Original subtitles

In early 1914, a spiritualist cinematographer

from the Supernormal Picture Society of London

joined the Royal Expedition to the Antarctic.

His name was James Maker - also known as "Hive" Maker.

James 'Hive' Maker hoped to photograph evidence

of life...after death.

The Spring of 1915 found James Hive Maker in France

where gas warfare had begun at the Battle of Ypres.

Hive Maker photographed the reaction to the new threat.

Each day's batch of film

brought him closer to his goal

of recording the moving spirits of the dead.

The Supernormal Picture Society taught

that the dead live near to us

but in an unknown world.

This world could be made visible by the cinematographer

who could see through the haze of our world...

...to the darkness beyond.

To the Supernormal cinematographer

the ghost was a spiritual radium in decay

which could stain photographic film.

It lived in the land of the dead.

Hive Maker wrote that he imagined this to be a place of dense vegetation

where the souls of the dead lived as small floating lights

Hive Maker believed

that someday these lights would swarm into our world

to join the living.

In the Summer of 1916,

James Hive Maker returned to his home and business -

a bee farm north of London.

to supervise the work

and check on his hives.

A telegram had warned Hive Maker

of a new disease among British Black bees.

To prevent possible ruin,

Hive Make hoped to purchase an experimental stock

of specialty bees from Mesopotamia.

He had heard that these special bees were both plague-proof

and producers of an unusually clear honey.

If the experiment was successful,

he would replace his entire stock.

In London that summer,

the telegraph company had begun to modernize its operation.

As a result, Ella Spiralum

lost her job as a telephone operator.

Spiralum herself was an electrical inventor

who dreamed of developing a means to transmit moving pictures

through the telephone.

Ella Spiralum was the half-sister of James 'Hive' Maker.

Through 'Hive' Maker,

Ella found work as a photographic medium at the Supernormal Picture Society.

Each Sunday,

ghosts would appear in a s�ance in Tavistock Square

to be photographed with the living

by Ella and her special camera.

Often, the ghosts spoke to Ella.

One talkative ghost had died in an auto accident.

This ghost was the dead wife

of a Hungro-Egyptian man who attended the s�ances.

This sad gentleman

was the charming bee scientist,

Zoltan Abbassid.

Ella discovered that Zoltan

knew her half-brother, James 'Hive' Maker.

It was Zoltan Abbassid who had brought Mesopotamian bees to England.

Abbassid had discovered the bees near Basra,

in the south of Mesopotamia.

In the Fall of 1916, the bee plague stuck Hive Maker's farm.

The British bees began to die.

Their breathing tubes infested

by parasite mites.

The Mesopotamian bees flourished,

and quickly took root

in the empty hives of the dead bees.

At that moment, a sudden love grew

between Ella Spiralum and Zoltan Abbassid.

The two were married in early winter.

For the honeymoon, Zoltan took his new wife to America

to see the cowboys.

They stopped in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

I live in Alamogordo with my wife, Melissa

at the edge of the army's Deseret Test Facility.

My name is Jacob Maker.

'Hive' Maker is my grandfather.

I inherited my bees from him.

I didn't keep them for the honey.

I just like to watch them.

Melissa and I were related.

'Hive' Maker's half-sister, Ella

was Mellisa's grandmother.

Mellisa and I met in Alamogordo

while we were working on a training simulator for the shuttle.

When the project was finished, we got married.

Mellisa stayed on the shuttle as part of the technical support group.

I was reassigned to another part of the company.

We still went to work together...

but I felt uneasy since my reassignment.

There was something in the air,

maybe my eyes weren't very good.

That had to do with the job.

I spent a lot of time in front of the screen

in that first flight simulation

right on the side of the mountain above town.

I was assigned

to military systems

where we built weapons systems trainers,

making sure that everything was as real as possible.

I didn't really understand what was going on...

until the first time it happened to me.

One afternoon,

when I went out to the backyard

to open up my hives...

...when I was among my Mesopotamian bees...

I always thought about how things had changed.

When my sight came back,

I was closing up the hive.

I'd gone someplace familiar, but I couldn't remember where.

I must have spent several hours with the bees.

When Melissa came out to talk,

it was almost time for dinner.

That evening, Melissa and I watched the shuttle on television.

We made love that night...

...for the last time.

I usually flew from the start of the day.

My specific assignment was the Army's integrated air battle mission simulator,

where several pilots could fly at once over a common landscape.

I was a programmer

in charge of writing the code that simulated target acquisition.

It was up to me to make sure the gun sight displays worked.

The day after my strange experience at the hive,

a thought came to me

in the middle of an explosion.

I remembered another strange experience with the bees.

Only the week before,

I'd gone out after dinner

and as I opened the hive,

I knew that something was wrong.

There were voices

INSIDE the hive.

When I awoke,

I was watching the bees.

I realized that I didn't really understand my job -

there were things I had to do,

but I didn't really know what they were.

So I went home early,

leaving Melissa at work.

"I discovered Pluto about 4pm on the 18th of February.

Pluto seemed to be the most logical name.

There weren't many good mythological names left.

And you may not realize that

that the fissionable element plutonium is named for the planet, Pluto."

I was drawn to the bees...

I wanted to be in the dark again.

When the dark came,

I was able to stay awake.

I waited for something to change.

I began to travel...

I arrived...at a patch of land

hanging in the darkness.

It resembled the place of my birth.

I was born

on July 16,

1945

in the house of my dead grandfather.

A place known as the Garden of Eden

near Abilene, Kansas.

James 'Hive' Maker left England in 1919 to invent this place.

Concrete trees bordered the property.

Up in the concrete trees, where the concrete people.

On one side of the house

were the twin brothers:

Cain the Plowman, who had a lot of fixed ideas

and his brother Abel.

When I was a child,

Cain killed his brother Abel.

After that

God put an "X" on Cain's forehead.

in order to protect him from vengeance.

Whoever killed Cain would die thirteen times.

I read this riddle in my grandfather's diary which I found in the library.

After that, I went for a walk.

I couldn't go beyond the perimeter of the acre.

So I went indoors.

I watched the people in the trees...

and Cain...

as he left for another planet.

I decided that I didn't want to understand what had happened.

I went to bed just as the sun was setting.

Melissa wasn't home yet.

The next day at work, I felt especially sensitive

to what was happening inside the machines.

I could feel the weapons

and the targets.

Inside the targets

I could feel that there were souls.

I was leaving my old self behind.

That afternoon, I could feel the darkness around me.

I was on the edge of a journey.

That night as I watched television,

it occurred to me that the soul of a person could fragment and decay

like one of 'Hive' Maker's ghosts.

I was lost...

The dead were in the sky.

I was their target.

They wanted me.

I knew that my suit would protect me.

I didn't want to tell Melissa what was happening to me.

I was glad for the everyday routine,

but I knew that I would soon have to make a decision.

I separated from the ground...

I was a weapon.

Our battlefields were prepared for us by the Defense Mapping Agency.

Every tape was a square of real landscape.

I could feel those places -

there were people there.

To hit a simulated target was to secretly prepare murder against the real target.

Eventually, there would be real ghosts.

I had to decide now.

I was on a mission.

I turned off the radar, and headed towards the moon.

The dead had attacked me.

Now I would attack THEM.

I was protected.

They wanted me dead,

but I would kill them before they killed me.

I spent the night at a motel.

The next morning

I visited some friends at the National Solar Observatory in the mountains.

We watched the clouds on television.

Then I went home.

I wasn't a killer...

I was a beekeeper.

There was only one way I could go.

I wanted to use the bees

to go back to the Garden of Eden.

The bees were waiting for me.

They pierced the side of my head.

Through this hole, they inserted a mirrored crystal.

I had discovered television among the bees.

Through the television, I could read my grandfather's diary

at the Garden of Eden.

Ella Spiralum and Zoltan Abbassid returned from New Mexico the next Spring.

Strangely, the Mesopotamian bees had multiplied over the Winter.

The hives were filled with their clear honey.

James 'Hive' Maker never harvested as early as he did that year.

The colonies were so crowded, everyday there was a new swarming.

Hive Maker followed lines of Mesopotamian bees

away from the farm, and found wild colonies in the trees

and caves of the surrounding countryside.

That Spring,

Ella Spiralum began work on a device

that would allow the dead to travel to our world.

She combined her brother's techniques of ectoplasmic cinematography

with her knowledge of electrical telephony.

She called the device, the electric telescope.

Spinning discs scanned mourners left behind by the dead,

changing their pictures to sounds

which were transmitted by telephone wires.

The receiver changed the sounds to moving pictures of the dead

which could float free and alive...

in the air.

During all this activity

the bee scientist, Zoltan Abbassid,

conducted his own experiments

on the Mesopotamian bees

he'd provided 'Hive' Maker.

I could see further through the television,

out to the Deseret Test Facility,

where weapons were flying through the air.

They were killing each other.

It was up to me to kill someone...

...that was where I had to go.

The X-shaped gun sight floated before my eyes...

I was Cain.

That was my mark.

God would protect me from my victims.

Melissa called from work.

I told her that I was going to the Deseret Test Facility

to look at the Army's implementation of the Airbattle Mission Simulator.

I had no idea how long I would be gone.

The test facility was 60 miles away

through the desert.

Deseret was the main American testing ground for guided

as well as semi-intelligent weapons.

The facility was slightly larger than Rhode Island.

There was always haze around the main post area.

That had reassured me right away.

THIS was a better place for me.

They were using my work to solve problems

with a vision-guided missile system

that they were testing for one of their contractors.

I found the work disturbing.

I had the strong feeling that I should go out to the range.

That I should be with the weapons.

I rented a small place not far from the base.

I started taking morning walks in the desert.

All this time,

the bee television was active inside me.

I received pictures from the bees.

They showed me how weapons died every day.

At the end of the day,

every night in the trailer park,

the bees told me about the new world

where they had settled and formed a new nation.

It was the land of the dead.

The bee television showed me that place

where the radiant souls

of living spirits

split into innumerable pieces

forming beautiful patterns that were their new bodies

and at the same time a language.

It was the language Cain brought with him

when he fled the Garden of Eden.

The thought of this new world excited me.

My walks became longer.

I often found myself 15 or 20 miles down-range

still full of energy.

My favorite stopping place was the launch site monument

where the Army had tested Nazi rockets.

On the bee television,

I could see that this is where

the Moon and the Earth were joined.

All around this place,

semi-intelligent weapons were trying to escape the Earth

hoping for a new life elsewhere.

When I was away from the ground,

the bee television became even clearer.

I could lose myself in the images

and become a weapon myself,

rising through the air.

My destination

was the Moon.

That's where the dead lived.

I always enjoyed visiting the moon.

The dead were always quiet until I started to leave.

That's when they spoke.

They spoke to me

...as bees.

They showed me a line

that I would have to follow through the darkness.

It led to a place

hidden in the desert

where they were waiting for me.

I would have to follow this bee line

out to the test range.

That's where the weapons were.

They were leaving around the clock.

No one on base seemed to wonder

what happened to the missiles that never came back.

But I knew that they had become flying saucers,

and that I could join them

if I wanted

and become one of them.

And so it was,

that carrying only the bee television and my own thoughts,

that I walked out to the desert.

As I walked, the bee tv showed me the sights of past

or future explosions.

I walked for many hours, engrossed by what I saw.

But eventually, I awoke.

I was afraid.

I could see the dead, shaped like letters of the alphabet.

They danced for me.

The bee tv appeared among them

I was traveling in the right direction.

I woke on my feet,

heading north.

Less than an hour later,

I came upon an unfinished mud building.

It was a library in-progress

for the Russian Orthodox monks of St. Anthony.

I met Father Bessarian.

He told me that there were demons in the desert.

Father Bessarian also told me

that bees lived in the historical marker at Trinity site

where the Army had tested the first plutonium bomb.

That was 40 miles to the north.

The next morning found me at White Sands,

a great stretch of pulverized gypsum.

The main ingredient in wallboard.

Out of the haze, a giant floating light appeared.

Its body was a poem, written in the language of Cain.

Here was a missile that had left the Earth, and returned to touch me.

The desert became the past.

The dead marched across the sands to reach me.

Their shadows crossed my face,

and I began to cry.

The sky opened...

I could see the darkness.

I wanted to take a picture,

but all I could do

was dance.

That's when the bees arrived,

riding on broken fragments of time.

They flattened the sands,

and built a room for me on stilts

so that I could be in the air

when the shuttle returned.

But I never saw it land.

I flew directly to the Garden of Eden

where there was a message waiting for me in my grandfather's diary.

It was written by the dead.

From the bed of my birth

to the bed of my death

and beyond,

I would have to travel with the bees

to find the person I was meant to kill

on the planet

inside the Earth.

The Mesopotamian bees of my grandfather

were waiting for me on this planet.

They would show me my victim at the moment of the kill.

At the end of the story,

I was still dead.

An angel arrived,

from the planet of Life

to take me back

to the White Sands.

The next day I arrived at Trinity site,

about 20 miles past White Sands.

There were camera bunkers still standing from the famous test.

This was the birthplace of the plutonium bomb.

The marker was my goal.

If there were bees...

I was glad I had my suit on.

On the bee tv

I could see myself.

I was approaching the marker.

I couldn't remember where this place was.

I did know that once I had traveled

across the ocean to Basra

in Mesopotamia

to find the tower of Babel.

I knew that I was from Alamogordo.

That couldn't be more than 50 miles by car.

But I didn't know how I could get back,

except perhaps as a bomb.

I couldn't allow that to happen.

I had to call Mellisa and warn her.

I dialed "O" for the operator,

but got ground zero instead.

Over and over,

I tried to make that call.

And then I remembered...

the bee tv showed me

that I was at Trinity site.

So that I would understand,

the bees showed me a movie called,

"The Garden of Eden Cave".

Starring me, Jacob Maker,

as "Fat Boy",

the first and loneliest plutonium bomb.

I lived in a mad tower

above Trinity site.

The day of my death,

the other dead came to visit me.

They said,

"Little bomb,

it is July 16, 1945."

"Now that you're gone,

they will make you a marker."

"And the bees will come to live here, and the flying saucers."

"So you will know, that through the grace of God,

the maker of people;

His son, the savior of the Christians;

and those bees who swarm through the air,

that though you are dead you were born

Zoltan Abbassid on July 11, 1882."

This is true.

In my youth, I studied Volap�k,

rival of Esperanto, the artificial language of international peace

and reconstructed the language of Cain spoken

at the tower of Babel.

In 1915, I - Zoltan Abbassid,

traveled to Basra, in southern Mesopotamia

in search of remnants from the Tower of Babel.

The British campaign in Mesopotamia

had recently climaxed with a surrender to the Turks

at Kut.

I traveled by plane

and boat against the retreat

to arrive at the famous tomb of Ezra,

the gatekeeper of the Garden of Eden.

I knew that the remnants of Babel were hidden here.

I found native bees...in British hives.

Bees that danced backwards.

I dissected the queen.

She was blind.

My guess was that these bees had come from INSIDE the Earth.

When I had this thought, I saw pictures.

I saw a man I had never met.

He told me that these bees had come to Basra

through a cave that led to the center of the Earth

where there was a planet that someday I would visit.

The Tower of Babel was there

and the bees lived inside it.

When the movie was over,

I realized that the world was surrounded by darkness.

That's because there was a cave the size of mid-town Manhattan

hidden beneath the New Mexico desert.

The bees were waiting for me there

to show me how to get to that planet

and meet my victim.

So I followed the pictures inside my brain...

towards the dark place.

Beyond the desert,

in the mountains,

I found the Garden of Eden cave.

There was only one way in...

I had reached the land of the dead.

I relaxed for a few moments,

and then I was ready.

I knew which way to go.

Into the darkness.

The first thing I noticed

was the light.

The bees had illuminated the cave for me.

The bees appeared on the tv,

speaking the language of Cain.

They were waiting for me.

They weren't directly visible to sight,

but I knew they were there.

The intricate stonework was their honeycomb.

I saw myself on the television.

Then I saw the bees,

directly,

for the first time.

They were 30 feet tall.

They sang for me.

I could see that the bees lived

in the darkness around this part of the cave.

Our world was puny and finite

in comparison with theirs.

I understood them as little

as the bees understood the beekeeper.

That didn't discourage me.

I continued to walk through the cave.

A tourist in the land of the dead.

Each corner held a new amazement.

They had created a world where the dead could live.

Each soul could have a square of land and time.

Both qualities were fluid,

the products of powerful thought machines.

that worked behind the scenes,

powered by the raw energy of the bees.

It was a mechanism of astonishing complexity.

All this tired me. I slept in a dark corner - like a bee.

When the underground sun rose,

I could feel my destiny pressing in on me.

It was time for me to find out

who I was going to kill.

Time

went forwards

and backwards.

I emerged in a room

as bright as noon,

covered with magnificent honeycomb.

Hidden behind those walls

the bees were sculpting enormous wax figurines.

Feminine forms,

in which they intended to enter our world.

They promised me one of these bodies after my death.

To earn it, I would have to enter their world.

I drove through a tunnel

and arrived at a city.

In the city, there was a building.

In the building, there was a room.

On the wall of the room was a vibrating bookshelf

that held a crystalline book.

In the book, was the story of the bees

told in secret words

shaped from the bodies of the dead.

The story told me that here in the Garden of Eden cave

vengeance was being planned for the dead.

I shut the book,

left the building

and got in my car

for the long journey home.

I knew I wouldn't be alone for long.

Once I had traveled into the darkness,

I was sure to be followed back.

That afternoon

out of the dark machinery,

one of the dead of the future arrived.

It was grotesque

with 4 brains on a single body.

I felt that I recognized it.

I was afraid,

but I was drawn towards this thing.

I followed it deeper into the cave.

That's where I would find my victim.

It was almost time.

I used my programming skills

to re-shape the cave into a shield.

From behind the shield, I would attack with the mark of Cain.

My reverie was disturbed by the sound of a telephone ringing.

It was the dead wife of Zoltan Abbassid.

She was calling from the moon.

In the language of Cain,

she told me that a murder had been committed in the past,

and that I would kill again,

in Basra,

in southern Mesopotamia.

As I spoke to her,

I remembered that I was Zoltan Abbassid.

I was already dead

yet I was still Jacob Maker.

So I already had my new body.

There was vengeance for the dead in this cave.

They wanted me.

I went into the darkness to hide.

An escort appeared

to take me to asylum.

I followed it into the darkness,

past the "Vengeance" sign

to the graveyard

where words were born.

Past this was a place guarded by the oldest of the dead.

There, the soul fragments of animals were sharpened and organized

into complicated floating weapons.

Beyond...was safety.

The "puzzle" planets, shuffling in perpetual confusion.

I went to one which had a moon.

This was my secret planet of refuge.

I couldn't pronounce it's name.

There...

I was born again

as the "X" shape, a floating gun sight.

It was time to return.

I plunged into the center of a planet

and traveled towards the place

where my old self was standing.

The "X" shape led

and my old self followed,

flying through the darkness on the bee television

that miraculous shape given me by the bees

and now being taken back by them.

Our destination was one of the infinite planets of the future dead.

This one was still geologically active.

On it, cities were forming.

Each city birth was preceded by the appearance of the Tower of Babel.

A hive of words

that articulated as streets and avenues.

Office buildings

and windowless apartments

that I flew through on my way to the religious center,

the Temple of Death.

Priests and military planners

were deciding on the shape of the new culture.

Each soul would have a home

built on a floating patch of land.

Each house would have a certain number of rooms,

each with a chair.

Sometimes there would a lamp or a stairway for decoration.

There would always be a basement

and in it, a clock and

the entertainment center

controlling both the television

and the bed as well as the toilet.

All of which reminded me

...that I was dead.

I had fallen to the floor of the cave.

My death was relaxing and beautiful.

I certainly didn't want to waste much time on it.

I had other places to go.

The first place you stop after death is the pulsating place

which is designed to be familiar to people who used to have bodies.

There, I was reshaped in preparation for transmission to my next body.

I became a short poem, in the language of Cain.

I would get my new body after I killed.

When the actual transmission began, the "X" shape was there for me.

There were new escorts also, sent from the Temple of Death to watch me.

Together, we approached the final journey.

Space and time opened like an elevator

to reveal a planet that had vanished

leaving its weather behind.

Here was the electric telescope,

an astronomical instrument of planetary size.

I looked in one end of the tube

and then the other and started the search for the missing planet.

I discovered the planet of television

4 hours after my death.

I went down the other end of the tube.

This brought me just outside the planet.

Inside,

the television was at work.

I went closer to investigate this marvel.

It was the closest I would ever get

to the eye of God.

When the television turned its gaze on me,

for a few moments I see the world as the deity did -

divided into different zones of transmission.

That was where I had to go.

My escort was still with me.

Together, we traveled into the television and burst into the past

where my future was about to be decided.

By the Fall of 1917,

James "Hive' Maker had begun to hate his brother-in-law, Zoltan Abbassid.

He had no specific reason

other than the desire to be the sole owner of the Mesopotamian bees.

The bees were still multiplying.

Hive Maker believed that these bees were the dead of the future.

That theory could account for their awesome numbers.

Ella Spiralum's machine had not progressed.

Technical limitations had prevented her from building a machine large enough

to scan an entire mourner

or receive a complete soul.

The night that I, Zoltan Abbassid, was murdered

I had decided to reveal the results of my experiments on the bees to my family.

A new version of Ella's machine was running in the garden,

pointed at the hives

creating images from the sounds of the bees.

This was the first time either I or my bees had been in front of the device.

Strange patterns began to form at the receiver.

A woman appeared on the screen.

Then 4 women...

My dead wife was in the hive

her soul had fragmented

and become many separate bees.

She wanted to kill me.

She needed a new body.

My escort made a signal.

Multiple faces appeared on Ella's receiver.

The bees swarmed to attack me.

I, Zoltan Abbassid, never wore protective clothing when I worked with my bees.

The masses of the dead had arrived to murder me.

Each with the same reason under a different name.

For they were the dead,

and vengeance was their life.

I was stung again and again...

When my breathing stopped,

I saw James 'Hive' Maker standing over me.

Hive Maker always wore his suit.

That was the last thing I ever saw.

Now I was Cain.

The "X" shape was my mark.

Together we traveled back to the planet of Television

which was transmitting the dead... to the future.

Now I needed a new body,

and to get it we would have to kill.

Those who murdered Zoltan Abbassid would be my victims.

Then I would be reborn.

I had seen God

in the planet of Television

and had faith that this was true.

I became a shape of light,

the poem that I was.

I hid in a flower crystal on the bee television.

The "X" shape followed the path that my enemies were fleeing along.

They were heading forwards through time, back to Mesopotamia

which now had a different name.

I followed my enemies through the bee television

to emerge in the air

above Basra, southern Iraq,

in the year 1991.

Now, I was going to kill.

That was my job.

I spoke the code

that changed the bee television into a weapon

with the image of my special enemy

engraved upon it.

I spun this projectile towards the one who was waiting for me.

The "X" shape followed to the kill.

Back in the darkness,

at the graveyard beyond the Vengeance sign,

many new souls were born.

They danced on bee tv.

This was "Victory".

I went back to the planet of the future dead to celebrate.

When I entered the city, my former escorts greeted me.

They'd had children.

Twins.

The "X" had gone there to give birth also.

On the bee tv, many new bodies were on display.

In fact, this world was twice as large as it had been before.

There was twice as much time,

twice as many houses

and many more useless things also.

That was it! The end.

For the last time, I entered the bee tv.

I traveled into the weapon boxes

and let my soul take on its true form.

I am the X-shaped Siamese twins.

With a little thought, I can change my shape

and have that body the bees promised me

in the cave.

We are Siamese twins at the beginning of the world.

My family is here; we are all attached.

That's me, Jacob Maker and next to me is me, Zoltan Abbassid.

We are on top.

On the bottom, are the two Iraqis we murdered in the tank.

They are our brothers now.

We can live anywhere on this planet that we want to,

but there's no place like home.

We are going back to the Garden of Eden.

Or actually, where we went to live after we left the Garden of Eden.

It's a beautiful day in Alamogordo.

I really enjoy my job.

I'm a woman now.

Actually, several women.

Our names are Alell and Zilalamak.

We're genetic researchers,

specializing in the study of

the shifting kernel patterns found across generations of mutating corn.

My research is paid for

by my dead grandfather,

James 'Hive' Maker,

who moved here in the 1940s with his sister, Ella Spiralum.

He made a fortune in beekeeping

which he let Ella invest in a flight simulation company,

The Tower of Babel, right here in Alamogordo.

That's where my brothers work.

Right now, their assignment at the Tower of Babel

is one of Aunt Ella's inventions.

A two-way television that lets them talk to the dead.

On the television, the dead have promised that for the next 1,000 years

we get to live in peace on this new world.

I love my brothers and I believe that.

That's the power of love.