the window.
But Hart is either stronger or just far crazier and drugged up. Smashes the two of them into the wall instead. They trade blows. The building gets worse. AMMO starts to EXPLODE downstairs.
A giant LAPD wrecker with a cow catcher front blasts through the main gates. LAPD Humvees follow.
A young cop (ZACHARY LAMB) gets out, looks at the main building, shakes his head in amusement at the destruction "It's Harkness again..."
The battle continues. The two trading blow for blow in this fiery arena. The two men are practically on fire. Finally Harkness knocks Hart cold, a clean shot straight in the face. Hart drops in a heap to the floor. Harkness shakes his head, sighs, bends down to retrieve his prisoner and... The BUILDING EXPLODES. Long and LOUD and high and mighty.
The fireball rockets by the blimp.
The Pilots with mouths agape as the fireball crashes by.
The EARTH RUMBLES. Those who aren't thrown to the ground dive for cover. The SECONDARY EXPLOSION kicks in. Everything that didn't blow straight up in the air blows out what remains of the sides of the building.
Nothing's left standing.
The dust begins to settle. Flaming wreckage and embers are still dropping from five hundred feet up. A beat. A beam shifts in the wreckage. It's a big beam. It moves aside. Harkness emerges dragging his prisoner out behind him. As he's being dragged along, Hart comes to. Harkness hands him off to another officer to be booked. Captain STEVE HEALY, Harkness's long-suffering captain and friend, comes out of the crowd of officers. "What's the matter with you? That's why nobody ever invites you over."
"I hate small talk." Jack shrugs "You sent me to do a job, I did it. It wasn't even me who blew everything up this time."
"Yeah. Sure." Healy continues to shake his head in consternation. No way he believes that... Harkness ignores him. Wipes the soot from his face. Shakes his head in disgust, walks away...
The Tactical Fire Response vehicles have arrived. Fully-armored firemen wearing bulletproof gear fight the blaze. Harkness continues to stride away. And then everything fucks up. One of the TFR OFFICERS in the wreckage calls out shocked "Captain. Captain! There's a lot of bodies in here."
Harkness stops dead. He looks sick. Healy's not thrilled, but he knows what's required of him and turns to Harkness "You have the right to remain silent."
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CRYO PRISON - STARK WHITE CORRIDOR - DAY
Harkness in stark white overalls. A beautiful, shaken woman holding the hand of a small child. About six. Harkness bends down to the little girl. Unclenches his fist. His LAPD badge inside. Pins it on the little girl, Alice.
"I'm going to be back. I'll still be your dad. I promise."
She holds the badge, nods solemnly. Harkness kisses her on the cheek as she says "I love you, Daddy."
She's young enough that it's unclear whether she understands that her father is going away for good. Harkness chokes back a sob. Stands back up. Kisses his wife. Everything that can be said, has been said. They kiss again.
Behind him, in front of two locked doors, are a pair of prison guards in odd, heavily-insulated uniforms. Tanks, heater batteries, guns. Harkness heads towards the far doors. They follow. Harkness steps through the doors, the guards now at either elbow.
The CryoPenitentiary is a Godel-esque nightmare of architecturally-perverse layers and levels, the Guggenheim mixed with industrial meat locker. All still half under construction.
Harkness is led along the middle ring to where a doctor, two white-coated technicians and a young-looking Warden Smithers are waiting.
Above him prisoners are encased into the ground in massive glass hockey pucks, contracted into pained foetal positions, gargoyle expressions of tortured struggle.
The group arrives at an empty chamber. The technicians nod to Harkness. He drops off the white overalls. Steps free. Stands naked. Doctor injects him with luminescent blue fluid. The techies slap on sensor pads. Head, heart, all over... Spraying him down with Freon. Mist everywhere... We see the temperature dropping on the monitors. The Warden looks at a crib sheet. Clears his throat. "Jack Harkness. You've done great deeds for the city of Los Angeles, so it is with some regret that I hereby..."
"Skip it..."
Harkness shivers, contemplating one of his stiffening hands.
"Jack Harkness. You've been sentenced to 70 years in the California CryoPenitentiary for the involuntary manslaughter of thirty..."
"Skip it..." Harkness is beginning to shake from the cold. His lips turning blue before our eyes. Color just drains away.
"I'm sorry, Jack." Smithers sighs then with a smile says "Don't catch cold."
"Fuh... fuf... funny."
The technicians attempt to help Harkness into the chamber. He shakes them off to stagger down on his own. Let's not kid ourselves, he's scared -
"See ya next century..."
The casing door is closed over him. MONITORS down the lining of the circular chamber show a digital rap sheet, a dropping thermometer, a parole date, and today's date: November 20, 1998. A super-chilled clear goo flows in, packing and preserving isolated Michelangeloesque segments of the defiant statue that is Jack Harkness.
But he's still conscious. Still even struggling a bit. On the arm above the chamber, inside a vacuum bell a small vial is auto unscrewed. LOCKED and SAFETY lights cycle. We see a tiny white chip inside. The vial is moved into place by a tiny robot arm. Bottom vent is opened. The chip is dumped into the chamber. It's the opposite of watching ice shatter. Instead, the whole hockey puck goes solid in an instant and a half. The thermo read-out drops in an instant to a half degree above 0 degrees Kelvin. It's done.
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The
date on Harkness's monitor now reads August 3, 2042.
Warden Smithers, now a bespectacled, gray-haired old man, in a peculiar uniform, shuffles past the completely unaged Harkness.
He grumbles by in a phone headset equipped with fiberoptic video gear, and we see that the prison has become vaster, stranger, with multiple grated catwalks and more networks of artfully-engineered piping. And heavily, heavily stocked with prisoners... Smithers looks up at his holoset. Hovering in front of him in the air is Ianto Jones. "Mellow greeting, Warden J.J. Smithers.
This again Smithers sighs "Yeah. BE well. Lieutenant Ianto Jones."