Identity crisis: the story of a sci-fi plot

Like them banal novels inspired by those ludicrous Hollywood sci-fi movies, starting out with someone killing someone, so that the hero/ heroine can chase someone he/she wants to, only to forget as they become more and more entangled, in this “web of mystery” they never wanted to be in, that they have “loved ones” who can be killed before the climax by someone else who similarly in the end, in self absorbed narcissism having the hero/ heroine cowed down, after a prelude of thunderous laughter, starts performing an overzealous soliloquy justifying his wrong doings, vaguely resembling those Shakespearean villains, oblivious, of the hero/ heroine plotting some fantastical escape attempt, which involves frog jumping overhead muscular bodyguards and choreographed action sequences in which everyone is able to kick if not simply graze, everyone else’s ass, with consummate grace at least once, all these only to end it by a prosaic killing of a whimpering villain; let us start our story by killing someone. Only because one can do that in his story, even if one were anemic, nerdy, clumsy, five-feet something, with the only power he has being the insanely high powered spectacles for his short sight. So then, someone, in ragged clothes, having a scarred face, climbs up pipes running down decrepit buildings, into some cluttered apartment in a dingy corner of a moribund city; maneuvering himself through the convoluted mess, that could be called any thief's perfect nightmare, with such precision that he could not have been a thief; that to another, watching him through the dark blanket of night, this act of trespassing would only be natural, for no one else could have moved through that clumsily filled apartment with such ease but the one who owned it. So, after a few other lines of verbose description, we find the man in the green jacket stabbing someone still in his pajamas with stupefaction on his unscarred face, and as the murderer bows down to drag the body we find him thinking, how once in his past, he was the man he had killed.

So, now that we have satiated the appetite to play god and kill someone, we move on to the plot. Headlines of newspapers read; "Are we at War?" or "These disturbing times!" and some other, ingenious, enigmatic, puns of a title for an emergency that is because of what follows. It seems that if we take out history text books of any one of the few school going kids at the time when this story takes place, or seems to be taking place, we shall find a high quality color photo of a young woman, quite insane by the looks of it, standing beside some gigantic tin container that she calls the time machine. We would find in the same text book, articles written instead of text book chapters, giving accounts of how the reason for their combined, miserable fortune, so virulent that all the future generations including their present one will be afflicted by it, and shall never recuperate from it; is their foolish continuum counterparts in the past, whose globalised foolishness is the cause, as is alleged, of this catastrophe called the present. The condition that is reported in these articles is something like this:

Sometime before, unable to reconcile his present fate, that is not only deplorable but something that he had never expected; unable to comprehend how all of us human beings in the world were able to manage to get into this state of extreme dereliction, depravity, and even with all that money with people, the destitution, which due to its ubiquity cannot even be pitied; confounded at how our combined fates had tumbled down to such a depressing point; started brooding upon his own life. Thus, he started first by, severing his own life from the lives of others, his own fate from that of the others, which for him, and other millions like him, was the only solace to the misfortune that had crashed upon them simultaneously and overwhelmingly so. In this search for his own individual past, he revisited his lost memories which showed a youth filled with grand ideas and a contagious hope for a better future; his decisions in life; the opportunities that went past him; the people who mattered to him the most; the books he had read; the movies he had seen; the journeys he had taken; the songs he had heard; disasters that were caused by human nature and nature itself; all of these resounded in his mind's hollow corridors. Thus, shuffling between memories of his youth, childhood, and his present and that of the common memory of mankind-our history; he found dots which he could join and which on joining, to his consternation, he found a meaningful constellation. He found his own freedom restricted by the freedom of others, and that his say in his own life, even though he rebelled against his family's wishes, the government, and against everyone if only to prove his point, was also decided by the circumstances in which he lived. His own individuality in the past and in the present was so entwined with past and present of his contemporaries, he found his own life too constricting. He found himself unable to extricate himself from this ghastly predicament of being enjoined in the combined fate, and the mediocrity of it, infuriated him. He wanted to be free from his fate which, he declared to himself in a soliloquy, was his destiny. What if, he thought as he tried to plan his own destiny, if he could enlighten his past?

And thus, this war that we are in with our own pasts, started with one man named "The hero" for the sake of anonymity, seeking to enlighten his past and hence, change his present. To this end, he found that, the insane scientist woman had created for him his tool, the time machine, and so, after discussing with this scientist on the side-effects of using this machine, he took it, let's say, for a ride. He had gathered enough to understand that the woman was a raving lunatic, and that if one could go by what she murmured during her bouts of sanity (it was when she usually stuttered, as she used to do in her past), that this machine was based on the theory another inmate of the scientific asylum had propounded a decade or so back, which stated that "We are but our identities"; that even the non-living things exist as a part of our identity as a human; that the variety of what we see around us, is but the materialization of the cognition of our different identities, and we, our mass, is but the cognition of our own selves. This would, he construed, apart from explaining why one became almost delirious when affected with high fever, explain how we all fell into such a mess. We gave up on our individual identities, we classified and declassified our identities so much that we stereotyped everything that was around us, even being unique became commonplace; men who did try to become different from different, found their identities still being similar to those others who were fighting side by side with them against mediocrity and thus, resulting in an inward revolution, and so on. All these tedious metaphysical revolutions were given up at the end, and all of us, giving up our struggle to find our singular identities, joined the combined fate, and consoled each other by showing how similar each was to the other. He also learns that, though he can not change his past without causing damage to his present identity; that each, the identity in the past, and the identity that has traveled to the past, are different and are independent of each other and that the past is connected only to the future. When we once step out of time, we are no more, either a part of the future or a part of the past. Thus, to exist, he who has stepped out of time to travel in it, must continuously be traveling, or then kill either of his identities, in the past or the future and then as a result of the first law of identities, "An identity can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed from one into another."; establish his own identity instead of it. This would mean that our past and future are therefore linked as a whole, and when we step out of it, are only taking with us some from the whole; and if we don't restore back this division of the whole into two and only two, we, our past, our future, and we who have stepped out, shall remain scarred for the rest of our lives, like the insane scientist who was the first to step into that fermata called time.

Our hero, wearing his lucky green jacket, steps into time, thereby scarring his own face from the sudden redistribution of identities and does what was described in the first paragraph, to his own self. This would, as the story moves, bring back this shift of identities to harmonious division into two of the whole, completing each others past and the present. Our hero, as he leads a life as his own past tries to achieve what he must to give himself a better future, his ex-contemporaries from the future learn of this path to salvation from their state, start trying to kill their past identities to form a better one for their own future. This would go on for long, until, the super power of the then past, by their covert intelligence, learn of this rapidly emerging new underground movement, that helped, to widespread disbelief, kill themselves. When all of this becomes news in the story's present, or our hero's past, people find their hopeful selves losing hope, looking at their own despicable future. And to dispel this sick relationship, which once used to be pure hope, between their present and their future, secured the time machines which this underground movement has until now kept secretly hidden from the government, after a bloody battle. This would be necessary, so as to send their own selves (by stepping into time) as assassins to kill their future selves. Their future selves also simultaneously stepping into time and so many of them doing it concurrently, causes major redistribution of the ethereal identity, which is overlooked for the greater good of mankind on the whole; which in the end would be seen as the datum with respect to which stupidity would be graded.

Every story must end. It must end, for if it doesn't, its meaning remains incomplete; like a sentence that never ends; like a word that is never uttered; like a life that is not yet at its end. The story without an end remains obscure, obfuscated by its inherent incompleteness. So, it is also our duty to draw up an ending to the plot, before we base our story on it. An ending where all the characters learn of their meaning in the story, where they reconcile with the parts they have been given, where their combined fate is decided. A story is unlike life in the fact that these paroxysms of fate, that causes one to be a hero and another to be a side kick; one to die and another to live; is decided by one, and that one, is still unsure of what will be his decision until he himself reaches the end, concertedly with the characters he has created. The symbolisms are quite conspicuous one feels, in his story, and yet, even an avid reader misses the point. It happens, because mainly it seems, the reader is comparing the identities of each character to his own; even perhaps, as he compares the identity of the writer to his own; and thereby losing, in ones effort to find similarities, those quirky aberrations which are perhaps why the story was written in the first place. In ones quest to be different, one disappointingly finds, that he is not as different or unique as he thought he is; this would lead one to ask himself, whether he must isolate himself from the world, retreat back into solitude to hear his own voice, and be with it. But, this would only be until his memory of the world from which he has come hauntingly points to him his mediocrity, in being the same. Would it suffice, to remain as an identity with which we are at peace within? What about discontentment? How many of us are happy being discontented? Discontented with what?-life, relationships, knowledge, love. What about a story that has an ending? What about a story, that doesn't have an end? What would it be showing us, but, the continuity of life; that the meaning is in the story and not in the end.

So now, we reach that part, where we are at the crossroads, contradicting ourselves. Should we end this story, but, if such a war were to happen, would it not go on, with the future continuously trying to perfect itself; or would it end with the annihilation of the identity of a man as an individual and as a group; or worse would it end by the identity losing itself in itself. So, now that the question remains with us story writers, it is we who must decide upon the future of the identity. Or, should we, showing solidarity with our fictional counterparts, be discontented with a complete story, giving ourselves the unlimited hope of having what is better than what we have, and thereby relieving ourselves of the great joy of being the one who controls the fate of all these characters combined, or those of each single character, and passing on to each reader's imagination this responsibility? Where then, would be the horizon which identifies the reader and the writer, memory and the present, truth and the make believe?