Time Bomb — Day 93

Genre: Science Fiction / Thriller

Plot:  It's a beautiful Summer day on a Long Island beach when a fully clothed body is spotted bobbing in the surf. As a lifeguard dives in and drags the drowned man in to shore a crowd gathers around him. When he is flipped over, the crowd is aghast to see that the man is dressed head to toe in the uniform of a Nazi SS soldier. And even more shocking, he is alive—though unconscious. The police are called to escort the ambulance to the hospital. 

At the hospital, the man wakes up in terror, screaming in German. He is restrained and the FBI is called in to assess just what kind of fanatic the town has on its hands. At first, the local FBI agents get nowhere, since the man refuses to reveal anything but his name, rank and serial number in German. This goes on for days. Until finally, one day, when the prisoner is allowed to walk to the window of his hotel room and sees a medical helicopter landing nearby. He collapses in despair and is finally ready to talk.

A German-speaking FBI agent from Wisconsin, who is also an expert hostage negotiator, is brought in to debrief the troubled man. The German begins to tell a fantastic story. He was the senior SS political officer on a German U-Boat tasked with a top secret mission. Launched in the Spring of 1945, his submarine carried an experimental weapon: A bomb prototype that was capable of tearing at the fabric of time itself.

With the allies closing in on Berlin, and the German Reich certain to fall, Hitler ordered the sub on a top secret suicide mission. They were to cross the Atlantic, take their U-Boat up the Potomac, as near to Washington D.C. as possible, surface and detonate the time bomb. The effects were theoretical, but if the bomb worked, it would essentially tear a 500 square mile wide hole in time, and transform the landscape and everything on it to that of a previous era. Washington D.C. would be wiped off the map, replaced by a landscape of pristine marshlands, as it would have existed thousands of years ago. But as the sub approached the U.S. coastline near New York, it was detected by a Coast Guard patrol boat. The patrol boat attacked the sub with depth charges, and the German crew, in a panic, detonated the bomb.

The next thing the German claims to remember is waking up in the hospital several days ago. The German says that when he awoke, obviously still alive, he assumed that the bomb had failed. But over several days in the hospital he began to marvel at the advanced nature of the U.S. medical equipment. And when he finally looked out the window and saw the helicopter and the modern cars and world, he realized the truth. The bomb worked, and yet, his mission has failed. The bomb has somehow has thrown him into a future where Germany has indeed lost the war. 

The man is clearly some kind of nut. He is sent to a maximum-security psychiatric ward while the authorities try to figure out what to do with him. The FBI agent heads home, and the German goes into the purgatory of the psychiatric prison system.

Several weeks later, a series of strange events start to take place. A small fleet of fishing boats disappear as they are heading home to port in Nantucket, Massachusetts. They vanish on calm seas, without a cloud in the sky.  The next day, a jumbo jet disappears on approach to JFK airport.  No crash, no landing, just gone. As the North East and America begin to panic that a stealthy terrorist attack might be underway, something completely impossible happens. A small seaside town on the New Jersey coast disappears. In it's place, is 500 acres of pristine forests and grassland. 

Our FBI agent realizes that—as impossible as it seems—he may, in fact, know what is happening. The German must have been telling the truth. He returns to the psychiatric ward to take custody of the SS officer as his prisoner.

The German has heard the news and is ecstatic. How foolish they all were in 1945!, he gloats to the FBI agent. If you are going to set off a time bomb of course there's no way to predict WHEN its destructive effects will ripple out. Though the Reich may have fallen, Hitler's revenge is being realized nonetheless! 

The strange events continue to occur, causing panic nation-wide. The federal government and the local authorities are completely overwhelmed, both with the bizarre "attacks" themselves, and the panicked response of the American populace, as civil society begins to collapse and people flee in all directions. The FBI agent realizes that he is on his own. It is up to him to do whatever is necessary to reverse the effect of the Nazi time bomb, and he can only do so with the cooperation—or coercion—of the fanatical Nazi in his custody.

Along the way, the FBI agent will chase many clues and recruit allies: it turns out another German "lunatic" had washed up on the shores of Long Island 30 years ago. After 10 years in a mental hospital, he was finally set free when deemed to not be a danger to himself or others. The man was an ensign on the same U-Boat, thrown onto American shores a few decades earlier than his SS superior officer. Since his release, he has made a life and a family for himself in America, and although he knows little about the nature of the bomb, he becomes an ally to our FBI agent and tries to help him "break" the SS officer, his former commander.

Together, they track down a living descendant of the SS officer—his daughter—and rush her to the states.  She was 2 years old when he left for his suicide mission, and she's now 71. Can she help them?  Will she even believe the fantastical story, and that this man is her long-dead father?

As the destruction to the East Coast mounts, the FBI agent goes to greater and greater extremes... and as his desperation grows he must decide how far he is willing to go to outsmart—or break—the SS officer, and thwart Nazi Germany's final, apocalyptic act of war.

Life After Life — Day 92

Genre: Drama

Inciting Incident:  Due to shocking—but circumstantial—evidence, a gentle young man is convicted of a grisly murder that he didn't commit. He is sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Act I:  In prison, the other inmates steer clear of him initially, respectfully afraid of the killer they believe him to be. Our inmate's high profile case catches the attention of a young female defense attorney, who becomes convinced of his innocence and decides to fight to free him on appeal.

Act I turning point:  After some time in general population, the other prisoners recognize our inmate's gentle nature, and realize that he is probably innocent. One of the biggest prison gang leaders beats him up to prove to the rest of the prison that the "killer" in their midst is a paper tiger.

Act II, part 1:  Our inmate is in hell. He has become a pinata and a whipping boy for all to wail on. Everyone who once feared him now exact their revenge upon him in unspeakable ways. The only ray of kindness in his life is his attorney. Their connection has deepened into an unspoken but intense love.

Midpoint: After several years of escalating abuse, our inmate can take no more and decides to take his own life. But his suicide attempt is interrupted by his biggest tormenter. As the bully cuts him down from his homemade noose, our inmate goes berserk. He kills his tormenter in the most brutal fashion imaginable.

Act II, part 2:  There were no witnesses to the murder, but the swagger and new found fire in our inmate's eyes let everybody know that a score has been settled, and a transformation has occurred. Our inmate realizes that the only way to survive in this brutal place for the rest of his life is to become the animal he was accused of being, and so he does just that. He cuts off all ties with his attorney / love interest, and gets down to the serious business of terrifying the general population into submission. Though he has seemingly killed off his own humanity, he can not afford to mourn the loss. He vows never to be weak or prayed upon again.

Act II turning point:  The attorney wins the case on appeal with evidence that clearly exonerates our inmate.  After 5 years, our inmate is declared innocent and wrongly imprisoned. He is set free. 

Act III:  After five years in hell, and his transformation into an actual killer, freedom and re-entry into the real world is the worst punishment our inmate could ever imagine. The devil's bargain he made to survive in prison now hangs upon him life an anvil. Worst of all, no one outside the prison realizes what he did while inside. Tormented by a news media that elevates him to sainthood, and the love of the honest woman who set him free, he must struggle to reclaim some of the goodness he once had, and atone for his sins—or else be consumed by the imprisonment he never deserved, and the man that he never wanted to become.