Rewind / Fate of Flight 700 by Matthew Reilly

Written two years before the film Memento, Rewind is the screenplay for a short film that plays out in reverse. If any aspiring film-makers would like to make Rewind into a short film, Matthew advises that they are welcome to do so -- on one condition: that he gets to see a copy of the finished product!

It has been produced at least once, in 2004 by independent filmmaker Andy Stark.

Download Rewind in Adobe PDF (20kb)

Fate of Flight 700 is the contracted, micro-fiction version of Rewind, written for the Tropfest programme. At just 174 words long, it tells a chilling story of a secret so well kept... it's murder:

In the darkest corner of the darkest neighbourhood in the darkest industrial sector of Washington D.C., there is a crumbling old dead-end street.

At the farthest end of this street, at the point farthest away from civilisation, there is a warehouse. 

On the bottom shelf of the most remote aisle of this warehouse, you will find a very ordinary-looking wooden box. 

If you were to open this box, you would find a sturdy bright-orange box-like device. It is the flight data recorder from a 747 jumbo jet, known as a 'black' box despite its true colour.

If you were to play this particular flight data recorder, this is what you would hear:

'Good God...To anyone who can hear me, this is Captain Harold O'Shea of British Airways Flight 700, ex-New York. We have visual on a missile bearing down upon us! Yes, a missile! It appears to be coming from a cluster of US Navy vessels on the horizon, over by Horn Island-'

It is then that the bullet will enter your head.