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Minority Report Scott Frank FLETCHER: What he's doing now, we call "scrubbing the image", looking for clues as to where the murder's going to happen. FLETCHER: Filtered, the Precogs can see outward up to four days with a sensory range of 200 miles. ANDERTON: By mandate of the District of Columbia Precrime division, I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks and Donald Doobin that was to take place today, April 22, at oh-eight hundred hours, four minutes -- WITWER: I thought they stopped the murder -- JAD: That's just an echo. Precog Deja Vu. Some of the really bad ones, the Precogs see over and over again. LYCON: Sweet dreams, Chief. Oh, don't worry none, your secret's safe with me. After all, you gonna be The Big Boss soon enough, be nice to have a little juice on my side. ANDERTON: What makes you say I'm gonna be the boss? LYCON: You're the perfect man for the job. It's like my Daddy used to say, "In the land of the blind...The one eyed-man is King". BURGESS: You understand that a week from now people are going to vote on whether or not what we've been doing down here has been some noble-minded enterprise or a chance to change the way this country fights crime. ANDERTON: I understand. Sir. BURGESS: I need you to do two things for me. One, watch Danny Witwer. ANDERTON: Yes, sir. BURGESS: You can let him look around, answer his questions, but watch him. If there's any problems, make sure we know about it first. ANDERTON: I understand. What's the other thing? BURGESS: Tuck in your shirt. FLETCHER: The information we need is embedded in the grain of wood. And since each piece is unique, the shape and grain is impossible to duplicate. WITWER: I'm sure you've all grasped the legalistic drawback to precrime methodology. KNOTT: Here we go again... WITWER: Look, I'm not with the ACLU on this Jeff. But let's not kid ourselves, we are arresting individuals who've broken no law. JAD: But they will. FLETCHER: The commission of the crime itself is absolute metaphysics. The Precogs see the future. And they're never wrong. WITWER: But it's not the future if you stop it. Isn't that a fundamental paradox? ANDERTON: Yes, it is. You're talking about predetermination, which happens all the time. ANDERTON: Why did you catch that? WITWER: Because it was going to fall. ANDERTON: You're certain? WITWER: Yes. ANDERTON: But it didn't fall. You caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn't change the fact that it was going to happen. WITWER: You ever get any false positives? Someone intends to kill his boss or his wife, but they never go through with it. How do the precogs tell the difference? ANDERTON: The Precogs don't see what you intend to do, only what you will do. WITWER: Then why can't they see rapes, or assaults... or suicides? FLETCHER: Because of the nature of murder. "There's nothing more destructive to the metaphysical fabric that binds us than the untimely murder of one human being by another". WITWER: Somehow, I don't think that was Walt Whitman. ANDERTON: It was Iris Hineman. She developed the Precogs, designed the system and pioneered the interface. WITWER: The photon milk acts as both a nutrient supply and a liquid conductor. It makes the images that each of them receive strong. WALLY: We call the female Agatha. The twins are Arthur and Dashiell. We scan by way of optical tomography, white light pinpoints pulse along the entire length of the headgear and are re-read after absorption through their brain tissue. In other words, we see what they see. They're not in any pain. We keep their heads pretty well stocked with dopamine and endorphins. Plus, we maintain careful control over their serotonin levels -- don't want 'em to drift off to sleep, but they can't be kept too awake either. ANDERTON: It helps if you don't think of them as human. WITWER: No... they're much more than that. Science has stolen most of our miracles. In a way... they give us hope... hope of the existence of the divine. ANDERTON: Why don't you cut the cute act, Danny, and tell me exactly what it is you're looking for? WITWER: Flaws. ANDERTON: There hasn't been a murder in six years. There's nothing wrong with the system. It's perfect. WITWER: I agree. The system is perfect. If there's a flaw, it's human. It always is. GIDEON: Hey, bet you don't know where the term "graveyard shift" comes from? Long time ago, in merry old England, they discovered that some coffins, after they reopened 'em -- now why they did that, I couldn't tell you -- Anyway, they discovered that some of the coffins had scratch marks on the inside, indicating that the person had not been dead when they buried them. So they tied a string to the wrist of each person that lead to a bell above ground.Someone was assigned to sit at night and listen for the bells. Hence the expression... Graveyard shift. Not to mention, "Saved by the bell". GIDEON: John Doe drug addict was gonna put down a woman named Anne Lively at Roland Lake. ANDERTON: That's her -- Why's he still a John Doe? Why wasn't he ever ID's from an EYEscan? GIDEON: On account of those are not his eyes. He had 'em swapped out to fool the scanners. You get it done on the street for a few hundred bucks these days. GIDEON: Okay, so you want just the female's prevision. Huh, we don't seem to have her data. ANDERTON: Try again. GIDEON: No... we have the two previsions from the twins right here, but... I can't pull up any data from the female. Probably just a glitch. GIDEON: Huh. How ironic... You finally crawl your way out of one hole, only to fall into another. Careful, Chief... You dig up the past, all you get is dirty. BURGESS: And you say the third prevision was, what, a little fuzzy or something? ANDERTON: I'm saying the third prevision wasn't there. And that's not all. I spent a few hours down there and it turns out there's a dozen more cases with missing previsions. BURGESS: My father once said to me that you don't choose the things you believe in, they choose you. ANDERTON: In the middle of the civil war, for example, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus observing that a limb may be sacrificed to save a life, but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. JAD: We're in motion on something. From what I can see, we got a white male, about five-eight, approximately one-forty, takes a round in the ten ring, and goes out a window. ANDERTON: Red Ball? JAD: Nope. Somebody's thinking about this one. ANDERTON: Amazing there's someone within two hundred miles actually dumb enough to still do that. WALLY: Chief? I like you, Chief. You've always been nice to me. I'll give you two minutes before I hit the siren. ANDERTON: This is all Witwer. He's setting me up. BURGESS: Stop. Just wait. Who's the victim? ANDERTON: Somebody named Leo Crow. BURGESS: And who the hell is that? ANDERTON: I have no idea. I've never heard of him. But I'm supposed to kill him in less than thirty-six hours. WITWER: You may consider him a friend. But we know that John Anderton is going to kill Leo Crow this Friday at three-o-six p.m., unless we stop him. Don't think for a minute that if the situation was reversed he wouldn't go after you. He would be a cop doing his job, as I'm doing mine. So if you're not ready and willing to put the halo on him, leave now. IRIS: Just what is it you think I can do for you? ANDERTON: You can tell me how someone... could fake a prevision. IRIS: And how would I know that? ANDERTON: You invented precrime. What's so funny? IRIS: If the unintended consequences of a series of genetic mistakes and science gone haywire can be called invention, then yes, I invented precrime. ANDERTON: You don't seem all that proud. IRIS: I'm not. I was trying to heal them, not turn them into... something else. ANDERTON: Heal who? IRIS: The innocents we now use to stop the guilty. ANDERTON: You're talking about the precogs... IRIS: You think the three in the tank come from a test tube? They're merely the ones who survived. IRIS: I was doing genetic research at the Woodhaven Clinic in Rhode Island on Renning's Syndrome, a neurological condition that affects the cerebral cortex of children. Most of these kids were abandoned or forgotten. Very few of the kids lived past the age of twelve. It began as play. A guessing game like you play with any toddler, except these children always guessed right. And then the nightmares started. They were all different, but all the same. They were all about murder. And the murders were all happening. ANDERTON: And how did Lamar become involved? IRIS: Back then, he was still a DA, and quite a few parents of my patients had passed through his courtroom. You have to understand, these people were the dregs of society. But once they saw their children... he decided he would do whatever he could for them. He's that way, you know, paternal about certain things. Precrime. The precogs. You. ANDERTON: You say some of the children died? IRIS: So many of them... despite what we did for them. Or maybe because of what we did to them. It doesn't matter. It's a perfect system now, isn't it? ANDERTON: I'm not a murderer. I've never even met the man I'm supposed to kill. IRIS: And, yet, a chain of events has started. A chain that will lead inexorably to his death. ANDERTON: Not if I stay away from him. IRIS: How can you avoid a man you've never met? ANDERTON: So you won't help me? IRIS: I can't help you. No one can. The Precogs are never wrong. But, occasionally, they do disagree. ANDERTON: What? IRIS: Most of the time, all three Precognitives will see an event in the same way. But once in a while, one of them will see things differently than the other two. ANDERTON: Jesus Christ -- why didn't I know about this? IRIS: Because these Minority Reports are destroyed the instant they occur. ANDERTON: Why? IRIS: Obviously, for Precrime to function, there can't be any suggestion of fallibility. After all, what good is a Justice system that instills doubt? It may be reasonable, but it's still doubt. ANDERTON: You're saying that I've halo'd innocent people? IRIS: I'm saying that every so often those accused of a precrime might, just might, have an alternate future. ANDERTON: Does Burgess know about this? About the Minority Report? IRIS: I used to joke with Lamar that we were the mother and father of Precrime. Well, in my experience, parents often see their children as they want them to be, not as they are. ANDERTON: Answer my question. Did Lamar Burgess know about the Minority Report? IRIS: Yes, of course, he knew, but at the time, he felt -- we both felt their existence was... an insignificant variable. ANDERTON: Insignificant to you maybe, but what about those people I put away with alternate futures? My God, if the country knew there was a chance they might not -- IRIS: The system would collapse. ANDERTON: I believe in that system... IRIS: Do you? Really? ANDERTON: You want to bring it down. IRIS: But you will bring it down if you don't kill Leo Crow. Why, that will be the most spectacular public display of how Precrime... didn't work. ANDERTON: I'm not gonna kill anybody. IRIS: Hold that thought. ANDERTON: Why should I trust you? IRIS: You shouldn't. You shouldn't trust anyone... certainly not the Attorney General who wants it all for himself. Not the young federal agent who wants your job. Not even the old man who just wants to hang onto what he's created. Don't trust anyone. Just find the Minority Report. ANDERTON: You said they're destroyed. IRIS: I said the record is destroyed. The original report exists for all time. I designed the system so that whenever a report occurred, it would be stored in a safe place -- but not declared. ANDERTON: What safe place is that? IRIS: The safest place of all. ANDERTON: Where? IRIS: Inside the Precog who predicted it. All you have to do is download it. ANDERTON: That's all, huh? Just walk right into Precrime, go into the Temple, somehow tap into the Precogs, and then download this Minority Report... IRIS: If... you have one. ANDERTON: -- and then walk out. IRIS: Actually, I think you'll have to run out, but yes, that's what you have to do. IRIS: It's funny how all living organisms are alike. When the chips are down... When the pressure is on... every creature on the face of the earth is interested in one thing and one thing only: It's own survival. Find the Minority Report. ANDERTON: How do I even know which one has it? IRIS: It's always in the more gifted of the three. ANDERTON: Which one is that? IRIS: The female. WITWER: Anderton's smart enough to go where electronic billboards and other media can't ID him to pick his pocket. There's fewer consumers down there, which means fewer scanners to target him. FLETCHER: No offense, sir, but why wouldn't he just run? WITWER: Because he thinks he's innocent. DR. EDDIE: Don't worry. I could cut open your chest, sew a dead cat in there and you'd never get an infection. Not with the spectrum of antibios I'll be shooting into you. ANDERTON: That's comforting. DR. EDDIE: You do understand I can't just give you new irises. The scanners will read the scar tissue. Alarms will go off. Large men with guns will appear... ANDERTON: Right. I know -- DR. EDDIE: Anesthesia. Try to relax, John. I'm saying I'll have to remove your eyes. Completely. ANDERTON: Yeah -- DR. EDDIE: And replace them with new ones. ANDERTON: I know that, but I wanna keep the old ones. DR. EDDIE: Why? ANDERTON: Because my mother gave them to me. What do you care? They're no good to you on the secondary market anyway. DR. EDDIE: Whatever you say, John. DR. EDDIE: You don't remember me, do you? ANDERTON: We know each other? DR. EDDIE: Oh, yes. ANDERTON: From where? D.C.? DR. EDDIE: Baltimore. Eastside. Solomon P. Eddie M.D. I was a plastic surgeon. I specialized in burn victims. Women mostly. ANDERTON: I put you away -- DR. EDDIE: Yes, you did. ANDERTON: You made those tapes... DR. EDDIE: They were performance pieces. ANDERTON: You set your patients on fire! DR. EDDIE: And put them out. Some not as quickly as others, but let's change the subject, shall we? The future is much more interesting than the past. Don't you think? LARA: You take anything in your coffee? WITWER: Cream and sugar. LARA: I don't have any cream. Sorry. WITWER: Just sugar then. You and John ever come here? LARA: We used to, every summer. WITWER: He's not here now, is he? I had to ask. LARA: I don't have any sugar either. DR. EDDIE: I know you're in a hurry, so I juiced up the nano-reconstruction around your new eyes. ANDERTON: The nano... what? DR. EDDIE: Organic microbots that reconstruct the nerves and blood vessels. It'll feel like fleas chewing on your eyeballs. But whatever you do, don't scratch. WITWER: Who does that look like to you? It's Agatha. FLETCHER: So this means -- WITWER: He's coming here to get her. FLETCHER: Find out where that pipe leads -- I want every team underground now! WITWER: It doesn't matter. He wins. FLETCHER: We can stop him. WITWER: She's in the room with him when he kills Crow. She's already a part of his future. Put everything you've got into finding that room and we stop a murder. STORE VOICE: Hello, Mr. Yakamoto! Welcome back to the Gap. RUFUS: What's your pleasure? We got it all here. We got guys come in, want to experience sex as a woman. We got women come in, want to get laid by their favorite soap star. We got rape fantasies from both sides. We got sports fantasies. And then we got what I call the "Look Ma, I can fly" fantasies which encompass everything from bungee jumping to soaring like an eagle over the Grand Canyon. Near Death's real popular right now, which includes everything from getting hit by a car, to falling off a high building to plane crashes. It's a big rush, you come out the other side without a heart attack. CUSTOMER: I wanna kill my boss. ANDERTON: What happened? Where's the rest? RUFUS: I guess that's all of it. ANDERTON: Is there a Minority Report? An alternate future. Do I have one? AGATHA: No. ANDERTON: Every day for the last six years I've thought about only two things. The first was what my son would look like if he were alive today. If I would even recognize him if I saw him on the street. The second was what I would do to the man who took him. AGATHA: Anderton -- ANDERTON: You were right. I'm not being set up. I'm gonna kill this man. AGATHA: Please, I want to go back... ANDERTON: I can't leave. You said so yourself, there is no Minority Report. I don't have an alternative future. AGATHA: But you still have a choice. The others never had a chance to see their future. You did. WITWER: If you were a child killer, you took these pictures, would you leave them out on the bed for anyone to find? FLETCHER: They could have been put away. Anderton could have found them. WITWER: What kind of cop were you before this? FLETCHER: I was a Treasury Agent for eight years. Why? WITWER: Treasury... Then this would be your first actual murder scene. I worked homicide before I went federal. This is what we would've called an "orgy of evidence". Do you know how many orgies I had as a homicide copy, Gordon? FLETCHER: How many? WITWER: None. This was arranged. AGATHA: Can you see? So beautiful... Where are we going? ANDERTON: Someplace safe. AGATHA: I have to go back. ANDERTON: Why? AGATHA: The other two will die without me. ANDERTON: You want to spend the rest of your life in the temple? AGATHA: I always wondered what the world would be like. But now that I've seen it, I don't need to see any more. It's all right. Once I'm in the tank, I won't remember any of this. ANDERTON: Agatha, you're never going back there. AGATHA: I am going back. I see myself there. It's best, Anderton, if you don't think of me as human. BURGESS: Tell me what you have. WITWER: This is the murder of a woman named Anne Lively. BURGESS: He told me about this. You got this from Containment? WITWER: Yes. This is from the twins, Arthur and Dashiel. Agatha's stream was missing. Now this one is from the cyberparlor. Anderton downloaded it directly from Agatha. Watch... BURGESS: It's the same prevision. WITWER: Not quite. Look at the surface wind across the water. Watch the ripples... moving away from shore. Now the second image. Watch the water. The wind's changed. The ripples are going the other way. BURGESS: I don't understand -- WITWER: This murder is happening at two different times. WITWER: I'm thinking someone got away with murder. BURGESS: How? WITWER: By fooling the system. All someone would have to do is wait for Precrime to stop the murder from taking place, then, a few minutes later, commit the crime in exactly the same way. BURGESS: Yes... It's called an echo. The act of murder is such a violent disturbance in the future continuum that it sometimes repeats to the Precogs. WITWER: Precog Deja Vu... BURGESS: We teach the tech's to identify them and disregard... WITWER: So there is a way to fool the system? BURGESS: Yes. WITWER: Of course, it would have to be someone with access to the Prevision in the first place, someone fairly high up -- BURGESS: Shhh. You know what I hear? WITWER: What? BURGESS: Nothing. No footsteps coming up the stairs. No hovercraft out the window. No clickity click of little spyders. No one crashing through that door. And do you know why I don't hear any of those things, Danny? Because right now, the Precogs can't see. ANDERTON: They used Sean. They wanted me to think Crow killed him -- but he didn't. LARA: Then who was he? ANDERTON: Just some guy... they found. LARA: Found? Where? ANDERTON: Somewhere. LARA: Think, John. Why would they set you up? ANDERTON: Because I found out about her... LARA: About who? ANDERTON: Anne Lively... AGATHA: Dr. Hineman once said to me that "The dead don't die. They look on and help." Remember that, John. He's on the beach now, a toe in the water, asking you to come in with him. He's been racing his mother up and down the sand. There's so much love in this house. He's ten years old. He's surrounded by animals. He wants to be a vet. You keep a rabbit for him. A bird. And a fox. He's in high school. He likes to run. Like his father. He runs the two mile and the long relay. He's twenty-three, at a University. He makes love to a pretty girl named Claire. He asks her to be his wife. He calls here and tells Lara who cries... he still runs. Across the University. And in the stadium where John watches. Oh, God -- he's running so fast, like his daddy. He sees his daddy, wants to run to him, but he's only six years old and he can't do it. And the other man is so fast. There was so much love in this house. AGATHA: Can't you see? She just wanted her little girl back. ANDERTON: Who wanted her little girl back? AGATHA: The drowning woman. Anne... But it was too late. Her little girl was already gone. ANDERTON: She died? AGATHA: She grew up. ANDERTON: She's still alive? AGATHA: She's not alive, but she didn't die. ANDERTON: Oh, Jesus... LARA: John? What is it? ANDERTON: How did I not see this? Agatha, who killed you mother? Who killed Anne Lively? AGATHA: I'm sorry, John, but you have to run again. ANDERTON: What -- AGATHA: RUN! BURGESS: All right. Tell you what I'll do. First thing Monday, I'll look over the Witwer evidence and I'll have Gideon run the Containment files, see if anyone drowned a woman named -- what did you say her name was? LARA: Anne Lively... But I never said she drowned. ANDERTON: All these years Agatha's had the truth locked inside of her -- the Minority Report. All these years she's the only one who knew what really happened... until last week when she took my hand and showed me the image of a drowning woman... an image that would eventually lead me back to you. BURGESS: I don't know what you're talking about, John. ANDERTON: I'm talking about Anne Lively. Just a junkie who had a kid once and had to give her up. But, surprise, this junkie cleaned herself up. And she wanted the kid back. She wanted Agatha... But you and Hineman had already turned the girl into something else: A Precog. And without her, there was no Precrime. She's always been the strongest of the three. And you know that without Agatha, you had nothing. Without her, you wouldn't be where you are now, standing there signing autographs... So now you had to get rid of Anne Lively, you had to find a way to shut her up... which presented a problem. How can you murder her without the precogs seeing it? Simple: you use the system against her. You hired someone to kill her for you, knowing full well the precogs would see that murder. You lured Anne Lively out to the lake with the promise of doing the right thing, reuniting her with her daughter... You killed her yourself in the same way the Precogs predicted your John Doe would kill her. You made the real murder look like an echo, knowing the tech would ignore it. You fooled the other two precogs, but not Agatha. She was going to see the murder of her own mother no matter what state you did it in, or how you tired to hide it. ANDERTON: What are you gonna do now? No doubt the Precogs have already seen this. BURGESS: No doubt. ANDERTON: Then go ahead, pull the trigger. What's the matter, Lamar? You see the problem, don't you? If you don't kill me, it means the precogs were wrong and Precrime is over. If you do kill me, you go away, but... it proves the system works. The precogs were right. So what do you do? ANDERTON: What's it worth? Just one more murder... You'll rot in hell with a halo, but people will still believe in Precrime. All you have to do now is pull the trigger like they said you would. Except... You've seen your own future. Which means... You can change it if you want to. You still have a choice, Lamar... lscgid: execve():/home/jauene/public_html/cgi-bin/counters/counter.cgi: Permission denied page views

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