Plot synopsis
The Spiritual Switchboard holds dead people for three days after they die. If they haven’t found a substitute body to inhabit by then, their soul passes over to the other side.
In the future year of 2009, the very wealthy Ian McCandless is dying. So, he orders bounty hunters called ‘bonejackers’ to snatch the healthy body of Alex Furlong, a racing driver from the past (1992) who is about to die in a car accident.
The team lock their co-ordinates onto Alex and teleport his body out of the car just as it leaves the track. His car goes on to hit a bridge and explodes.
His body arrives into the future onto an ambulance bed. He wakes up and when they realise he is conscious, they try to apply a voltage to the frontal lobe.
But armed soldiers attack the vehicle and amongst the explosions, Alex escapes. As they technically died in their own time, the person who paid for the transporting owns their bodies.
Alex is now a ‘freejack’ – someone who has escaped from the past and arrived in this future year. He goes on to spend the rest of the movie on the run in a dystopian future world and never returns to his present.
My comments
Scientists from the future are able to change our present by teleporting a man to their time. However, they time it just before he dies, so that the timeline quickly converges.
Although the future did not diverge, the scientists thought it would if they did not time the kidnap at just the moment before the body was about to die.
The dashed green line in the diagram below represents this potential diverging future.
Summary of time travel
Nobody travels back beyond the date that the first time-travel trip to the future takes place, so the past is undefined.
The scientists from the future believe that the timing of the kidnapping is critical, so they must be using a model of time with a double-well timeline.
The transported body is used to prolong the life of someone about to die, which is further evidence that the future is open.
Category of time travel
Science fiction: time-travel transporter.
Model of time
Undefined past, open future with a double-well timeline.
