Colm gave me the title and helped out with the ideas, though I forgot most everything we talked about specifically and was too lazy to check out our Gchat conversation. I do love this title:
Hard Reboot
The year is 2245 and the world is united. We no longer rely on oil, coal, gas or other forms of current unclean energy and instead are using the perpetual rotation of the Earth to generate unlimited energy with a device we call The Core, which sits below the Earths surface. Automatons and humans live together in harmony, the robots are responsible for much of the manual labor. Without warning a giant ship appears over the earth and begins to drain the energy from The Core and have taken control of it. The robots stop working, factories are ground to a halt, most electronics no longer work (but there are still some battery-powered things), and the world is in a panic.
There is an attack on the ship, but nothing comes of it. It is protected by a force field, but they are able to send an attack against us, which happens to leave us with a few remnants of Alien tech. In order to stop the Alien threat, world leaders decide to send a rag-tag team of unlikely heroes to shut down The Core from its physical space, because a soft reset won’t work with the Alien’s controlling it. The group consists of a computer hacker (Daryl), an ex special forces leader (Trent), a molecular biologist (Heather), a psychiatrist (Meghan) and two dogs (Milly and Philly).
There are press conferences with people asking if this is a joke, if this team is really ready (which people can hear through their PBS funded crank radios) (yes PBS still exists in 2245). There is a whole training montage where Trent is getting the troupes ready. It’s lightly comical. During the final briefing before the mission Trent is examining the recovered alien tech and when he touches it gets a flash of the alien mind. He sees that if they reboot the core the aliens have a plan to come back and that the threat won’t be eliminated but only kept at bay for a while.
They find an old digger machine that runs on gasoline, they break into a science lab and steal the last remaining amounts of gas on earth, only enough for a one way trip to The Core. Daryl is trying to interfere with the alien transmissions to keep them hidden, Meghan is making sure that everyone is sane and obviously has a thing for Trent (who obviously has a thing for Daryl), and Heather is watching the inner atmosphere of beneath the surface. Milly and Philly are chillin, being dogs.
As they start to get closer to The Core there is strange interference with their own systems and computers. Daryl is powerless to stop it and there is now an alien presence underground, albeit it an electrical alien presence. They are actually projecting themselves as lightning type monsters and attacking the ship. Trent heads out with two Akimbo P90s because he was a fan of retro military shooters and tries to take out the threat but is unable to, luckily Milly comes outside with an EMP in mouth and the threat is quiet for now.
They continue on and reach The Core. Trent tells everyone what he saw. Meghan says he’s insane and they just need to restart The Core. The dogs disagree and shake their heads at her. Everyone else is on board and know what has to be done. Meghan goes crazy and takes the guns and says they’re not going to blow both themselves up and the power for the world. Trent asks what choice they have and since they’re not going to make it back to the surface anyway with no gas left, they might as well save Earth. Meghan shoots Trent dead, the other two are in complete shock. They pled with her to put the guns down when another alien attack happens, using the corpse of Trent the aliens kill Daryl. Heather and Meghan each take a gun and firing into the corpse, as the aliens also resurrect Daryl for use. When the dogs come out, they jump and attack the two of them, Milly is killed but is not reanimated. Philly grabs an EMP and sets it off, but not in enough time before Heather is killed. Now Meghan is alone, the electro aliens are no longer around and she sits next to the core. Philly comes back with a stick of C4 in her mouth. And starts nudging Meghan with her nose. Meghan sets up the C4 on a timer, then sits down in the rig with Philly and pets her as she waits for the countdown to reach zero.
The core explodes and the shockwave of a total release of energy also blows up the Alien ship. No more energy means that people need to start thinking about how they can get the world back to what it was. The world than honors the memories of all that were in the ship, and even the dogs are awarded the Platinum Heart of Service, which they make up for this occasion and is the highest honor possible ever.
THE END
Post credits! The rig shoots up out of the earth where it was digging, with Philly and Meghan still ok. They step out and walk around in this new old world they have created.
(This one was pretty normal/The Core, right?)