A man wakes hooded and hogtied in a white processing facility for people who’ve misused illegal time-travel — and can no longer trust his own memory.
Kafka rewritten as a Primer-grade time-crime interrogation.
The story
Mike Collins is dragged hooded into a stark white facility and thrown into a holding room with Parker Hoyt, a long-term detainee who speaks about “the Rift” — an illegal time-circumvention technology — in half-remembered, dreamlike fragments. Both men are losing their memories of ordinary spacetime, retaining only fragments of the timespace they’ve skipped through and the processing facility itself. Mike is pulled next into interrogation with Gray, an “evaluator” whose questions dissolve into impenetrable physics-speak before circling back to what, exactly, Mike saw when he looked into the Rift. The Blister is a noir interrogation dressed as science fiction: a crime that unmakes the criminal’s ability to remember committing it.
Coverage — plot points
- Mike is hauled hooded and restrained into a white processing facility.
- He meets Parker, a long-term detainee who’s lost his memory to repeated Rift use.
- Both describe glimpsing something vast and intelligent inside the Rift’s threshold.
- Mike is moved to interrogation with Gray, an “evaluator” probing for what he actually saw.
“You’re skipping.” — “I—don’t know what you mean.” — “Did you see the whirlpool?”
“You’re like a needle, skipping out of the grooves of time’s record.”
Read the sample
Below is the existing draft. Scroll to read, or download the PDF.
Seeking representation, or a home in a shorts / anthology package. Complete script available on request.