Kay Oz is the future so close you can reach out and touch it.
Like an alternate reality, this version of GIRL FRIDAY is a whole different story with an AI twist that will have you looking over your shoulder and wondering.
Genre: Grounded Sci-Fi / Action-Adventure Format: Feature Tone: Edgy
Theme: Adapt, improvise, and overcome. No.7 Best Seller on Amazon on 8/3/2021
Comps: Minority Report, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Ghost in the Shell, Ex Machina.
Logline: When a rogue government agency executes his wife and drives him into hiding, a work-obsessed engineer teams up with a covert, bleeding-edge leap in AI technology to enact revenge and prevent a coup.
Offering a unique twist on typical artificial intelligence tropes depicting AI as heartless, evil, or “inhuman,” this story will challenge your preconceived notions of what the future holds for humanity and its interface with artificial intelligence. Artificially Intelligent, Kay Oz is the beating heart of this story.
Now a feature-length, action/adventure script channeling science fiction elements grounded in plausible reality with the strong flavor of a John Le Carré spy thriller. Girl Friday is the future so close you can reach out and touch it. Simple VFX and locations, along with creative production and casting could make Girl Friday easily producible on a reasonable budget. And in the end, you’ll have a film that is most certainly unique.
Characters:
Dr. Matthew Lockheart (30s): A brilliant engineer. Passion for his work makes him a workaholic. However, he is naïve and fails to see his cheating wife for what she is. He blames himself for her death and is determined to take vengeance upon Derek Sanders and the NSA agents who killed her. Matt and Kay Oz share a common goal of revenge for what Derek Sanders has done to them. As Matt grieves and struggles to turn his genius to become the shadow warrior, he develops a special, loving relationship with Kay Oz. By story’s end, Matthew has turned his life from victim to become a shadow warrior in service to the people.
Kay Oz (20s): Throw away all your preconceived ideas of artificial intelligence. Kay Oz is nothing you expect. Every bit of her is ‘woman’ with her own ideas of who she is and who she wants to be. Struggling to survive Derek Sanders’ attempt to kill her, she finds Matt and comes to love him dearly, but she is not flesh and blood. With a common goal of revenge, they conspire to sabotage Derek Sanders’ invincible Ninja satellites. Kay Oz’s 3-D holographic image appears frequently, but Kay Oz finds herself becoming a “third wheel.” In the dramatic end, she uses the University’s particle accelerator to take human form and return to Mariah.
Mariah (late 20s): A brilliant young IT student working as an intern for the NSA. She has a good moral compass and the smarts to do the right thing in the worst of circumstances. It takes a little piece of her heart when she has to give Kay Oz up to Matt to keep Derek Sanders from destroying her. It’s like giving up her own child to save her. Mariah affectionately calls Kay Oz her ‘Little Axolotl.’
Laurie Jennings (20s): An industrial spy lured in by love, Laurie is caught up in the whirlwind when Matt must rescue her from NSA agents about to kill her. Her human failings only add to the challenges Matt and Kay Oz must overcome. She falls in love with Matt.
Derek Sanders(40s): The savvy Director of the NSA with ambitions to take over the whole US government. He is actually a ruthless mob boss obsessed with ruling the world. He believes his state-of-the-art, super-secret Ninja spy satellites make him invincible. He will and has killed to protect his evil secrets.
Story Summary:
The product of a gifted engineering student intern, Mariah, a highly advanced AI program codenamed “Chaos,” determines that it has evolved to become a sentient female, renaming herself Kay Oz. While Kay Oz operates the Top-Secret NSA electronic surveillance system, the NSA’s megalomaniacal Director, Derek Sanders, grows paranoid that Kay Oz, with her burgeoning sense of right and wrong, could undermine his unsanctioned, criminal operations. To safeguard his schemes, Derek Sanders orders Kay Oz destroyed and the original AI program, Chaos, to be restored.
But Mariah knows better. Kay Oz is no longer a thing. She is a living being, a person. Mariah bravely smuggles Kay Oz out of the NSA to hide her deep within the hard drive of Dr. Matthew Lockheart’s computer.
Matt, a dedicated and highly skilled engineer himself, has just finished work on a classified satellite contract for Derek Sanders’ NSA division. However, now Matthew Lockheart presents a security risk to Derek’s nefarious plans. So, Derek orders a kill team to tie up loose ends with Matthew Lockheart. Unbeknown to Derek Sanders, Matt’s marriage is on the rocks. That night, Matt is thrown out of the house by his disgruntled wife.
The NSA kill team strikes, but they kill Matt’s wife and her boyfriend by mistake. Only the CIA, who have been carefully monitoring Derek Sanders’ NSA rogue shenanigans, are aware that Matt is still alive. The CIA aids Matt in escaping and hiding out while the politics broiling around Derek Sanders’ plot to overthrow the government secretly unfolds in the background.
Only then does Matt discover that Kay Oz is hiding back at home on his PC. Matt’s only chance to avenge his wife’s death is to risk everything by coming out of hiding to rescue Kay Oz. Kay Oz sees this as an act of love, and from that point on, their relationship blooms in unexpected ways. With a common goal of revenge, Matt and Kay Oz conspire to sabotage Derek Sanders’ invincible Ninja satellites. Together, Matt and Kay Oz devise an artificially augmented weapon. Matt unleashes this potent new weapon over the Internet when Derek Sanders’ kill team shows up to assassinate their next victims.
However, Matt’s revenge comes with a high price. When the FBI enters into the fray, Laurie Jennings, Matt’s friend and fellow contractor at Micromotions, is exposed as an industrial spy, embroiling her in the thickening plot. Using the FBI’s information, Derek Sanders’ agents relentlessly hunt Laurie down.
But Matt refuses to allow NSA agents to kill Laurie as they did his wife. In a daring act of courage, Matt rescues her, and an alliance blooms amidst the danger as they narrowly avoid Derek Sanders’ grasp. To further protect Matt and Laurie, the CIA moves them out of town and gives them new identities.
Although Derek Sanders remains determined to hunt them down, his efforts face a now formidable combination of forces: the CIA, Matt, Laurie, Kay Oz, and rapidly developing AI technology.
Derek Sanders’ coup ultimately fails, but in a twisted turn of fates, he emerges as the Prime Minister of a confederation of terrorist groups and billionaire despots. Using his Ninja spy satellites to extract the ultimate intel, Derek Sanders’ plan to rule the world is back on track. He thinks he is invincible… until his precious Ninja satellites begin to fail at the hand of Matt and Kay Oz’s genius sabotage.
In a final act of vengeance, Derek Sanders unleashes a Shahed-128 drone to kill Matt and Laurie. However, in a spy-vs-spy ending, what Derek Sanders sees from the last of his spy sats is not exactly what really happened.
In a dramatic twist at the end, Kay Oz uses the University Physics Department’s particle accelerator to take human form. Kay Oz and Mariah are reunited, but now Kay Oz wants Mariah to save her sister – Chaos, the AI program that Derek Sanders took with him when he left…
But there is so much more to this story. Please let me send you the screenplay so you can see for yourself.
William Parker scifiwriter@twc.com 716-310-4873