 | Retroactive |
Had this idea for a story during the night, when i was partially dreaming, partially awake, which really makes the best setting for cognitive creativity. Your mind has the boundaries of normal thought and imagination removed, but your logic is present enough to keep it all in order. Anyway, I digress.
The main character is the narrator, even though I criticize that so often, it must be done. He’s a ~30 something guy, and everything around him, life as he knows it is in reverse. Everyone and everything is moving chronologically and silently backwards. It’s as if someone hit the rewind button on his life, but he’s not there. It wasn’t always like this, he lead a normal life, up until something traumatic happened, like his wife dying while giving birth. So as his life is moving in reverse, if he interacts with life to change it, he gets to participate in "forward life" again. So, he likes to hang out at morgues, funeral homes, and read the newspaper, to see what happened, and then he can go change it. As an less dramatic example, and maybe how he finds out this ability, he’s walking down the street, sees a girl trip over the leash of a guy walking his dog, so as everything is moving backwards, he stops to pet the dog and delays the owner from tripping the girl, and all of a sudden, it’s forward life, and he’s talking to the owner and maybe even he makes a comment that the girl hears like, "These dogs are so excited! You better hold them back before the end of tripping these beautiful women walk by."
So he becomes a superhero of sorts, but he’s not getting any recognition because he’s alone. So, pulling in "Early edition" (remember that TV show) and maybe even a Quantum Leap (since he’s zapped back to reverse life) story possibilities, but the circumstances are unique. But there’s a lot you can do with that set up, add some humor with him liking to just sit at home sometimes and watch movies in fast forward. You can throw in some religion with him asking what his purpose is, is he supposed to be saving lives, did he make 1 mistake and he’s getting a redo, it’s just taking a lot of time to get there? And then what happens when he reaches his own birth? He’ll be aging like normal. I have a few ideas, but obviously I can’t give them out here…
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