POD

Episode Two – Bin Day

Written by

Peter Richard Adams

SCENE 1.

JEMIMA: 	(V.O.) Space. The final job before I quit. These are the voyages of UK Space Agency Engineering Pod Number 46. My five-year mission: to explore the ten square metres I’m trapped inside, seek out Pluto and boldly go and switch the lights off. If they’re still on. 

FADE

		SCENE 2.

F/X: 	THE LOW HUM AND BLEEPS THAT YOU WOULD EXPECT FROM THE INTERIOR OF A SPACE-GOING VESSEL.

JEMIMA:	Argh!

POD: 	Wilhelm scream. 

JEMIMA: 			Correct, Pod.

POD:				My turn… Argh! 

JEMIMA:			Don’t tell me… Don’t tell me…

POD: 				You’ll never get it.

JEMIMA:			Janet Leigh in Psycho. 

POD:				Damn! 

JEMIMA: 			My turn again. 

PAUSE

POD: 				Ok, go on. 

JEMIMA: 			I am. I’m doing it. 

PAUSE

POD:				Nope, not getting anything. 

JEMIMA:			That’s because I’m The Scream by Edvard Munch. 

POD:	That is very clever. I love playing “Screamy-Screamy-Guessy-Guess”. It’s the best. 

JEMIMA:	I know. You just can’t play it on earth because it makes you look absolutely mental. 

POD:	It really does. 

F/X: 					AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA:	Pod, what’s that noise?

POD:	What noise?

F/X: 					AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA: 	That ominous clanking noise. 

POD: 	The one that sounds like someone trying to break in?

JEMIMA:	Yes. That noise. 

F/X: 					AN OMINOUS CLANK.

POD:	Well, I can assure you it’s not somebody trying to get in the pod. 

JEMIMA:	Good. 

POD: 	That would be absolutely impossible on account of how utterly alone we are. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA: 	Don’t Pod… 

POD: 	Out here… In the depths of space… 

JEMIMA:	That’s enough now, Pod… 

POD:	Thousands of miles away from the nearest life... 

JEMIMA:	Pod! 

POD:	Alone… Are you scared?

F/X: 					AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA:	No, of course not.

POD:	If you are, you can scream if you like.

JEMIMA: 	Why would I want to scream?

POD: 	Because no one can hear you. Except for me. But I wouldn’t worry about me because I didn’t even hear that ominous clanking. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA:	Pod, run a sensor sweep of the hull.

POD: 	Sweeping hull… Sweep complete. Negative results.  

JEMIMA: 	Ok. Widen sweep and repeat. 

POD: 	Sweep widened. Sweeping hull… Sweep complete. Negative results.  

JEMIMA: 	Right. There’s nothing for it. 

POD: 	What are you going to do? Bypass the sweep circuit by the mainframe? 

JEMIMA: 	No, I’m going to look out the window. Argh!

POD:	Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone! 

JEMIMA: 	No Pod, that was a real scream.  

POD:	They don’t count. I’m deducting a Screamy-Screamy-Guessy-Guess point from you for cheating. 

JEMIMA:	I’m not playing anymore Pod. I’m being serious. There’s something out there.

F/X: 					AN OMINOUS CLANK.

POD:	What sort of something?

JEMIMA:	Well it looked like…

POD:	Yes?

JEMIMA: 	It looked like… It looked like a skeleton… A human skeleton. 

POD: 	Oooh, that’s terrifying. Hang on, I’ll take a look. 

F/X: 					AN OMINOUS CLANK.

POD:	Well, you’re not wrong. One human skeleton, currently smashing its gnarly, calcified, space-bleached jaw against the airlock. I don’t know how I missed it now, what with its chilling visage of hollow terror staring right at me in the unending night. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA:	What’s it doing out there?

POD: 	Very little I should imagine. 

JEMIMA: 	But what’s it doing outside the pod?

POD:	We must have hit the Garbage Belt.

JEMIMA: 	What Garbage Belt?

POD: 	The big dirty one just beyond the Moon.

JEMIMA: 	I don’t understand. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

POD: 	Of course you do! The Garbage Belt? The ring of refuse? The dirty dump? It’s where all the crap gets sent. 

JEMIMA: 	Since when? 

POD: 	Since about 50 years ago when you humans really got going with the whole space thing. 

JEMIMA:	Space thing?

POD:	Yeah… When mankind looked up at the night sky and said: “I could really leave my mark on that… My dirty brown mark.”

JEMIMA: 	So rubbish isn’t buried anymore? Or burnt?

POD: 	No. It was stinking up the place something rotten. Planet of eleven billion people makes a lot of rubbish… Makes a lot of stench. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA: 	So they send it all up here?

POD: 	Yup. In space no one can you hear you smell. 

JEMIMA: 	Why don’t we recycle it?

POD: 	It was just too boring to bother. Now it’s just loaded up and banged off into the stratosphere. 

JEMIMA: 	That still doesn’t explain why there’s a skeleton trying to get into the pod.

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

POD: 	I expect it’s just a corpse. There are loads of them up here.

JEMIMA: 	Are you telling me we’ve stopped burying people as well? 

POD: 	No. of course not. That would be inhuman. The one out there was probably just horrifically murdered. 

JEMIMA: 	Murdered?!

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

POD: 	Yeah, murdered… You know? Executed? Killed? Terminated? Bought the farm? Handed a one-way ticket to “Why’s it all gone so dark?”

JEMIMA: 	I know what murdered means Pod. What I don’t get is why anyone that’s been horrifically murdered would be all the way out here. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

POD: 	It’s actually a very logical place. 

JEMIMA:	Why?

POD:	Well you know all those East London gangsters that used to spend their weekends burying the bodies of their enemies in Epping Forest? It’s kind of the 22nd Century version of that.

JEMIMA: 	Gangsters? What gangsters?

POD: 	Space gangsters. 

JEMIMA:	Have you been watching Saturday morning cartoons again Pod?

POD:	No seriously… Space gangsters. The moon is full of them. 

JEMIMA:	Rubbish.

POD:	Hang on, I’m getting to that. Look, you know how it’s only rich people who live on the Moon? Well not all of them got there by selling used cars. A lot of them got there in the incredibly lucrative and highly unregulated space garbage dumping business. And because no-one’s really watching, it attracts a lot of real wrong ‘uns who occasionally bump off their rivals and dump them up here in the Garbage Belt… Where no one can smell them rot. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA:	That’s horrible. 

POD:	That’s life. I don’t really see what all the fuss is about.

JEMIMA:	There’s a skeleton outside, Pod!

POD: 	So what? There’s one inside you too. In fact there’s a spooky skeleton lurking inside every one of you disgusting flesh bags. Man up, I say. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA: 	There are two reasons I can’t man up Pod. Firstly I’m all alone in the depths of space. 

POD:	Yes you are. You really are. 

JEMIMA;	And secondly, I’m a woman.

POD: 	You’re a woman?

JEMIMA: 	Yes. 

POD: 	No way. I had literally no idea. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA: 	What?

POD:	I’ve got you classified as male. 

JEMIMA:	Really?

POD:	Yeah… Jemima Margaret Belafonte. Engineer. Male. 

JEMIMA:	How didn’t you know?

POD: 	I don’t really notice such things. They’re not a great deal of interest to me. Plus you’re not my type. 

JEMIMA: 	You had no idea what type I was until about ten seconds ago. 

POD: 	Well now I do and I’m not interested. So don’t try flirting with me. 

JEMIMA: 	I wasn’t going to. 

POD:	Playing hard to get eh?

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA:	Get John on the comm. Right now.

POD:	On it.

F/X: 	COMMUNICATOR SWITCHES ON AND CALLS.

JOHN: 	(D) Good afternoon this is Command & Control, John speaking, how can I… Oh hi Jemima, you ok?

JEMIMA: 	No I’m not! I’m not ok at all. There’s a bloody skeleton outside the pod. 

JOHN: 	(D) Oooh distressing! I shouldn’t worry about it. It’s probably just the Garbage Belt. You’ll be out of it in a few hours. Did you pick up anything good?

JEMIMA: 	I’m not sure it has a gift shop, John.

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JOHN: 	(D) There’s loads of sweet stuff up there. It’s the treasure trove of the universe. People throw out all sorts of awesome tat. I sometimes go up there on annual leave for a bit of a rummage. 

JEMIMA:	You come here for fun?

JOHN: 	(D) Yeah. It’s ace. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JEMIMA:	What do you get?

JOHN: 	(D) Oh you can find anything up in the Garbage Belt. Old magazines... Furniture… Skulls. They’re my favourite.

JEMIMA: 	The skulls?

JOHN: 	(D) Yeah.

JEMIMA: 	The human skulls?

 JOHN:	(D) If you stick a candle in them they look absolutely awesome on the mantelpiece. 

JEMIMA:	That’s horrible. 

JOHN:	(D) You couldn’t grab one for me could you? It would look brilliant if I had a pair. 

JEMIMA: 	No John, I’m not going to tear the head off a skeleton and then spend the next five years trapped in a ten square metre pod with it staring back at me. 

F/X: 		AN OMINOUS CLANK.

JOHN: 	(D) Oh come on… It’s not like it would bite or anything… 

JEMIMA:	No.

JOHN: 	(D) Well, you should still deploy a net and see what you can grab. There’s some awesome stuff to be had in that Garbage Belt.

JEMIMA: 	End communication. 

JOHN: 	(D) Spoilsport. 

F/X: 					COMMUNICATOR SWITCHES OFF. 

POD:	Communication ended. 

					PAUSE.

JEMIMA: 	Damn it… Pod. Send out a net. 

POD:	Net deployed. 

JEMIMA:	Let’s go fishing for filth. 

F/X: 					A BLEEP AND A WHOOSH.

END