Ellipse

By Tristan Marqui Marshall

TREATMENT
We are at the table having a family dinner, Spaghetti
Sunday. A smiling young man sits across from a giggling
young woman. He looks as if hes just told her a dirty
joke. Between them is a chubby cheeked toddler, their son,
and across from baby is an older woman, the mother of the
young man. They all laugh now as the baby makes a mess of
his spaghetti.
There is a loud knock at the door and the young man, Micha
Leon, gives his mom a reassuring look before he gets up
from the table and goes to answer it. When he is gone the
mother and the young woman exchange a very different kind
of look; fear.
As if on cue, there is a loud crash from the front door
and raised voices. The older mother immediately gets up
and goes towards the trouble.
The younger woman stands and picks up her son. She hugs
him tightly for a few moments before she goes too, leaving
the happy dinner table and Spaghetti Sunday behind...
Fast forward two years into the future, to a college
classroom, as a very pretty young professor, Lena Bertram,
wearily surveys her first period Modern Psychology class.
Her eye catches a handsome young man wearing dark shades
with his feet up on the seat in front of him. His loose,
mature style makes him stand out from his classmates. She
thinks to tell him about his feet but changes her mind.
Instead she clears her throat and starts her First Day of
School speech.
As the class period goes on, and to her surprise, he
raises his hand most frequently. Every time he speaks he
seems to be talking only to her. She can feel the
chemistry. His questions are thought provoking, well
spoken and his responses are intelligent and humorous. He
has a voice worth listening to and the rest of the class
seems to feel it too. His participation enlivens them.
By the end of the period she realizes this is the best
class she has ever had and this maybe the best semester.
She is in love..
A week later Albert Leon asks her out for coffee and

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,although she knows she shouldnt, her feelings overpower

her judgment and she accepts.
After they make love she lies on his chest, rising and
falling.
When she wakes up the first time and he is not there she
looks and sees him naked at the window smoking and
clicking the keyboard as the glow from the laptop screen
lights his face.
The second time she wakes it is morning and her room is
empty....
Albert notices a strange car following him as he gets his
morning coffee. He steals a bike and rides off before the
car can follow. When hes gone the man in his car raises
his cell phone to make a call.
A man sits alone in a pitch black room with the only light
coming from the six or seven computer monitors in front of
him. He looks as if he is floating in the darkness of
space. He reaches up and taps the bluetooth device in his
ear, Hello. His haunted expression peels into an evil
smile as he listens to the voice on the other line. The
name on the prescription bottle is Steven Gates. He pops
the top and eats a few of its pills..
Lena gets to school late that morning but she is smiling
when she opens the door to a packed classroom. Her smile
falters when she sees all of her students are present
except one...
Days later, Albert wakes from a memory/nightmare of what
happened the night he came home to his family having
Spaghetti Sunday.
The charts graph on his laptop screen shine across his
face. He flips it closed, gets up, and starts to gather
his few possessions from the mess around him.
Then he shoulders his backpack and hops out the window,
leaving the girl the room belongs to asleep on the bed..
After a week of no contact Lena decides to check the
school records for Albert but finds there is no one by
that name enrolled in her class or the school, for that
matter.
She uses his cellphone number to find an address and pays
a visit. There she finds his mom, the older woman from the
Spaghetti Sunday. She tells Lena she hasnt seen Albert

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in months but that he is not well and that someone

dangerous is after him. A young kid can be seen through a
window playing in the back yard while they talk.
Lena leaves not knowing what to believe but sure that the
guy thats been in her class and in her bed for the last
month feels more real than the one his mom is describing.
She decides to look for him herself...
Albert sits at a computer desk tapping away on someone
elses laptop while a raucous party goes on in the other
room.
A young man comes in and squints at him through red,
wasted eyes, You still working, man? Youre
gonna burn
out my computer.
The man offers him a line of cocaine but Albert refuses.
The man says Albert should have joined him years ago. With
his connections and Alberts brilliant mind they could be
rich by now; Cocaine Cowboys. Albert says that drugs are
more risk than there worth and that you have to play it
to long before it pays off. The man only laughs.
Hours later Albert is still working while the rest of the
house has fallen into a dead sleep. He finally stops and
leans his back on the chair. He finally falls asleep and
has a dream about Lena.
He is woken by a hand gripping his shoulder. Cocaine
Cowboy stands over him with wide eyes and a large handgun
at his shoulder. He says someone is at the door and hes
going to check. When hes gone Albert grabs his bag and
heads for the back. As he slips out the door he hears
raised voices in the living room..
Steven Gates slams his fist down on the desk in front of
him as he listens to the voice on his earpiece. He looks
gone mad with desperation..
Lena gets a strange call from a man who says hes Alberts
doctor. He offers her his help in finding Albert if she
will allow him to be there when she finds him...
Albert sits in a lawn chair behind his mothers house
smoking a cigarette and looking up at the stars. Its
obvious hes waiting for something. His laptop sits open
on the table beside him. He looks down at it, letting the
display play across his face again, and tosses cigarette.
Then he picks up his cell phone and makes the call........

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PLAYERS
Albert Leon

Steven Gates

-tells his story through action

-speech and nuance tells

his story

-does things himself

-uses technology and

other people to
interact with the world

-connected, neurotic, methodical -secluded, paranoic,

obsessive
-moves effortlessly through
the chaos

-floats outside of time

and space

-he is the window on the world

on the world

-technology is his
window on the world

These two characters represent the two extremes of bipolar

disorder.; depression and mania. While Steven is in, and a
part of, the black, Albert is too bright for the small
spaces he enters. Steven acts as the ego watching the
world pass by from inside the mind while Albert lives in
the moment, actually experiencing the things that Steven
is only perceiving. It is almost as if they are two people
in the same mind fighting each other for complete control.
Lena acts as the pivot in the middle, which stabilizes the
tension in our story. She also serves as the physical
connection between the two men and the only main character
who resides completely in the real(physical) world. She is
fearless and selfless, only motivated by the truth.

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THE PLOT
Alberts brother, Micha, commits suicide before the story
starts. He is distraught over the fact that he has lost
all of his familys savings to a failed hedge fund.
Albert finds out later that Micha losing the money was a
setup perpetrated by Steven Gates who was looking for
money to start his own hedge fund at the time.
Albert sniffs out one of Stevens top brokers and gives
him a program that supposedly predicts stock prices premarket. When Steven tries to use the program it loses him
a lot of money and another programmer tells him the
program is incomplete. Steven kills the broker but Albert
manages to disappear before Steven can catch up to him.
When our story starts Albert has just resurfaced and it
isnt long before Steven picks up his trail. Albert is
forced to stay mobile as he continues to keep an eye on
the stock market.
Steven also watches the market obsessively looking for any
sign of how Albert is betting.
After albert gets away a few times Steven enlists the help
of Lena by calling and pretending to be Alberts doctor.
Albert seems to be leaving a trail for Lena to follow.
Lena runs into Michas girlfriend and is confronted with
the truth about Alberts past.
When she finally finds Albert he tells her the rest of the
story. The truth is that there is no program that can
predict stocks pre-market. Albert has been doing all the
predictions and investing himself through meticulous
research and some luck.
The real program is a radio virus called Ellipse which
Steven infected his own system with when he ran the
original program years before. The virus allows two
systems to communicate with each other undetected using a
round, fragmented signal that is broadcast everywhere.
The second system picks up the fragments from cyberspace
and puts them back together. Because the first terminal
never sends a direct signal it is impossible to track the

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second terminal. An because the information is fragmented

the transfer is almost impossible to detect.
Steven finds out that while he has been focused on finding
Albert and his magic program a very real Ellipse virus has
been siphoning away his money and transferring it to an
account which Albert controls. Albert has been using the
stolen money to invest in the market and has just reached
his goal profit amount of ten million dollars.
He has set up a trust fund for his brothers son to take
care of his family and in the end all that is left is for
Lena to make the choice to stay or go away with him. The
film ends just before she makes her decision......