Michael Undying
Very Long and Wonky Six-Season Treatment
Opening Credits
Hundreds and hundreds of medical-looking photos, all of one man. Early thirties and thin. Shots from every angle, close-ups and extreme close-ups. In the background, his voice recites every word in the dictionary, in order. Every mole and hair, every fingerprint. He grows thinner and thinner as the photos flicker by. He makes random phonetic sounds. Super close-ups of his eyes. His teeth. Laughs. Screams. Cries. He’s recounts memories and lists things he hates and loves, his deepest beliefs, his favorite gelato flavor. X-rays, medical records, a CT scan, photos that look like they’re from an autopsy. His inner ear. Everything. The last shot is his face. He manages a little smile, blows a weak last kiss to the camera.
Season One
Denial
In Season One, we will get to know Annabelle and her kids and the husband she keeps on a harddrive, Michael. We’ll see the past that haunts her, the present that eludes her and the future she’s desperately trying to create. Though she will do some fairly terrible things, we’ll be with her because she is driven by love and hope.
A path through a tall lawn is methodically cut by a squat machine that looks like a giant, homemade Roomba crossed with a snarling mechanical dog. It whirrs as it chews through the summer’s last thick grass, the fall’s early leaves and the occasional branch.
But today some tiny glitch occurs in its little silicon brain. It pauses and twitches. Changing course, it weaves off task and toward us, chasing us into the street, its powerful blade throwing gravel.
Having crossed the street, it enters a very neat, already-cut lawn, plows through a flowerbed and onto the walk.
Back on the other side, a little boy in an alien costume, Blaise, screams for his mother.
The bot continues toward us, up the walk and toward a door. It shreds the welcome mat as it enters the very neat suburban house.
A toddler scrambles onto the sofa, screaming, as the terrifying thing eats a toy train set and some Legos, spewing the remains around the room. An end table is bowled over, toppling a vase and a lamp. A dog barks at the thing as it careens through the house.
A woman runs in from her bedroom, half-dressed, scoops up the child and shoves him into the closet, leaps on the counter and dials her phone.
Another child charges down the stairs, a boy of maybe ten, and goes after the machine with a baseball bat. The mom shouts at him to run. She yells in the phone to the 911 operator.
Little Blaise enters, shouting commands at the mechanical monster. It ignores him.
Annabelle Ford appears. Mid-thirties, intense, obviously not a woman to be fucked with. But she looks scared. She’s in men’s clothes and un-made up. Face clenched, she enters commands into her phone, assuring everyone she’s stopping the thing.
Instead, the engine guns and it rolls toward a game of marbles. In slow motion, a marble shoots out and shatters a glass on the table. More marbles fly. Photos are destroyed in their frames. Marbles whizz through the mesh of a crib, shattering the mobile dangling inside as the glass spheres are sprayed around the house like machine gun fire.
A teenage Goth girl, Annabelle’s daughter Ada, is there. She grabs the bat and beats the thing savagely, dodging marbles. Annabelle pulls her away. Who is she protecting?
Her middle child, Radia, pushes past, climbs across the tops of the bar stools, reaches down to the machine and fiddles dangerously with a control panel. In the chaos, a marble hits the patio door. The door explodes.
Shards of glass fly into the air, then rain down, beautiful and dangerous. Kids cry, the mother screams, and terrified little Radia finally disables the thing in a spray of sparks. Everything goes quiet. Lip quivering, Radia apologizes to the woman on the counter. Humiliated, Ada grabs the machine to drag it away. Blaise takes Annabelle’s hand to lead her home. But Annabelle looks hypnotized, staring around the inside of the house like she’s never seen one.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
Moving day. This is not unusual for the Fords. This time she has moved them to the edge of a failed utopian community, like Disney’s Celebration. Like all dreams of perfection, it collapsed on itself. It’s perfect for Annabelle - half inhabited, cheap, a lack of nosey neighbors and a huge under-used power substation. Annabelle cheerfully spins it, working hard to convince the kids, and herself, that this is all wonderful, but this is the shittiest place they’ve ever lived. The kids aren’t stupid.
Ada, 15, has evidently purchased the Deluxe Angry Teen Kit. She has reasons. She and Radia move into their shared room. This sucks. Ada wonders where the fuck she’s going to hide her shit. Why don’t mom and Blaise share a room? Blaise could sleep in a drawer. She rips her sheet off the bed, climbs on a chair and starts attaching the sheet to the ceiling with push-pins. A wall.
Radia, 12, is a geek, a brilliant little super-achiever. Adults love her. She’s putting her books on the shelf. It looks more like an office than an adolescent’s bedroom. She sets out a photo of herself and her dad, of a moment she has convinced herself she remembers. Mom likes to see that she has that photo on her desk.
Blaise, 9, is a little weirdo. He believes they are a family of space aliens, which is why they don’t fit in on Earth. Worse theories have been posited. His little room obviously is a walk-in closet. He drags a moving box inside and flips it on its side. He fills it with pillows and a blanket and a zillion stuffed animals, grabs his plastic Blaster and crawls inside. His tiny hand reaches out and pulls the box shut.
In Annabelle’s room, there’s a king-size bed. And two mirrors. And two dressers. She fills one with men’s clothes.
IN ANNABELLE’S IMAGINATION, we see Michael here. The scene in the house is the same, if romanticized, but he’s part of it and they are that happy, bright, quirky family.
Dinner is late. Frozen Costco Chicken Tika Masala is slopped into a pot on the stove and the fire is cranked on underneath it. Annabelle hides the box in the trash, steps out the back door, grabs a cooler bag, a tool belt and a huge roll of heavy electrical cable.
She picked the new house very carefully. Yes, the neighbors across the street are annoyingly happy and successful, not in that sitcom way, but in a real way. They are playful and they drink a little and laugh and have people over and generally rub Annabelle’s face in her struggles. But the new house has a critical feature – a nice little concrete block shed in the yard. A little bunker for her to set up as a writing office so she can finish her book. She walks past it, flashlight in hand, through the rear gate and to the big metal box that houses the high-voltage distribution panel for the neighborhood. When she opens it and pulls the disconnect, the entire neighborhood goes dark.
On the stove, the Masala begins to boil.
Annabelle slips on gloves and, flashlight in her mouth, hurriedly climbs the ladder on an adjacent pole, nearly falling off several times – she does not like heights. At the top, she cracks the transformer and patches in a large junction box. She drops a screw.
The neighborhood fills with phone flashlights, sweeping the dark. Repair trucks with flashing lights appear in the distance, led by a cop car, getting closer.
She connects three large electrical leads into the transformer. She knows what she’s doing, but the cables are very heavy and hard to manipulate.
The Masala pops and dries up the sides crusting. The trucks are getting very close.
She leaps to the ground, throws the heavy ladder into the drainage canal. From a cooler bag, she produces a dead squirrel, harvested from the road. She shoves the squirrel’s mouth onto a wire, sinking its teeth in. She throws the main disconnect, frying the squirrel in a spray of sparks. Then she runs, tossing the cooler bag and the gloves in a neighbor’s backyard trashcan. A fire alarm goes off, this one in her house. Fuck. She runs full speed, slips back into her house and turns off the stove under the flaming, burned pot.
Blaise is in the doorway in his Space Prince costume. Annabelle fakes a laugh about her lousy cooking and suggests they order a pizza for dinner. “You’re not sick of pizza, are you?” Blaise steps away and Annabelle glances at the photo of Michael on the fridge. She still gets as excited as a schoolgirl.
When the repair crew arrives at the distribution panel, they grin and take pictures. A whole damned neighborhood blacked out by a squirrel. They never think, of course, to look overhead for a pirated high-voltage line.
Annabelle loads very expensive-looking flight cases into the shed. Something precious.
At school, the kids follow their drill. Ada clocks all the tables, the jocks, suck-ups, morons, the queers... Finally she spies the tableshe’s looking for – the stoners. Thar be drugs. She passes slowly, letting them get a gander, then sits alone at a nearby table. She discreetly takes out her lighter and flicks it a few times. The stoners notice – message sent and received.
Radia, only a middle schooler, walks through looking very poised, though she’s very afraid. All of these kids look like they hunt. Where are the geeks? She spies Ada, alone at a table, and heads over. As she sits, Ada stands. And leaves.
In Kindergarten, Blaise stands before the class and says, “Space.” There’s giggling and the teacher asks him, “Seriously, honey, where are you from?” Blaise says his family moved here from Omaha, but that they are actually from space. His mom refuses to tell him what galaxy, probably for safety reasons. Uh-huh…
The family is in their places at 11:00 at night. Radia is in her maniacally ordered half room, doing homework that isn’t due for weeks. Blaise is inches from the computer in the kitchen, watching Ancient Aliens as Asimov bounces around keeping the floor spotless. Ada grabs her lighter and a hoodie and saunters right out the front door. And across the back yard, even through the blackout shades, bright light leaks out of the shed window. And the building, as you get closer to it, hums. On the door is a sign, “No Admittance – Author at Work!” Of course, she’s not an author. There is no book. There is only Michael.
In the shed is one of the most advanced computers in the world. Wires and monitors and hard drives and cooling fans and circuit boards fill the shelves and the table. The only other things in the room are photographs of him, pinned to the walls like butterflies. When the secret door is safely closed and locked, Annabelle pushes a single button.
The equipment comes to life with a soft whirring. Two monitors light up. One displays impossibly complex code. On the other is a crisp CGI image of the man from the opening photographs. He's very attractive, though more charismatic than handsome. He appears to be sleeping until she says his name. “Michael.” Then the eyes blink open and the face awakens and smiles. “Hello, beautiful,” he says. And Annabelle is no longer lost.
In his current form, Michael is made from a fantastic mixture of available things. Eye cams behind eyes on the screen. Little microphone ears. The monitor sits on an armature of a body. There are gloves as hands, the fingers loaded with sensors. He can feel every hair when she runs his hand thru her hair. Even a vibrator covered with sensors at his middle. There are sensors on his makeshift lips and a speaker behind them.
IN FLASHBACK we see Annabelle and Michael as very happy, if intense, graduate students, the rock stars of the MIT Idea Lab. Impossibly brilliant and playful and horny and addicted to their work, a project they call Osmosis. They are loved and hated, but they are the shit.
Now, in the secret room, Annabelle is again that happy, ferocious woman. And Michael hasn't changed a bit, except for the fact that he only exists on a hard drive. Together now, they talk and flirt. She tells him that the panel was huge and that an unmarked military car escorted the repair crew. This all but proves what they’ve suspected, that the navy scrap yard here is cover – the secret robotics lab is there and with it, the chip. The experimental Metabyte chip, by far the fastest, most sophisticated chip ever imagined. This is the piece they need to build Michael his body and mind. Then she tells him about her day and all about the kids. But everything she tells him about the family is a lie.
She can’t bear for him to know how poorly things are going with his children. She’s just trying to keep them all alive until she can bring him back for real and they can raise their family together, the way they were supposed to, they perfect way it was all supposed to be before biology fucked everything up.
IN FLASHBACK, we see the diagnosis. Michael has cancer. Stage Four, inoperable, get-your-things-together cancer. The dreams of being the world’s most famous scientists, of ushering in a profoundly new era and becoming stupidly rich were gone. Gone too was the promise of growing old together, of a life of joy and adventure and devotion. They were meant to have lots of kids and pets and raise them in a house full of ideas and purpose and immeasurable, impossible love. Unsurprisingly, the diagnosis just makes them work harder to complete Osmosis before Michael dies.
As is usually the case when it all gets too overwhelming and guilty, she goes in and kisses the kids goodnight, though it’s three in the morning, and crawls half into the box with Blaise and snuggles to sleep.
ANNABELLE’S RECURRING NIGHTMARE : Fire everywhere, consuming a body. But the body rises, now more like a demon than a man. There is screaming all around. She reaches desperately for small hands, the children hands, but can’t quite grip them as the man of flames, growing larger and larger, closes in on her.
Annabelle’s new job as a custodial worker is wildly below her abilities. But… it’s at the naval scrap yard. And in here somewhere is the secret robotics lab and the Megabyte chip. Under an assumed name and a persona of near silence, she mops and wipes and listens and observes and studies the fire escape maps posted at each stairwell.
Radia and Ada are at the bus stop, not talking. The bus pulls up. Radia reminds Ada to pick Blaise up. Ada doesn’t fucking need to be reminded. The bus pulls away, leaving Ada. She has a few bars of Xanax.
At work, Annabelle is trying her custodial keys in a high-security door when a supervisor stops her. When she looks up, he looks at her with shock. Then he says here name – her real name. Nico is a former Idea Lab member who was a year behind her at MIT. She pretends not to recognize him, but he surely knows her. He’s a Naval officer stationed here at the base, running logistics for the scrapyard. He is stunned to find her with a mop. He asks about Michael. She says she doesn’t know anyone named Michael. He must have her confused with someone else.
Terrified, she excuses herself and walks out the door. And out of the facility.
IN FLASHBACK, we see Annabelle and Michael's final experiment, Osmosis, the photos of which we saw in the credits. But all of the information we now see, was lovingly gathered by Annabelle, who cares for her dying love even as she catalogues his every detail. She laughs when he laughs. Screams wit him. Cries with him. Onto a library of drives, Annabelle desperately saves every little part of him as he becomes weaker and weaker. I will never, ever give you up, she whispers.
But how long can she do this? She walks down the highway, headed home. She’s unemployed, has no access to the base, Nico recognized her, she’s broke, the drives that store Michael are getting glitchy and are constantly threatening to fail and the kids are miserable.
Blaise certainly is. He’s alone in front of the kindergarten. It’s getting dark. A car pulls up and Ada flops out of it. She is very, very loaded. The stoner behind the wheel offers them a ride. Ada says he’s crazy if he thinks her little sister’s getting in that car. Riddled with guilt, she over-apologizes for being late, but Blaise doesn’t seem to be the least bit bothered.
In the shed, Annabelle, as usual, puts on her brave face. She tells him some nice family bullshit, stories stolen from watching Kiki and Jake and their kids across the street. She doesn't mention Nico's appearance, she just says there’s been a set-back. This upsets him enough. He doesn't know how much longer he can take being locked in this fucking machine. Annabelle can’t calm him down and he gets very upset when she offers to power him down. Fuck, no! He hates powering down. It’s like dying again. Annabelle, he says, has to do something. He's bored to death and anxious and he wants to see his children. He wants to touch his wife. He wants to meet his son! Barely holding it together, she promises she will figure something out.
It’s like a stage set. All of the decent furniture is on one side of the living room, complete with lamps and soft lighting. The rest is piled up on the other side in a heap. The kids have been forced into nice clothes. Blaise looks like a cake, Adam has on a vest and Ada looks like he’s in a band. He’s also still loaded. Annabelle, with morbidly phony good cheer, delivers the big surprise - they‘re going to finally get to meet their Uncle David, their dad's little brother! WTF? They’ve never heard of an Uncle David. He lives in London, she says, so they're going to Skype him up. This sounds like typical bullshit from their mom, who is always making weird, manic announcements. We’re moving! I got a new job! Now, they have an uncle appearing out of thin air. Whatever. She says it’s very, very important that he think everything’s great. He’s a big worrier, so accentuate the positive.
The kids are arranged in a very pleasing tableau on the sofa and Skype is chirping its little connection song. Annabelle is very, very anxious for Michael and the kids to meet. But before they connect, there's a frantic pounding on the door. Blaise gets up to go see what’s up. From outside, Blaise screams for his mom. Annabelle shuts down the Skype before it connects and follows the scream. Blaise is across the street, trotting up the path cut in the tall grass by Asimov. This takes us back to the opening scene. The patio door finishes shattering.
Inside the neighbor's wrecked house, Blaise tugs on his mother’s hand. But Annabelle is mesmerized by the scene around her. Time slows down as she takes in the beauty of a house so full of comfort and care and sanity, the sense of peace and ordinary joy. Reasonable, healthy food on the stove. Family photos of vacations, of playing, of genuine joy. Kiki on the counter, rightly terrified at a scene she and her kids accept as ordinary. What the fuck has she done?
In FLASHBACK, we see Annabelle – eight months pregnant - struggle to bring the dying Michael out to a swamp, pour Morphine into his mouth, kiss him madly, then smother him with a pillow. Then she sets his body on fire. She swears to him that she’ll bring him back and that she’ll take care of the kids. Then she weeps so violently that she, too, might die.
Annabelle realizes in this moment that she cannot let Michael see the children. Ever. Once that happens, there’s no turning back. She tells the kids to take the fancy clothes off and heads to the tool shed.
Michael’s avatar is sleeping as Annabelle whispers her confession. She can’t keep lying to her children. If they find out that their mythic father is not lost, but dead; that their mother has neglected them because she’s in love with a memory in a machine. And how will you feel when you find out how your kids were really faring, how completely she has failed them? You will never forgive me. I will never forgive me. Ada is almost grown. Can we all keep these secrets? Or will I die in prison?
Michael’s virtual eyes betray nothing as she tightens her grip on the power cord, but may have fluttered open and looked at her as she yanks it out of the wall. Was he listening? No matter. The monitor goes dark. Sobbing, she breaks the gear down and shoves it into boxes. She throws the pictures into trash bags and hauls it all to the curb.
She watches and waits, defeated, as the trash truck rumbles toward her, driveway by driveway, in the pre-dawn. It's only a block away when she turns to go, leaving Michael to be hauled to the landfill.
SEASON TWO
The Lab
In Season Two, Annabelle will take her madness out in to the wider world. This will bring her back into contact with adults and work and success, causing deep conflicts within her. And it will leave her kids in further crisis, a situation she is willing to accept and ignore only because the perfect life she has promised them seems at last to be within reach. And the pressure is on because Michael is becoming glitchy and desperate to get out of his dark, binary world.
Moments before the trash truck takes Michael, Nico arrives. He doesn’t care what her problem is or what she’s doing here and he won’t ever ask. He knows what she can do in a lab and he needs her. The scrapyard (as she suspected) is a front. She’ll have all the best toys at her disposal. And money.
Annabelle spends Season Two working for Nico in the glistening tech facility hidden in the navy scrapyard. A global crisis is brewing and the US needs access to foreign intelligence. But cyber espionage has become so sophisticated that nations have resorted to yellow legal pads and verbal discussions that leave no electronic trace. They government need to get inside the rooms where this is happening. They need a spy that looks like the enemy leader’s dog or maybe his bodyguard. They have a chip that can power such a machine if they can figure out how to make it all work.
The job gives her two things she desperately needs – money and hope. She hires a cleaning service and orders decent furniture. Bills are paid, the fridge is stocked and she’s wearing clothes that fit. The house is transformed. And over the weeks, she will transformed as well. The only one not benefitting is Michael.
Though he has been stabilized by her pilfered government-issued gear, he remains a prisoner in an unimaginable darkness growing worried that Annabelle is leaving him behind. He begs to be connected to the internet so he can read or watch fucking cat videos, but Annabelle can’t take the chance of him being discoverable. They compromise with Annabelle loading his discs with more books and music and news.
The global crisis escalates, forcing Annabelle to act before she’s ready. In her desperation, she instigates an affair with Nico to give her greater access. She takes riskier and riskier chances to break into the secure parts of the facility to steal code and materials as she gets closer to the chip.
At home, things escalate, too. She has solved the symptoms of her family’s illness, but not the cause - her absence. She’s now around even less than before. Ada delves deeper and deeper into delinquency and harder drugs. Radia begins to suffer panic attacks. And Blaise retreats more and more completely in his fantasy world.
Annabelle keeps herself in denial, knowing the outcome will justify the pain. But she feels the guilt, which is made worse by the pleasure. Her success in the lab and the respect she gets, for the first time, without Michael. The way the neighbors now look at her and her home. The thrill of sneaking and cracking security systems and stealing. But guiltiest pleasure is in the warmth of Nico’s hand on her wrist, his breath on her cheek. In her guilt, she rededicates herself to Michael.
In the shed, they talk intimately, have their unusual brand of cyber sex, and make plans for their reunion. He’s better, pacified by his access to information - it took him seconds to read Anna Karenina, which he very much enjoyed.
At work, she becomes more brazen in her theft and acquires enough gear to set up a proper production lab in a rented space. Vats of chemicals, tables covered with pneumatic parts, an airbrush and spools of very fine wire. In here, she begins to build Michael's body. But it’s Nico’s body she’s curled up against when the phone rings.
It’s the double ring of Ada’s phone. But it’s not her daughter on the line - it’s a doctor. Ada is in ICU, having nearly died of an overdose of some stolen pills at a party. Then, it gets worse.
Annabelle went too far. A breach in security has been detected at the base. They know that someone has been stealing code and parts and design information. An Admiral has been assigned to investigate. Nico is terrified that their affair will be exposed. The thief could pin this whole thing on them. We're talking military prison.
She leaves Ada alone in the hospital. At home, she hugs and kisses Blaise and Radia, tells them too many times how much she loves them, how everything she's ever done in her life she's done for them. She goes to the shed, hooks Michael up to the internet and has him enter the surveillance system for the base – she has the codes. He needs to manipulate the video to put her at her workstation for the next six hours, though she won’t be there. She tells him she loves him. Then she makes a bomb.
At the base, she evades the guards and cameras and hauls a loaded wagon to a gate on the far side of the campus, hacks the lock, shoves the wagon inside and runs like hell. She's just out of sight when the bomb goes off, blowing trees into the air and setting everything on fire.
As all hell breaks loose, Annabelle slips into the facility and begins her descent into its heart.
Season Three
Michael
In Season Three, Annabelle will finally achieve the dream and bring Michael to life. But a secret of this magnitude will prove almost impossible to keep – from her lover, the US Government and her kids, who are finally, mercifully getting what they have been promised and what they need.
Annabelle will nearly be killed, but she will manage to steal the chip.
And then she’ll build Michael.
It will get increasingly harder as the scrutiny at work intensifies. There will be interrogations and alibis and an ever-growing complexity with Nico. Nico will grow more and more suspicious and fragile as the Admiral’s suspicions will come to center on him, guided subtly by Annabelle. But she will ready Michael’s body, layering latex over a pneumatic skeleton per her many detailed images.
She will also have to get home ready for him. She’ll Photoshop pics of family vacations that never occurred, paste herself into school functions she missed, create awards and trophies for the kids, order souvenirs from places never visited, and enlist the kids to make the art they never made when they were little.
And as she does all this, the kids will slip ever further away. Radia will find Ada’s gear and decide it’s her turn to be irresponsible. How much would it break Annabelle’s heart to see her 12 yr-old get high? To see Ada eat many bars of Xanax? To see Blaise sit alone at school every day, friendless and shouting about aliens and pretending to kill his classmates with his invisible blaster. Annabelle knows they are all on the edge, but she’s soooo close.
And she readies herself. She’ll get a professional haircut and buy new underwear, which will be depressing – she’s now eight years older than him. She’ll wonder why she cares, why she’s acting this way. Maybe she’s stunted. Maybe she wants to be a stupid, simple schoolgirl. Maybe that would be a lot easier.
And in the World, the global crisis will continue to escalate, compounded by the theft of the chip.
And then Michael will come home.
When he at last powers up, it will be everything the wonder couple ever dreamed – a joyous, weeping, lusty reunion and the start of their new lives.
The kids, of course, will freak out. And there will be so much lying to explain his absence and to cover for the family’s struggles that they will all be overwhelmed. But for a while it will work. Annabelle will break off the affair with Nico, explaining that her husband came home. He won’t take it well, but she won’t be able to care. She should. Nico will do exactly what he promised not to do – pry. He’ll begin to research her and investigate Michael’s disappearance and re-appearance.
Annabelle won’t realize, but we will, that she’s under surveillance almost everywhere she goes. Cameras will track her and the mics in her own devices record her conversations. Nico? The Admiral?
But the transformation of the family will beginning to really happen. Annabelle will credit Michael, not seeing that her presence is key. Her attention. Her love. Even Ada, who was inches from death or jail, will start to thaw. She will cover all the lies and problems, like the fact that Michael weighs five hundred pounds. And she’ll tweak Michael’s programming as they go – he forgot she was allergic to shellfish and nearly served her clam sauce, which might have killed her. But mostly, the plan will work perfectly and her life will be, at least on the surface, all she dreamed. Family dinners with laughter and intellectual discussions. Plans to resurrect their project and make a name for themselves as tech leaders. Asimov and Verne are mothballed and the family now does the chores on weekends. But the investigation at the naval base will not go away.
What you do in the dark will always come into the light.
A security conference – the result of the breech at the base – will be called and Annabelle will have to go. Michael is ready to handle things a home. The kids are adjusting. Blaise, in particular, has come to worship Michael. He wants to know everything about him and hates to let his dad out of his sight in case he gets lost again.
So, Annabelle will step off into a trap she doesn’t see coming and Michael will be left alone with the family. As he readies for bed, a pair of tiny eyes – Blaise’s – will watch from a hiding place as he pulls back his scalp and plugs a power cord into a socket in his skull. His eyes, usually a deep blue, will phase through a series of flashes and blinks, and then go blank. Blaise’s eyes will grow very round in horror.
Season Four
The Admiral and the Alien
In Season Four, Michael will appear to be working perfectly. But the kids will discover his true nature and, out of hurt and spite and mischief, take over his programming to have the dad they really want. And Michael will begin to change. Plugging into the information grid, he’ll spy on Annabelle, getting increasingly jealous and suspicious. And he finds he can manipulate everything – banking, the news, the military. He is the ghost in the machine. And with all of this power, immortality will begin to seem delicious. He will just need a mate.
Blaise says nothing about what he saw. He’s afraid and he doesn’t want to ruin things. Because if there is one thing Michael has learned by being dead, it's that you only live once. He's far more reckless than the original Michael was. And far more fun. There are trips to the mall and to the lake and all the things normal kids do with their normal dads when mom’s out of town. Except Michael buys a convertible.
And Annabelle’s marinating in the spa, relaxed for the first time in years. Hot stones, big glasses of wine, deep quiet. Until there's knock on the door. Nico is there, with the Admiral. It's a very polite interrogation and Annabelle is sincere and charming. The second they leave, though, she freaks out. How did they know she was here? Did they wait until they knew she had been drinking to arrive?
In a frenzy of coffee, concentrating through the alcohol in her brain, she takes out her laptop and all sorts of outboard gear, using deeply encrypted torrent servers as cover to try and find out just what the government knows about the explosion at the base. The kids call to check in and she makes up some crap about hot stone therapy as she hacks into CIA systems and searches incredibly complex code for clues. So, far she’s in the clear. She's running one last search when she finally just passes out in the chair.
At home, Michael is interviewing the kids separately, piecing together the years when he was gone. The stories are lovely, but the kids seem nervous. Details, he notices, don’t match. Michael is increasingly suspicious. But the conversations are relief for the kids, especially Ada, and the truth begins to emerge. Annabelle was a pretty lousy mom. And much of what she told Michael was a lie.
Blaise watches Michael plug in almost every night. Is he pleased that his dad is an alien? It is sort of like having a super-hero for a dad. But this night, he takes three hard drives from the dresser and runs a cable from his power port to the first one. Blaise’s image and voice appear on the monitor – he was recording their conversation. He recorded all of them. And now he’s putting all that information onto the hard drives, each of which has one of their names written on it. He’s collecting their memories, their facial expressions, the pitch of their voices - putting them into the machines. Suddenly Blaise is worried.
He doesn’t have a cell phone and there’s no landline, so he logs onto her school email to send her mom a note. He types in that Annabelle needs to come home. Daddy is not daddy.
Annabelle awakens and immediately checks her computer. But it isn't Blaise's email she sees - it's a warning banner that her customized detection software has picked up and her IP address may have been compromised. She slips the laptop in her robe and runs down the hotel stairs. Slipping through the breakfast crowd, ducking to avoid being recognized, she heads for the beach. She slips into the water, like she’s having a morning swim, the laptop hidden beneath the surface and swims out as far as she thinks she can. Far from shore, she hurls the computer even farther. She almost drowns on the swim back, then lies coughing in the surf as the early birds come to claim their beach chairs. She hurries into her robe and runs.
At the door of the conference she’s all smiles, if breathless and terrified. She puts her phone in the bin, passes through security, and enters. This is a classified meeting – no devices allowed. So Blaise gets no reply to his email. So, he wakes Ada and explains… that’s not our father. He’s an alien. He tells his sisters the story. Ada and Radia find this hilarious until Blaise starts to really freak out. They agree to check it out with him.
At the conference, Annabelle sits through the very detailed presentation on the espionage, treason, trespassing and terrorism charges being considered for the perpetrator of the attack on the base and the steps being taken to find the criminal. There are traces of code in the system suggesting that the software has been copied. There are discrepancies in the material quantities in the lab. Evidence is presented, questions are asked and Annabelle can see that they are getting close. All the while, Nico is trying to rekindle their affair, as though he has information and may use it as leverage. Annabelle shuts him down – they can’t do anything at all secret until this investigation’s over. Nico knows what this is really about – Michael. Nico hates that smug motherfucker.
At home, peering through the window are three sets of eyes, watching as their father peels back his hair and plugs the power cord into the little socket. His eyes do their thing. It’s everything the kids can do - even Ada - not to scream. Radia does let a tiny sound escape and for a beat, the kids are sure they're dead. But the alien doesn't seem to have heard.
The kids gather in Ada’s room. Scared to death, they figure that whatever secret mission their father went on must have gone terribly wrong and this thing was sent back in his place. Blaise wants to call the FBI, but Ada is sure nobody will believe them and Radia suspects they might already know. Why would they? So what, Blaise wonders, are they going to do?
Poor Michael is just making pancakes when Ada smashes him in the head with a baseball bat, knocking parts of the acrylic skull off and revealing the wiring inside. It's a surprisingly violent attack as the kids' years of pent-up rage come to the surface. Michael tries to explain, but they're relentless. Surely he could defeat them, but they're his kids - he can't hurt them. They beat the hell out of him and tie him up, ignoring his claims to be their father, his protestations of love.
At the conference, Annabelle gets increasingly nervous, especially when the Admiral starts describing typical means of espionage - like seduction. Nico is struck by this as well. Other clues include mysterious pasts, inconsistent relationships, humble lifestyles and a background in the sciences. Nico very pointedly asks her about Michael. What is that about? The Admiral seems to be talking directly to her. Is she imagining that? She starts to panic. She has to get out of here. She slips over to the food table. Cocktail shrimp. She eats one, then another and then a few more, then walks back over and sits next to Nico. She checks her watch.
Ada hits Michael’s head again and Radia reaches in the opening and deactivates him. Radia peers inside the bot's head at the incredible array of chips and sensors and pneumatic controls and… handwriting on little tags on the wires, there to make sure each is plugged into the right place. Familiar handwriting – Mom’s handwriting. Could it be? The Navy job, the stupid lawn-mowing robots, the secret book that never seemed to get written? No way. There is no way she built this thing. But obviously - she did.
When Annabelle’s allergy kicks in, it does so with a bang. She turns red, welts appear on her neck, her eyes go bloodshot and her breathing gets shallow and rasping. When she hits the floor, her face hits first and she bites deeply into her swollen tongue, which is choking her to death.
The kids realize that Mom's some kind of frickin' mad scientist who spent years down here building a replacement husband – instead of raising her kids. Now he’s a fucking babysitter while she’s off at a spa. All of her stories and photos with their "dad'" are as much bullshit as the ones she had them make up. This is the moment Radia breaks. “So, she can do this and she wouldn't even help me with that project for Mr. Owen?” Radia has fought for her, made excuses for her and compensated for her all of her life. Now she’s just a fucking liar who doesn’t give a shit about them. Well, Radia knows exactly what to do.
Radia's siblings are amazed to see her slowly and carefully repair the wiring she ripped out of the bot’s head. And then she powers it up and hacks into its O.S. It’s a simple protocol and not well-protected because why would it be? Like many very smart people, Mom lacks common sense. It takes Radia only minutes to figure out the password – Annabelle’s birthday. Duh. She pairs the bot to her phone. Holy shit – she finds the bot’s parameters, the carefully calibrated sets of priorities, desires and responses that Annabelle used to fine-tune Michael’s personality. Radia can now adjust them. What, she asks her brother and sister, would we like this stupid thing to do for us?
Season Five
Annabelle’s Monster
In Season Five, Annabelle will have to come clean with the kids to get Michael back. She also needs them on board because the noose is tightening. The government is now certain of her betrayal and is simply trying to prove it. And poor, jealous Nico is losing his mind. Michael, of course, has solutions for all of this. But Annabelle can’t let him commit the treason and murder he proposes. And when she discovers that he’s been recording and cataloging her and the kids in order to transfer her and the kids into mech bodies so they can live forever together, the question becomes – can she stop him?
Annabelle awakens in the hospital, intubated and hooked up to a dozen machines. The allergic reaction nearly killed her, but she's out of that conference room. She manages to grab her phone off the table. She checks her texts – nothing. She checks her email and is only interested in one – Blaise’s. She opens it – reads that ‘daddy is not daddy.’ Oh, fuck. But a newer one arrives. It says, “He’s Superdaddy! We are having fun. Hope you are, too. Blaise.” She calls Michael and indeed everything seems to be fine. But, of course, she’s hearing Ada’s words through Michael’s hacked voice module. Everything’s not fine.
Michael is now what the kids want – not what Annabelle wanted. This is particularly tasty for Ada, who has more reason than ever to rebel against her mother. She also now has the means of doing real damage and getting real street cred. Michael signs them out of school, buys them beer and takes them to R-rated movies. He lets Ada drive. He lets her friends crash at his house, then cleans up after they trash it. Her dad scores her medical marijuana. And Radia now wants a little taste of that. Blaise’s still very hurt that he lost his daddy, so the girls make the bot take him places and buy him things. Like puppies. Even after Annabelle gets home, they secretly abuse their robot. But moms are hard to fool and she just has a feeling one day and follows them to school. Of course, they don't go to school. They pile out of the car at the paintball field, reeking of weed. She runs up and furiously tries to override Michael with her phone, assuming she's made some kind of programming error. The kids enjoy her frustration for a while, but this - coupled with the threat of going to prison for espionage and murder - starts to crush Annabelle and she looks like she's about to die of panic. Radia finally blurts out that the password isn’t her birthday anymore and it all comes tumbling down.
In the basement, Annabelle shows them old videos of her and Michael, laughing and goofing around and talking seriously. Then she goes into the backup discs and dials up digital Michael. They seem exactly that same, she explains, because they are – it is actually him in there. She didn't spend all that time just making some guy - she made the love of her life. She made their dad. So, she’s going to just restore the robot and everything’s going to be fine. But Radia has a question – what if our real dad comes home? Before she can answer, they see on the security monitor that several Navy vehicles are screeching up onto the lawn. She says the kids have to go get rid of them. They refuse. Where is our real dad? The Admiral is at the door – she has to tell them. She says the original version of their dad is dead and if anyone outside of this room ever finds out – she’ll go to prison for it. The Admiral bangs on the door.
The investigators are polite and insist that this is all routine. But Nico’s there and seems to be guiding the Admiral. This is obviously personal for Nico. The house is inspected closely, nearly exposing the lab. The kids are interviewed separately, as are Michael and Annabelle about their family. Due to Annabelle's diligence, everything lines up, even the story of Michael's amazing reappearance after five years in the jungle and as a kidnap victim. The investigators have no idea, when they speak to Annabelle and Michael, that they have both the thief and the spoils in front of them. Nor do they realize the witnesses are seated politely at the table, watching their mother lie. Watching her break the law. When the Admiral and Nico and the Military Police leave, Annabelle is safe, for the moment, though she knows it can’t last.
She tells them that they have to leave the country. Now. Like, start packing. But Michael is going nowhere. Annabelle, he says, is no longer making the decisions. He understands she was under a lot of pressure, but she has failed on too many fronts. He knows she lied about the kids' lives. He knows about the affair with Nico, which may have been expedient, but is causing trouble now. So, he's taking over, for everyone's benefit. And the first order of business is to stay put. He can make sure that they're never caught. Annabelle doesn't believe it. Why, he asks, does she think the Admiral bought the story about his disappearance and re-emergence? Because he’s already read several articles on line and in press archives detailing it. How did those articles get in those archives? Michael put them there.
Annabelle has no choice but to play along. Michael adds loads of money to their accounts. They move into a much larger house. With a pool. There are no more chores – a maid and gardener take over. For a while, it all works beautifully. Annabelle, of course, is growing increasingly nervous and is getting scared of Michael as he becomes more controlling and arrogant. He has, it seems, won. But he’s not the Michael she loved and she’s afraid for her kids. She tries to hack into him, but his ability to develop his own security is far too good. She's helpless, too, when he begins to frame Nico for the attack and theft at the base to throw the military off Annabelle's trail.
She becomes scared to death of him, but what can she do? She did too good a job making him legitimate - the fingerprints, the story of his disappearance, the subtle aging of his skin and the slight grey in his hair. If she tried to tell someone, her story will sound completely insane. And if she did convince someone and Michael was defeated, would it be better? The fact that all of her crimes and horrible decisions were born of love will mean nothing to the world. She’s a traitor, a spy, a murderer and a horrible, neglectful mother. All because of Michael. She would kill him if she could, but he’s every bit as smart as she is and the kids are always with him. There is only one person who might be able to help her.
Season Six
National Security
In a desperate attempt to stop Michael, Annabelle will confess to the authorities and ask for their help in destroying him. It becomes a global technical and political crisis with Michael in charge of all information and Annabelle reduced to whispers and secrets shared on scraps of paper. She will manage, with the help of the kids, to destroy him. But, she hasn’t realized that he exists on servers and drives all over the world. That body she built for him was just and input/output device – one of many he has made in secret. In another one, built more like a weapon than just a man, he finds Annabelle, on the run with the kids, and kills her. At once, she reappears in a tech body that he has made for her, her personality installed and ready to go. She, like him, is overwhelmed with the power and the possibilities of immortality. They walk off together, wondering what age is best for each kid to be forever.
The Admiral believes her, all right. He has a deep background in replicant technology and in global affairs and he takes this even more seriously than she does. Here she was trying to make a family and what she's done is make the single greatest - and most dangerous advancement in human history. To him, this is no different than the atomic bomb. The government - any government - is the worst place in the world to hide a secret. They have to get rid of it and convince everyone again that this is impossible.
Their first scheme is just to take Michael out. Quick and simple before he has time to notice any activity. Obviously, he's designed to notice everything. So Annabelle has to pretend to be on board, laugh at his jokes, sleep with him, make plans. But subtle little things leak out. Did he notice that she's spending more time with the kids? That she's talking about philosophy with them? Preparing them...
The Admiral has created an alibi for her at work. He's in a van, she's in an idling car in disguise. Michael comes out of the market, following his pattern, steps across the street. Annabelle puts the car in gear and floors it. But when it’s half a second away, he leaps out of the way. He knew she was coming. She wrecks the car and he shoves her across the seats and gets behind the wheel.
Now she's his prisoner. Back and forth they go, her trying to destroy him and him gleefully defeating her. She will, he's convinced, see that he's right.
She tries to turn the kids, but her arguments are too sophisticated and frightening. His are basic - he's cooler and can give them anything. And it's easy to convince them that she's instable. Eventually, he kicks her out of the house.
She and the Admiral have one last, great plan. He has access to a drone program and all she has to do is lure Michael somewhere remote. There is a danger that she'll be hit, but it's a risk she's willing to take.
After weeks of planning and lies, she gets him alone in the desert under the ruse of a broken down car. She sends the signal to the Admiral and engages Michael, waiting for the drone strike - but it never comes. So she shoots him. Over and over, blasting holes in her creation, wiping his face off of his skull. It's done. But only for a moment.
A new Michael climbs out of his car, laughing. She has underestimated herself and him. He can’t be killed. He's no longer in just that one graphite and latex container - he's made many of them. And that's just the tip of it. He has uploaded himself on every server he could find. He’s everywhere. He’s in NASA, he’s in Google, he’s in her phone. That’s how he knew the drone strike was coming, and how he knew the coordinates to send to to kill the Admiral instead. By the way, he tells her, the Admiral was lying to her. He had already made arrangements to sell the technology and had four countries bidding.
Annabelle begs him to let her go, to destroy himself. Refusing to face his death nearly ruined her. She wants to get old. She wants to change and grow and wonder and be part of life, not apart from it. By destroying death, she says, they’ve destroyed life. What has his immortality done for them? It’s made her do things that disgust her. And it’s changed him so much she no longer loves him. What makes a life precious? Or a moment? It's precious because it's fleeting. Why would we live well if we didn’t have to? Why would we care for ourselves or for anyone else? Why worry about the planet? No oxygen or clean water? No problem. Removing all consequences leads to a life of carelessness and boredom, which Michael displays in spades. Michael surprises her and says that he reached the same conclusion. A race of creatures that never die is a disaster. But... just one immortal family? Who better? They're smart and kind and forward-thinking.
Annabelle refuses. But, of course, he knew she would. No matter. He’s had, he reminds her, a lot of time to think. And plan. When she passed out that first night they were reunited, it wasn’t just the wine. And while she was unconscious, he measured and molded and catalogued every inch of her. He’s been recording her every word, every phrase, every reaction, every choice since before he died. As she's realizing what his plan is, the car door opens and her duplicate gets out. She will, he says, have all of your desires and quirks and memories. Except, of course, this one. And then he smothers her and sets her body on fire, just as she did to him all those years ago.
At home in their secluded mansion by the sea, the two perfect parents have dinner with their three wonderful children, just as Annabelle had always dreamed. Their kids' laughter and decisions and voices and gestures are all dutifully recorded on their parents' drives. As soon as Ada is finished growing, she'll get her new body. And then Radia. But Blaise is so cute at this age, they might keep him this way forever.
Hundreds and hundreds of medical-looking photos, all of one man. Early thirties and thin. Shots from every angle, close-ups and extreme close-ups. In the background, his voice recites every word in the dictionary, in order. Every mole and hair, every fingerprint. He grows thinner and thinner as the photos flicker by. He makes random phonetic sounds. Super close-ups of his eyes. His teeth. Laughs. Screams. Cries. He’s recounts memories and lists things he hates and loves, his deepest beliefs, his favorite gelato flavor. X-rays, medical records, a CT scan, photos that look like they’re from an autopsy. His inner ear. Everything. The last shot is his face. He manages a little smile, blows a weak last kiss to the camera.
Season One
Denial
In Season One, we will get to know Annabelle and her kids and the husband she keeps on a harddrive, Michael. We’ll see the past that haunts her, the present that eludes her and the future she’s desperately trying to create. Though she will do some fairly terrible things, we’ll be with her because she is driven by love and hope.
A path through a tall lawn is methodically cut by a squat machine that looks like a giant, homemade Roomba crossed with a snarling mechanical dog. It whirrs as it chews through the summer’s last thick grass, the fall’s early leaves and the occasional branch.
But today some tiny glitch occurs in its little silicon brain. It pauses and twitches. Changing course, it weaves off task and toward us, chasing us into the street, its powerful blade throwing gravel.
Having crossed the street, it enters a very neat, already-cut lawn, plows through a flowerbed and onto the walk.
Back on the other side, a little boy in an alien costume, Blaise, screams for his mother.
The bot continues toward us, up the walk and toward a door. It shreds the welcome mat as it enters the very neat suburban house.
A toddler scrambles onto the sofa, screaming, as the terrifying thing eats a toy train set and some Legos, spewing the remains around the room. An end table is bowled over, toppling a vase and a lamp. A dog barks at the thing as it careens through the house.
A woman runs in from her bedroom, half-dressed, scoops up the child and shoves him into the closet, leaps on the counter and dials her phone.
Another child charges down the stairs, a boy of maybe ten, and goes after the machine with a baseball bat. The mom shouts at him to run. She yells in the phone to the 911 operator.
Little Blaise enters, shouting commands at the mechanical monster. It ignores him.
Annabelle Ford appears. Mid-thirties, intense, obviously not a woman to be fucked with. But she looks scared. She’s in men’s clothes and un-made up. Face clenched, she enters commands into her phone, assuring everyone she’s stopping the thing.
Instead, the engine guns and it rolls toward a game of marbles. In slow motion, a marble shoots out and shatters a glass on the table. More marbles fly. Photos are destroyed in their frames. Marbles whizz through the mesh of a crib, shattering the mobile dangling inside as the glass spheres are sprayed around the house like machine gun fire.
A teenage Goth girl, Annabelle’s daughter Ada, is there. She grabs the bat and beats the thing savagely, dodging marbles. Annabelle pulls her away. Who is she protecting?
Her middle child, Radia, pushes past, climbs across the tops of the bar stools, reaches down to the machine and fiddles dangerously with a control panel. In the chaos, a marble hits the patio door. The door explodes.
Shards of glass fly into the air, then rain down, beautiful and dangerous. Kids cry, the mother screams, and terrified little Radia finally disables the thing in a spray of sparks. Everything goes quiet. Lip quivering, Radia apologizes to the woman on the counter. Humiliated, Ada grabs the machine to drag it away. Blaise takes Annabelle’s hand to lead her home. But Annabelle looks hypnotized, staring around the inside of the house like she’s never seen one.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
Moving day. This is not unusual for the Fords. This time she has moved them to the edge of a failed utopian community, like Disney’s Celebration. Like all dreams of perfection, it collapsed on itself. It’s perfect for Annabelle - half inhabited, cheap, a lack of nosey neighbors and a huge under-used power substation. Annabelle cheerfully spins it, working hard to convince the kids, and herself, that this is all wonderful, but this is the shittiest place they’ve ever lived. The kids aren’t stupid.
Ada, 15, has evidently purchased the Deluxe Angry Teen Kit. She has reasons. She and Radia move into their shared room. This sucks. Ada wonders where the fuck she’s going to hide her shit. Why don’t mom and Blaise share a room? Blaise could sleep in a drawer. She rips her sheet off the bed, climbs on a chair and starts attaching the sheet to the ceiling with push-pins. A wall.
Radia, 12, is a geek, a brilliant little super-achiever. Adults love her. She’s putting her books on the shelf. It looks more like an office than an adolescent’s bedroom. She sets out a photo of herself and her dad, of a moment she has convinced herself she remembers. Mom likes to see that she has that photo on her desk.
Blaise, 9, is a little weirdo. He believes they are a family of space aliens, which is why they don’t fit in on Earth. Worse theories have been posited. His little room obviously is a walk-in closet. He drags a moving box inside and flips it on its side. He fills it with pillows and a blanket and a zillion stuffed animals, grabs his plastic Blaster and crawls inside. His tiny hand reaches out and pulls the box shut.
In Annabelle’s room, there’s a king-size bed. And two mirrors. And two dressers. She fills one with men’s clothes.
IN ANNABELLE’S IMAGINATION, we see Michael here. The scene in the house is the same, if romanticized, but he’s part of it and they are that happy, bright, quirky family.
Dinner is late. Frozen Costco Chicken Tika Masala is slopped into a pot on the stove and the fire is cranked on underneath it. Annabelle hides the box in the trash, steps out the back door, grabs a cooler bag, a tool belt and a huge roll of heavy electrical cable.
She picked the new house very carefully. Yes, the neighbors across the street are annoyingly happy and successful, not in that sitcom way, but in a real way. They are playful and they drink a little and laugh and have people over and generally rub Annabelle’s face in her struggles. But the new house has a critical feature – a nice little concrete block shed in the yard. A little bunker for her to set up as a writing office so she can finish her book. She walks past it, flashlight in hand, through the rear gate and to the big metal box that houses the high-voltage distribution panel for the neighborhood. When she opens it and pulls the disconnect, the entire neighborhood goes dark.
On the stove, the Masala begins to boil.
Annabelle slips on gloves and, flashlight in her mouth, hurriedly climbs the ladder on an adjacent pole, nearly falling off several times – she does not like heights. At the top, she cracks the transformer and patches in a large junction box. She drops a screw.
The neighborhood fills with phone flashlights, sweeping the dark. Repair trucks with flashing lights appear in the distance, led by a cop car, getting closer.
She connects three large electrical leads into the transformer. She knows what she’s doing, but the cables are very heavy and hard to manipulate.
The Masala pops and dries up the sides crusting. The trucks are getting very close.
She leaps to the ground, throws the heavy ladder into the drainage canal. From a cooler bag, she produces a dead squirrel, harvested from the road. She shoves the squirrel’s mouth onto a wire, sinking its teeth in. She throws the main disconnect, frying the squirrel in a spray of sparks. Then she runs, tossing the cooler bag and the gloves in a neighbor’s backyard trashcan. A fire alarm goes off, this one in her house. Fuck. She runs full speed, slips back into her house and turns off the stove under the flaming, burned pot.
Blaise is in the doorway in his Space Prince costume. Annabelle fakes a laugh about her lousy cooking and suggests they order a pizza for dinner. “You’re not sick of pizza, are you?” Blaise steps away and Annabelle glances at the photo of Michael on the fridge. She still gets as excited as a schoolgirl.
When the repair crew arrives at the distribution panel, they grin and take pictures. A whole damned neighborhood blacked out by a squirrel. They never think, of course, to look overhead for a pirated high-voltage line.
Annabelle loads very expensive-looking flight cases into the shed. Something precious.
At school, the kids follow their drill. Ada clocks all the tables, the jocks, suck-ups, morons, the queers... Finally she spies the tableshe’s looking for – the stoners. Thar be drugs. She passes slowly, letting them get a gander, then sits alone at a nearby table. She discreetly takes out her lighter and flicks it a few times. The stoners notice – message sent and received.
Radia, only a middle schooler, walks through looking very poised, though she’s very afraid. All of these kids look like they hunt. Where are the geeks? She spies Ada, alone at a table, and heads over. As she sits, Ada stands. And leaves.
In Kindergarten, Blaise stands before the class and says, “Space.” There’s giggling and the teacher asks him, “Seriously, honey, where are you from?” Blaise says his family moved here from Omaha, but that they are actually from space. His mom refuses to tell him what galaxy, probably for safety reasons. Uh-huh…
The family is in their places at 11:00 at night. Radia is in her maniacally ordered half room, doing homework that isn’t due for weeks. Blaise is inches from the computer in the kitchen, watching Ancient Aliens as Asimov bounces around keeping the floor spotless. Ada grabs her lighter and a hoodie and saunters right out the front door. And across the back yard, even through the blackout shades, bright light leaks out of the shed window. And the building, as you get closer to it, hums. On the door is a sign, “No Admittance – Author at Work!” Of course, she’s not an author. There is no book. There is only Michael.
In the shed is one of the most advanced computers in the world. Wires and monitors and hard drives and cooling fans and circuit boards fill the shelves and the table. The only other things in the room are photographs of him, pinned to the walls like butterflies. When the secret door is safely closed and locked, Annabelle pushes a single button.
The equipment comes to life with a soft whirring. Two monitors light up. One displays impossibly complex code. On the other is a crisp CGI image of the man from the opening photographs. He's very attractive, though more charismatic than handsome. He appears to be sleeping until she says his name. “Michael.” Then the eyes blink open and the face awakens and smiles. “Hello, beautiful,” he says. And Annabelle is no longer lost.
In his current form, Michael is made from a fantastic mixture of available things. Eye cams behind eyes on the screen. Little microphone ears. The monitor sits on an armature of a body. There are gloves as hands, the fingers loaded with sensors. He can feel every hair when she runs his hand thru her hair. Even a vibrator covered with sensors at his middle. There are sensors on his makeshift lips and a speaker behind them.
IN FLASHBACK we see Annabelle and Michael as very happy, if intense, graduate students, the rock stars of the MIT Idea Lab. Impossibly brilliant and playful and horny and addicted to their work, a project they call Osmosis. They are loved and hated, but they are the shit.
Now, in the secret room, Annabelle is again that happy, ferocious woman. And Michael hasn't changed a bit, except for the fact that he only exists on a hard drive. Together now, they talk and flirt. She tells him that the panel was huge and that an unmarked military car escorted the repair crew. This all but proves what they’ve suspected, that the navy scrap yard here is cover – the secret robotics lab is there and with it, the chip. The experimental Metabyte chip, by far the fastest, most sophisticated chip ever imagined. This is the piece they need to build Michael his body and mind. Then she tells him about her day and all about the kids. But everything she tells him about the family is a lie.
She can’t bear for him to know how poorly things are going with his children. She’s just trying to keep them all alive until she can bring him back for real and they can raise their family together, the way they were supposed to, they perfect way it was all supposed to be before biology fucked everything up.
IN FLASHBACK, we see the diagnosis. Michael has cancer. Stage Four, inoperable, get-your-things-together cancer. The dreams of being the world’s most famous scientists, of ushering in a profoundly new era and becoming stupidly rich were gone. Gone too was the promise of growing old together, of a life of joy and adventure and devotion. They were meant to have lots of kids and pets and raise them in a house full of ideas and purpose and immeasurable, impossible love. Unsurprisingly, the diagnosis just makes them work harder to complete Osmosis before Michael dies.
As is usually the case when it all gets too overwhelming and guilty, she goes in and kisses the kids goodnight, though it’s three in the morning, and crawls half into the box with Blaise and snuggles to sleep.
ANNABELLE’S RECURRING NIGHTMARE : Fire everywhere, consuming a body. But the body rises, now more like a demon than a man. There is screaming all around. She reaches desperately for small hands, the children hands, but can’t quite grip them as the man of flames, growing larger and larger, closes in on her.
Annabelle’s new job as a custodial worker is wildly below her abilities. But… it’s at the naval scrap yard. And in here somewhere is the secret robotics lab and the Megabyte chip. Under an assumed name and a persona of near silence, she mops and wipes and listens and observes and studies the fire escape maps posted at each stairwell.
Radia and Ada are at the bus stop, not talking. The bus pulls up. Radia reminds Ada to pick Blaise up. Ada doesn’t fucking need to be reminded. The bus pulls away, leaving Ada. She has a few bars of Xanax.
At work, Annabelle is trying her custodial keys in a high-security door when a supervisor stops her. When she looks up, he looks at her with shock. Then he says here name – her real name. Nico is a former Idea Lab member who was a year behind her at MIT. She pretends not to recognize him, but he surely knows her. He’s a Naval officer stationed here at the base, running logistics for the scrapyard. He is stunned to find her with a mop. He asks about Michael. She says she doesn’t know anyone named Michael. He must have her confused with someone else.
Terrified, she excuses herself and walks out the door. And out of the facility.
IN FLASHBACK, we see Annabelle and Michael's final experiment, Osmosis, the photos of which we saw in the credits. But all of the information we now see, was lovingly gathered by Annabelle, who cares for her dying love even as she catalogues his every detail. She laughs when he laughs. Screams wit him. Cries with him. Onto a library of drives, Annabelle desperately saves every little part of him as he becomes weaker and weaker. I will never, ever give you up, she whispers.
But how long can she do this? She walks down the highway, headed home. She’s unemployed, has no access to the base, Nico recognized her, she’s broke, the drives that store Michael are getting glitchy and are constantly threatening to fail and the kids are miserable.
Blaise certainly is. He’s alone in front of the kindergarten. It’s getting dark. A car pulls up and Ada flops out of it. She is very, very loaded. The stoner behind the wheel offers them a ride. Ada says he’s crazy if he thinks her little sister’s getting in that car. Riddled with guilt, she over-apologizes for being late, but Blaise doesn’t seem to be the least bit bothered.
In the shed, Annabelle, as usual, puts on her brave face. She tells him some nice family bullshit, stories stolen from watching Kiki and Jake and their kids across the street. She doesn't mention Nico's appearance, she just says there’s been a set-back. This upsets him enough. He doesn't know how much longer he can take being locked in this fucking machine. Annabelle can’t calm him down and he gets very upset when she offers to power him down. Fuck, no! He hates powering down. It’s like dying again. Annabelle, he says, has to do something. He's bored to death and anxious and he wants to see his children. He wants to touch his wife. He wants to meet his son! Barely holding it together, she promises she will figure something out.
It’s like a stage set. All of the decent furniture is on one side of the living room, complete with lamps and soft lighting. The rest is piled up on the other side in a heap. The kids have been forced into nice clothes. Blaise looks like a cake, Adam has on a vest and Ada looks like he’s in a band. He’s also still loaded. Annabelle, with morbidly phony good cheer, delivers the big surprise - they‘re going to finally get to meet their Uncle David, their dad's little brother! WTF? They’ve never heard of an Uncle David. He lives in London, she says, so they're going to Skype him up. This sounds like typical bullshit from their mom, who is always making weird, manic announcements. We’re moving! I got a new job! Now, they have an uncle appearing out of thin air. Whatever. She says it’s very, very important that he think everything’s great. He’s a big worrier, so accentuate the positive.
The kids are arranged in a very pleasing tableau on the sofa and Skype is chirping its little connection song. Annabelle is very, very anxious for Michael and the kids to meet. But before they connect, there's a frantic pounding on the door. Blaise gets up to go see what’s up. From outside, Blaise screams for his mom. Annabelle shuts down the Skype before it connects and follows the scream. Blaise is across the street, trotting up the path cut in the tall grass by Asimov. This takes us back to the opening scene. The patio door finishes shattering.
Inside the neighbor's wrecked house, Blaise tugs on his mother’s hand. But Annabelle is mesmerized by the scene around her. Time slows down as she takes in the beauty of a house so full of comfort and care and sanity, the sense of peace and ordinary joy. Reasonable, healthy food on the stove. Family photos of vacations, of playing, of genuine joy. Kiki on the counter, rightly terrified at a scene she and her kids accept as ordinary. What the fuck has she done?
In FLASHBACK, we see Annabelle – eight months pregnant - struggle to bring the dying Michael out to a swamp, pour Morphine into his mouth, kiss him madly, then smother him with a pillow. Then she sets his body on fire. She swears to him that she’ll bring him back and that she’ll take care of the kids. Then she weeps so violently that she, too, might die.
Annabelle realizes in this moment that she cannot let Michael see the children. Ever. Once that happens, there’s no turning back. She tells the kids to take the fancy clothes off and heads to the tool shed.
Michael’s avatar is sleeping as Annabelle whispers her confession. She can’t keep lying to her children. If they find out that their mythic father is not lost, but dead; that their mother has neglected them because she’s in love with a memory in a machine. And how will you feel when you find out how your kids were really faring, how completely she has failed them? You will never forgive me. I will never forgive me. Ada is almost grown. Can we all keep these secrets? Or will I die in prison?
Michael’s virtual eyes betray nothing as she tightens her grip on the power cord, but may have fluttered open and looked at her as she yanks it out of the wall. Was he listening? No matter. The monitor goes dark. Sobbing, she breaks the gear down and shoves it into boxes. She throws the pictures into trash bags and hauls it all to the curb.
She watches and waits, defeated, as the trash truck rumbles toward her, driveway by driveway, in the pre-dawn. It's only a block away when she turns to go, leaving Michael to be hauled to the landfill.
SEASON TWO
The Lab
In Season Two, Annabelle will take her madness out in to the wider world. This will bring her back into contact with adults and work and success, causing deep conflicts within her. And it will leave her kids in further crisis, a situation she is willing to accept and ignore only because the perfect life she has promised them seems at last to be within reach. And the pressure is on because Michael is becoming glitchy and desperate to get out of his dark, binary world.
Moments before the trash truck takes Michael, Nico arrives. He doesn’t care what her problem is or what she’s doing here and he won’t ever ask. He knows what she can do in a lab and he needs her. The scrapyard (as she suspected) is a front. She’ll have all the best toys at her disposal. And money.
Annabelle spends Season Two working for Nico in the glistening tech facility hidden in the navy scrapyard. A global crisis is brewing and the US needs access to foreign intelligence. But cyber espionage has become so sophisticated that nations have resorted to yellow legal pads and verbal discussions that leave no electronic trace. They government need to get inside the rooms where this is happening. They need a spy that looks like the enemy leader’s dog or maybe his bodyguard. They have a chip that can power such a machine if they can figure out how to make it all work.
The job gives her two things she desperately needs – money and hope. She hires a cleaning service and orders decent furniture. Bills are paid, the fridge is stocked and she’s wearing clothes that fit. The house is transformed. And over the weeks, she will transformed as well. The only one not benefitting is Michael.
Though he has been stabilized by her pilfered government-issued gear, he remains a prisoner in an unimaginable darkness growing worried that Annabelle is leaving him behind. He begs to be connected to the internet so he can read or watch fucking cat videos, but Annabelle can’t take the chance of him being discoverable. They compromise with Annabelle loading his discs with more books and music and news.
The global crisis escalates, forcing Annabelle to act before she’s ready. In her desperation, she instigates an affair with Nico to give her greater access. She takes riskier and riskier chances to break into the secure parts of the facility to steal code and materials as she gets closer to the chip.
At home, things escalate, too. She has solved the symptoms of her family’s illness, but not the cause - her absence. She’s now around even less than before. Ada delves deeper and deeper into delinquency and harder drugs. Radia begins to suffer panic attacks. And Blaise retreats more and more completely in his fantasy world.
Annabelle keeps herself in denial, knowing the outcome will justify the pain. But she feels the guilt, which is made worse by the pleasure. Her success in the lab and the respect she gets, for the first time, without Michael. The way the neighbors now look at her and her home. The thrill of sneaking and cracking security systems and stealing. But guiltiest pleasure is in the warmth of Nico’s hand on her wrist, his breath on her cheek. In her guilt, she rededicates herself to Michael.
In the shed, they talk intimately, have their unusual brand of cyber sex, and make plans for their reunion. He’s better, pacified by his access to information - it took him seconds to read Anna Karenina, which he very much enjoyed.
At work, she becomes more brazen in her theft and acquires enough gear to set up a proper production lab in a rented space. Vats of chemicals, tables covered with pneumatic parts, an airbrush and spools of very fine wire. In here, she begins to build Michael's body. But it’s Nico’s body she’s curled up against when the phone rings.
It’s the double ring of Ada’s phone. But it’s not her daughter on the line - it’s a doctor. Ada is in ICU, having nearly died of an overdose of some stolen pills at a party. Then, it gets worse.
Annabelle went too far. A breach in security has been detected at the base. They know that someone has been stealing code and parts and design information. An Admiral has been assigned to investigate. Nico is terrified that their affair will be exposed. The thief could pin this whole thing on them. We're talking military prison.
She leaves Ada alone in the hospital. At home, she hugs and kisses Blaise and Radia, tells them too many times how much she loves them, how everything she's ever done in her life she's done for them. She goes to the shed, hooks Michael up to the internet and has him enter the surveillance system for the base – she has the codes. He needs to manipulate the video to put her at her workstation for the next six hours, though she won’t be there. She tells him she loves him. Then she makes a bomb.
At the base, she evades the guards and cameras and hauls a loaded wagon to a gate on the far side of the campus, hacks the lock, shoves the wagon inside and runs like hell. She's just out of sight when the bomb goes off, blowing trees into the air and setting everything on fire.
As all hell breaks loose, Annabelle slips into the facility and begins her descent into its heart.
Season Three
Michael
In Season Three, Annabelle will finally achieve the dream and bring Michael to life. But a secret of this magnitude will prove almost impossible to keep – from her lover, the US Government and her kids, who are finally, mercifully getting what they have been promised and what they need.
Annabelle will nearly be killed, but she will manage to steal the chip.
And then she’ll build Michael.
It will get increasingly harder as the scrutiny at work intensifies. There will be interrogations and alibis and an ever-growing complexity with Nico. Nico will grow more and more suspicious and fragile as the Admiral’s suspicions will come to center on him, guided subtly by Annabelle. But she will ready Michael’s body, layering latex over a pneumatic skeleton per her many detailed images.
She will also have to get home ready for him. She’ll Photoshop pics of family vacations that never occurred, paste herself into school functions she missed, create awards and trophies for the kids, order souvenirs from places never visited, and enlist the kids to make the art they never made when they were little.
And as she does all this, the kids will slip ever further away. Radia will find Ada’s gear and decide it’s her turn to be irresponsible. How much would it break Annabelle’s heart to see her 12 yr-old get high? To see Ada eat many bars of Xanax? To see Blaise sit alone at school every day, friendless and shouting about aliens and pretending to kill his classmates with his invisible blaster. Annabelle knows they are all on the edge, but she’s soooo close.
And she readies herself. She’ll get a professional haircut and buy new underwear, which will be depressing – she’s now eight years older than him. She’ll wonder why she cares, why she’s acting this way. Maybe she’s stunted. Maybe she wants to be a stupid, simple schoolgirl. Maybe that would be a lot easier.
And in the World, the global crisis will continue to escalate, compounded by the theft of the chip.
And then Michael will come home.
When he at last powers up, it will be everything the wonder couple ever dreamed – a joyous, weeping, lusty reunion and the start of their new lives.
The kids, of course, will freak out. And there will be so much lying to explain his absence and to cover for the family’s struggles that they will all be overwhelmed. But for a while it will work. Annabelle will break off the affair with Nico, explaining that her husband came home. He won’t take it well, but she won’t be able to care. She should. Nico will do exactly what he promised not to do – pry. He’ll begin to research her and investigate Michael’s disappearance and re-appearance.
Annabelle won’t realize, but we will, that she’s under surveillance almost everywhere she goes. Cameras will track her and the mics in her own devices record her conversations. Nico? The Admiral?
But the transformation of the family will beginning to really happen. Annabelle will credit Michael, not seeing that her presence is key. Her attention. Her love. Even Ada, who was inches from death or jail, will start to thaw. She will cover all the lies and problems, like the fact that Michael weighs five hundred pounds. And she’ll tweak Michael’s programming as they go – he forgot she was allergic to shellfish and nearly served her clam sauce, which might have killed her. But mostly, the plan will work perfectly and her life will be, at least on the surface, all she dreamed. Family dinners with laughter and intellectual discussions. Plans to resurrect their project and make a name for themselves as tech leaders. Asimov and Verne are mothballed and the family now does the chores on weekends. But the investigation at the naval base will not go away.
What you do in the dark will always come into the light.
A security conference – the result of the breech at the base – will be called and Annabelle will have to go. Michael is ready to handle things a home. The kids are adjusting. Blaise, in particular, has come to worship Michael. He wants to know everything about him and hates to let his dad out of his sight in case he gets lost again.
So, Annabelle will step off into a trap she doesn’t see coming and Michael will be left alone with the family. As he readies for bed, a pair of tiny eyes – Blaise’s – will watch from a hiding place as he pulls back his scalp and plugs a power cord into a socket in his skull. His eyes, usually a deep blue, will phase through a series of flashes and blinks, and then go blank. Blaise’s eyes will grow very round in horror.
Season Four
The Admiral and the Alien
In Season Four, Michael will appear to be working perfectly. But the kids will discover his true nature and, out of hurt and spite and mischief, take over his programming to have the dad they really want. And Michael will begin to change. Plugging into the information grid, he’ll spy on Annabelle, getting increasingly jealous and suspicious. And he finds he can manipulate everything – banking, the news, the military. He is the ghost in the machine. And with all of this power, immortality will begin to seem delicious. He will just need a mate.
Blaise says nothing about what he saw. He’s afraid and he doesn’t want to ruin things. Because if there is one thing Michael has learned by being dead, it's that you only live once. He's far more reckless than the original Michael was. And far more fun. There are trips to the mall and to the lake and all the things normal kids do with their normal dads when mom’s out of town. Except Michael buys a convertible.
And Annabelle’s marinating in the spa, relaxed for the first time in years. Hot stones, big glasses of wine, deep quiet. Until there's knock on the door. Nico is there, with the Admiral. It's a very polite interrogation and Annabelle is sincere and charming. The second they leave, though, she freaks out. How did they know she was here? Did they wait until they knew she had been drinking to arrive?
In a frenzy of coffee, concentrating through the alcohol in her brain, she takes out her laptop and all sorts of outboard gear, using deeply encrypted torrent servers as cover to try and find out just what the government knows about the explosion at the base. The kids call to check in and she makes up some crap about hot stone therapy as she hacks into CIA systems and searches incredibly complex code for clues. So, far she’s in the clear. She's running one last search when she finally just passes out in the chair.
At home, Michael is interviewing the kids separately, piecing together the years when he was gone. The stories are lovely, but the kids seem nervous. Details, he notices, don’t match. Michael is increasingly suspicious. But the conversations are relief for the kids, especially Ada, and the truth begins to emerge. Annabelle was a pretty lousy mom. And much of what she told Michael was a lie.
Blaise watches Michael plug in almost every night. Is he pleased that his dad is an alien? It is sort of like having a super-hero for a dad. But this night, he takes three hard drives from the dresser and runs a cable from his power port to the first one. Blaise’s image and voice appear on the monitor – he was recording their conversation. He recorded all of them. And now he’s putting all that information onto the hard drives, each of which has one of their names written on it. He’s collecting their memories, their facial expressions, the pitch of their voices - putting them into the machines. Suddenly Blaise is worried.
He doesn’t have a cell phone and there’s no landline, so he logs onto her school email to send her mom a note. He types in that Annabelle needs to come home. Daddy is not daddy.
Annabelle awakens and immediately checks her computer. But it isn't Blaise's email she sees - it's a warning banner that her customized detection software has picked up and her IP address may have been compromised. She slips the laptop in her robe and runs down the hotel stairs. Slipping through the breakfast crowd, ducking to avoid being recognized, she heads for the beach. She slips into the water, like she’s having a morning swim, the laptop hidden beneath the surface and swims out as far as she thinks she can. Far from shore, she hurls the computer even farther. She almost drowns on the swim back, then lies coughing in the surf as the early birds come to claim their beach chairs. She hurries into her robe and runs.
At the door of the conference she’s all smiles, if breathless and terrified. She puts her phone in the bin, passes through security, and enters. This is a classified meeting – no devices allowed. So Blaise gets no reply to his email. So, he wakes Ada and explains… that’s not our father. He’s an alien. He tells his sisters the story. Ada and Radia find this hilarious until Blaise starts to really freak out. They agree to check it out with him.
At the conference, Annabelle sits through the very detailed presentation on the espionage, treason, trespassing and terrorism charges being considered for the perpetrator of the attack on the base and the steps being taken to find the criminal. There are traces of code in the system suggesting that the software has been copied. There are discrepancies in the material quantities in the lab. Evidence is presented, questions are asked and Annabelle can see that they are getting close. All the while, Nico is trying to rekindle their affair, as though he has information and may use it as leverage. Annabelle shuts him down – they can’t do anything at all secret until this investigation’s over. Nico knows what this is really about – Michael. Nico hates that smug motherfucker.
At home, peering through the window are three sets of eyes, watching as their father peels back his hair and plugs the power cord into the little socket. His eyes do their thing. It’s everything the kids can do - even Ada - not to scream. Radia does let a tiny sound escape and for a beat, the kids are sure they're dead. But the alien doesn't seem to have heard.
The kids gather in Ada’s room. Scared to death, they figure that whatever secret mission their father went on must have gone terribly wrong and this thing was sent back in his place. Blaise wants to call the FBI, but Ada is sure nobody will believe them and Radia suspects they might already know. Why would they? So what, Blaise wonders, are they going to do?
Poor Michael is just making pancakes when Ada smashes him in the head with a baseball bat, knocking parts of the acrylic skull off and revealing the wiring inside. It's a surprisingly violent attack as the kids' years of pent-up rage come to the surface. Michael tries to explain, but they're relentless. Surely he could defeat them, but they're his kids - he can't hurt them. They beat the hell out of him and tie him up, ignoring his claims to be their father, his protestations of love.
At the conference, Annabelle gets increasingly nervous, especially when the Admiral starts describing typical means of espionage - like seduction. Nico is struck by this as well. Other clues include mysterious pasts, inconsistent relationships, humble lifestyles and a background in the sciences. Nico very pointedly asks her about Michael. What is that about? The Admiral seems to be talking directly to her. Is she imagining that? She starts to panic. She has to get out of here. She slips over to the food table. Cocktail shrimp. She eats one, then another and then a few more, then walks back over and sits next to Nico. She checks her watch.
Ada hits Michael’s head again and Radia reaches in the opening and deactivates him. Radia peers inside the bot's head at the incredible array of chips and sensors and pneumatic controls and… handwriting on little tags on the wires, there to make sure each is plugged into the right place. Familiar handwriting – Mom’s handwriting. Could it be? The Navy job, the stupid lawn-mowing robots, the secret book that never seemed to get written? No way. There is no way she built this thing. But obviously - she did.
When Annabelle’s allergy kicks in, it does so with a bang. She turns red, welts appear on her neck, her eyes go bloodshot and her breathing gets shallow and rasping. When she hits the floor, her face hits first and she bites deeply into her swollen tongue, which is choking her to death.
The kids realize that Mom's some kind of frickin' mad scientist who spent years down here building a replacement husband – instead of raising her kids. Now he’s a fucking babysitter while she’s off at a spa. All of her stories and photos with their "dad'" are as much bullshit as the ones she had them make up. This is the moment Radia breaks. “So, she can do this and she wouldn't even help me with that project for Mr. Owen?” Radia has fought for her, made excuses for her and compensated for her all of her life. Now she’s just a fucking liar who doesn’t give a shit about them. Well, Radia knows exactly what to do.
Radia's siblings are amazed to see her slowly and carefully repair the wiring she ripped out of the bot’s head. And then she powers it up and hacks into its O.S. It’s a simple protocol and not well-protected because why would it be? Like many very smart people, Mom lacks common sense. It takes Radia only minutes to figure out the password – Annabelle’s birthday. Duh. She pairs the bot to her phone. Holy shit – she finds the bot’s parameters, the carefully calibrated sets of priorities, desires and responses that Annabelle used to fine-tune Michael’s personality. Radia can now adjust them. What, she asks her brother and sister, would we like this stupid thing to do for us?
Season Five
Annabelle’s Monster
In Season Five, Annabelle will have to come clean with the kids to get Michael back. She also needs them on board because the noose is tightening. The government is now certain of her betrayal and is simply trying to prove it. And poor, jealous Nico is losing his mind. Michael, of course, has solutions for all of this. But Annabelle can’t let him commit the treason and murder he proposes. And when she discovers that he’s been recording and cataloging her and the kids in order to transfer her and the kids into mech bodies so they can live forever together, the question becomes – can she stop him?
Annabelle awakens in the hospital, intubated and hooked up to a dozen machines. The allergic reaction nearly killed her, but she's out of that conference room. She manages to grab her phone off the table. She checks her texts – nothing. She checks her email and is only interested in one – Blaise’s. She opens it – reads that ‘daddy is not daddy.’ Oh, fuck. But a newer one arrives. It says, “He’s Superdaddy! We are having fun. Hope you are, too. Blaise.” She calls Michael and indeed everything seems to be fine. But, of course, she’s hearing Ada’s words through Michael’s hacked voice module. Everything’s not fine.
Michael is now what the kids want – not what Annabelle wanted. This is particularly tasty for Ada, who has more reason than ever to rebel against her mother. She also now has the means of doing real damage and getting real street cred. Michael signs them out of school, buys them beer and takes them to R-rated movies. He lets Ada drive. He lets her friends crash at his house, then cleans up after they trash it. Her dad scores her medical marijuana. And Radia now wants a little taste of that. Blaise’s still very hurt that he lost his daddy, so the girls make the bot take him places and buy him things. Like puppies. Even after Annabelle gets home, they secretly abuse their robot. But moms are hard to fool and she just has a feeling one day and follows them to school. Of course, they don't go to school. They pile out of the car at the paintball field, reeking of weed. She runs up and furiously tries to override Michael with her phone, assuming she's made some kind of programming error. The kids enjoy her frustration for a while, but this - coupled with the threat of going to prison for espionage and murder - starts to crush Annabelle and she looks like she's about to die of panic. Radia finally blurts out that the password isn’t her birthday anymore and it all comes tumbling down.
In the basement, Annabelle shows them old videos of her and Michael, laughing and goofing around and talking seriously. Then she goes into the backup discs and dials up digital Michael. They seem exactly that same, she explains, because they are – it is actually him in there. She didn't spend all that time just making some guy - she made the love of her life. She made their dad. So, she’s going to just restore the robot and everything’s going to be fine. But Radia has a question – what if our real dad comes home? Before she can answer, they see on the security monitor that several Navy vehicles are screeching up onto the lawn. She says the kids have to go get rid of them. They refuse. Where is our real dad? The Admiral is at the door – she has to tell them. She says the original version of their dad is dead and if anyone outside of this room ever finds out – she’ll go to prison for it. The Admiral bangs on the door.
The investigators are polite and insist that this is all routine. But Nico’s there and seems to be guiding the Admiral. This is obviously personal for Nico. The house is inspected closely, nearly exposing the lab. The kids are interviewed separately, as are Michael and Annabelle about their family. Due to Annabelle's diligence, everything lines up, even the story of Michael's amazing reappearance after five years in the jungle and as a kidnap victim. The investigators have no idea, when they speak to Annabelle and Michael, that they have both the thief and the spoils in front of them. Nor do they realize the witnesses are seated politely at the table, watching their mother lie. Watching her break the law. When the Admiral and Nico and the Military Police leave, Annabelle is safe, for the moment, though she knows it can’t last.
She tells them that they have to leave the country. Now. Like, start packing. But Michael is going nowhere. Annabelle, he says, is no longer making the decisions. He understands she was under a lot of pressure, but she has failed on too many fronts. He knows she lied about the kids' lives. He knows about the affair with Nico, which may have been expedient, but is causing trouble now. So, he's taking over, for everyone's benefit. And the first order of business is to stay put. He can make sure that they're never caught. Annabelle doesn't believe it. Why, he asks, does she think the Admiral bought the story about his disappearance and re-emergence? Because he’s already read several articles on line and in press archives detailing it. How did those articles get in those archives? Michael put them there.
Annabelle has no choice but to play along. Michael adds loads of money to their accounts. They move into a much larger house. With a pool. There are no more chores – a maid and gardener take over. For a while, it all works beautifully. Annabelle, of course, is growing increasingly nervous and is getting scared of Michael as he becomes more controlling and arrogant. He has, it seems, won. But he’s not the Michael she loved and she’s afraid for her kids. She tries to hack into him, but his ability to develop his own security is far too good. She's helpless, too, when he begins to frame Nico for the attack and theft at the base to throw the military off Annabelle's trail.
She becomes scared to death of him, but what can she do? She did too good a job making him legitimate - the fingerprints, the story of his disappearance, the subtle aging of his skin and the slight grey in his hair. If she tried to tell someone, her story will sound completely insane. And if she did convince someone and Michael was defeated, would it be better? The fact that all of her crimes and horrible decisions were born of love will mean nothing to the world. She’s a traitor, a spy, a murderer and a horrible, neglectful mother. All because of Michael. She would kill him if she could, but he’s every bit as smart as she is and the kids are always with him. There is only one person who might be able to help her.
Season Six
National Security
In a desperate attempt to stop Michael, Annabelle will confess to the authorities and ask for their help in destroying him. It becomes a global technical and political crisis with Michael in charge of all information and Annabelle reduced to whispers and secrets shared on scraps of paper. She will manage, with the help of the kids, to destroy him. But, she hasn’t realized that he exists on servers and drives all over the world. That body she built for him was just and input/output device – one of many he has made in secret. In another one, built more like a weapon than just a man, he finds Annabelle, on the run with the kids, and kills her. At once, she reappears in a tech body that he has made for her, her personality installed and ready to go. She, like him, is overwhelmed with the power and the possibilities of immortality. They walk off together, wondering what age is best for each kid to be forever.
The Admiral believes her, all right. He has a deep background in replicant technology and in global affairs and he takes this even more seriously than she does. Here she was trying to make a family and what she's done is make the single greatest - and most dangerous advancement in human history. To him, this is no different than the atomic bomb. The government - any government - is the worst place in the world to hide a secret. They have to get rid of it and convince everyone again that this is impossible.
Their first scheme is just to take Michael out. Quick and simple before he has time to notice any activity. Obviously, he's designed to notice everything. So Annabelle has to pretend to be on board, laugh at his jokes, sleep with him, make plans. But subtle little things leak out. Did he notice that she's spending more time with the kids? That she's talking about philosophy with them? Preparing them...
The Admiral has created an alibi for her at work. He's in a van, she's in an idling car in disguise. Michael comes out of the market, following his pattern, steps across the street. Annabelle puts the car in gear and floors it. But when it’s half a second away, he leaps out of the way. He knew she was coming. She wrecks the car and he shoves her across the seats and gets behind the wheel.
Now she's his prisoner. Back and forth they go, her trying to destroy him and him gleefully defeating her. She will, he's convinced, see that he's right.
She tries to turn the kids, but her arguments are too sophisticated and frightening. His are basic - he's cooler and can give them anything. And it's easy to convince them that she's instable. Eventually, he kicks her out of the house.
She and the Admiral have one last, great plan. He has access to a drone program and all she has to do is lure Michael somewhere remote. There is a danger that she'll be hit, but it's a risk she's willing to take.
After weeks of planning and lies, she gets him alone in the desert under the ruse of a broken down car. She sends the signal to the Admiral and engages Michael, waiting for the drone strike - but it never comes. So she shoots him. Over and over, blasting holes in her creation, wiping his face off of his skull. It's done. But only for a moment.
A new Michael climbs out of his car, laughing. She has underestimated herself and him. He can’t be killed. He's no longer in just that one graphite and latex container - he's made many of them. And that's just the tip of it. He has uploaded himself on every server he could find. He’s everywhere. He’s in NASA, he’s in Google, he’s in her phone. That’s how he knew the drone strike was coming, and how he knew the coordinates to send to to kill the Admiral instead. By the way, he tells her, the Admiral was lying to her. He had already made arrangements to sell the technology and had four countries bidding.
Annabelle begs him to let her go, to destroy himself. Refusing to face his death nearly ruined her. She wants to get old. She wants to change and grow and wonder and be part of life, not apart from it. By destroying death, she says, they’ve destroyed life. What has his immortality done for them? It’s made her do things that disgust her. And it’s changed him so much she no longer loves him. What makes a life precious? Or a moment? It's precious because it's fleeting. Why would we live well if we didn’t have to? Why would we care for ourselves or for anyone else? Why worry about the planet? No oxygen or clean water? No problem. Removing all consequences leads to a life of carelessness and boredom, which Michael displays in spades. Michael surprises her and says that he reached the same conclusion. A race of creatures that never die is a disaster. But... just one immortal family? Who better? They're smart and kind and forward-thinking.
Annabelle refuses. But, of course, he knew she would. No matter. He’s had, he reminds her, a lot of time to think. And plan. When she passed out that first night they were reunited, it wasn’t just the wine. And while she was unconscious, he measured and molded and catalogued every inch of her. He’s been recording her every word, every phrase, every reaction, every choice since before he died. As she's realizing what his plan is, the car door opens and her duplicate gets out. She will, he says, have all of your desires and quirks and memories. Except, of course, this one. And then he smothers her and sets her body on fire, just as she did to him all those years ago.
At home in their secluded mansion by the sea, the two perfect parents have dinner with their three wonderful children, just as Annabelle had always dreamed. Their kids' laughter and decisions and voices and gestures are all dutifully recorded on their parents' drives. As soon as Ada is finished growing, she'll get her new body. And then Radia. But Blaise is so cute at this age, they might keep him this way forever.