michael-dean-k/

I really disliked S7 E1 of Black Mirror, not because it was depressing, but because it’s terrible science fiction. I never expected BM to be hard sci-fi (where it gets into all the technical and nerdy specifics)—that would alienate its Netflix audience. But at the very least, it should be believable.

There’s probably a middle ground where SOMEONE on the team thinks through the realistic development of technology, so that the writers have some constraints around character and plot development. But this whole episode was simplified to the point of being cheeky.

Of course, companies will use deceptive tactics to push you to upgrade. But it's ridiculous watching Rashida Jones' mind get paused to spew ads without her realizing. Really? They mapped Verizon salesperson antics onto something as invasive as a BCI, which would never be so explicit.

Idea for Timehole (the non-linear novel I'll never write): So there’s a classical pianist in the 2040s who refuses to go into a “time hole” to write music. Basically, there is a headband you can wear that shoots acoustical signals to trigger lucid-dream-like simulations (inspired by Morpheus), where you can experience an hour in a minute (extreme time dilation). So all these musicians go into time holes for hundreds of simulated years and became savant-like, routinely. This classical pianist, the protagonist, is the last analog musician. This is all background context.

Suddenly, there is a UAP phenomenon, something like a first-contact experience, but they send us angelic/bizarre music, and the human race interprets them as wanting a response. The UN General (or whoever is in charge) offers the protagonist the ability to write the species-defining song, if he’s willing to go into a timehole. The idea is, even though he’s not as good as the “timehole composers,” he is the last classically trained maestro, and so his brain is structured differently, and if he were to go into a time hole, he would produce something more profound than the average person who goes in.

So he caves and he does it, and it’s this weird music writing odyssey, and somehow he ascends to a level of music-making where he can be bend reality/time. The ultimate twist is that the UAP phenomenon wasn’t an alien species, it was the musician himself breaking through reality from his timehole from the future.