Remember “Rollerball”?

If I am going to be unable to sleep, as it seems, perhaps I ought to do something at least minimally useful. It is at least three hours before any time that might be even moderately sensible, tolerable, for being up and about unless one happens to be still up and about. (You do understand the difference)

There is a bit of a story idea. It is possible that it is already too attenuated from having been put back away in the back of my mind. The area is dry and dusty, and dreams left there too long unattended lose definition and grow pale holes.

Still, before I forget altogether:

It would be in context of a story of several people–separate, sketched lightly–who learn in different ways of the plans of a group of people to produce a new television game show. Something different from anything ever to have been done before. These people–the brother and sister Sean and Michaele Rhoden-Cohen and the rather mysterious Ephram Gray– have developed a most miraculous device which visualizes thought, shows memory. Live and in clear and recognizable pictures. They bought the idea from a medical research group that had been unable to afford to produce so much as a prototype, or the machine would have been acquired by the government for its intelligence applications. The group has not totally passed that idea by as a potential source of revenue some time in the future, instead, however they are choosing to narrow down the focus of the device’s application to something which can be used as a form of entertainment.

The so-called Limbic Projector, which neither projects nor is in any way connected with the Limbic system, is paired with a computer program which is designed to be able to extrapolate probable alternative outcomes from individual choices. An elaborate feedback manipulation connection between the two mechanical halves allows the subject to experience a past which never occurred, in which he, so to speak, goes down “the road not taken” for some small distance.

It has been shown, although with a limited sample to base the results upon, that the great majority of alternate choices would make no real mark on a person’s life. Even some of the most dramatic events grow from the same probability which produced the present reality, and inertia even in this situation is a force that cannot be ignored. The leopard does not grow stripes by choosing to attend MIT instead of Stanford. Not normally. Rarely, however, an option , a change, a small and by appearance insignificant choice is so powerful in its rightness and in its timing that the future which the program foresees takes on a life of its own. It is potentially REAL.

The object of the game is to be the person whose alternative life choice is one of those.

The prize: the possibility of “reliving” a past that never occurred.

There are some serious problems with the machine and with the individuals. The question becomes one of definition of reality and desirability of change. There is also the ethical dilemma, a side-problem in this context, of mining Alternativity of its possible discoveries and inventions.

Whatcha think? Do you see a possibility?