About Rejacked

I always loved the 1999 movie “The Matrix”. It was mind blowing! But it had some flaws as well. It used two tricks in particular that always bugged me:

• If you die in the virtual world, you die in the real world.
• If you want to log out of the virtual world, you have to find a land-line telephone.

I always found it ridiculous that someone would design a VR system, where the user really dies if he dies in the “game” world. Add to that the need to find a land-line telephone to be able to log out.

Of course both of these rules where added to the Matrix universe to add suspense, excitement and tension.

So ever since I saw that movie, I challenged myself to find a story idea that would still be exciting and suspenseful without using those or any other illogical tricks.

Round about 10 years ago I got an idea. And I have developed that idea ever since. I then thought about interesting characters and the overall story beats. I wrote a few chapters and hired a Ghostwriter to help me out.

4 Month ago I finished a really bad first draft of the overall story.

But it taught me so much about where the story needs to go to be better and it taught and surprised me so much about my own characters that I never knew or planned.

So I knew I had to rewrite it; I plan on 4 drafts at least overall.

Here is the logline: The disgraced inventor of a revolutionary VR system, the Neuropod, is asked to help investigate the mysterious death of 3 female users of his device.

Here is the slightly longer Elevator Pitch: In the future work is done by robots and humans spend all their time in virtual reality. All would be great if it weren't for the recent discovery of 3 dead women, still connected to their Neuropod. When a police officer asks Ben, the disgraced inventor of the VR system, to help with the case, things get very dangerous.