Thesis World

In the near future medical technology has had a significant breakthrough allowing us to map every detail of a brain. This led to the creation of the Connectome. A digital world where minds are uploaded to once someone dies. The Connectome grows exponentially while the physical world crumbles due to the climate crisis. Eventually, nuclear war breaks out, destroying it and dramatically damaging the Connectome. Years later, it now houses less than 5% of the population it once had, and all inhabitants are stuck in a metropolitan city. When servers run out of energy or their facility collapses, random sections of the city and its inhabitants disappear. Our story has three shorts that look at people's lives in the Connectome, how they respond to crises, and how they find meaning in this suffering.

Second Short

We follow an older woman named Bella as she goes about her day preparing for something, eventually leading to her with a bag in the middle of the city. Interspaced are shots that take place in a blank room. Projected onto the wall and edited in are old pictures and videos of her. They are from film reels, VHS tapes, film and digital photos, videos, etc. While we see all of this we hear a conversation between a detective and her younger sister Amanda. The detective is questioning her on Bella’s life before she joined the connectome and during. How she volunteered for the Connectome project during the first wave of human trials, her fascination with coding, why she chose to remain in an older body, and their family that’s been wiped out. The detective intersplices this with some questions verging on hostility about Amanda’s life as well. She got in because of her sister joining the trials and they had a falling out due to Bella's increasingly pessimistic views on the world. He reads out a letter Bella wrote to her. It describes a thought she had that she couldn’t shake. She had joined the Connectome in its infancy, when many of the trials were unsuccessful and much more invasive. Right before major regulations on how they could treat the minds as many had gone through what was described as existential torture in order to fine tune the system. What if she was one of those minds? What if by trying to escape death she was put in hell? That would mean everyone else in the Connectome was in on it or they had no idea the world they were stuck in. She tells her sister that she has to save herself, but the least she can do is help as many people as possible before she does. She couldn’t bring herself to help her, but hopes she sees things her way after she reads her letter. At this point we see Bella in the city with a bag. She looks nervous until she brings out some chocolate and takes a bite. It calms her as she takes a small button out of her bag. That’s when the detective reveals Bella had made a small device that syphoned an incredible amount of power and set it off in the city causing a sudden server failure. It caused the area and everyone in it to be wiped. We see Bella press the button and as she does we can see the server room the Connectome is on. Some lights on the server racks suddenly turn off.