Narrative

Leonardo Briggs, an aspiring painter in London, finds his life slowly being taken over by a virus, the iP35, which starts with the deterioration of the eye’s macula leading to mass visual hallucinations among the general population. Leonardo Briggs leads a seamlessly normal life as he has recently built a major reputation for himself through his work for important clients and exhibitions to provide for his wife Emily, and newborn child on the way. Being the sole provider, the stress of work becomes an endless cycle. We as the audience learn early on of a secret he has been holding onto for the past year. He had been experiencing light visual hallucinations, yet hasn’t shared the diagnosis in fear that his closest friends and family will think he has become mentally unwell. However, he isn’t the only one as this is a significant symptom of a virus that had recently taken over the UK. We start to follow others whose stories intertwine with Leonardo and his altered perception. The virus begins by slowly blurring vision, the brain begins to compensate for the missing information thus overtime taking over and producing vivid and complex visual perceptions. The population becomes apart of a larger hallucination as each person falls into a deep lapse of one’s mind. The familiarity of the world is punctured by distorting perspectives, abstract figures of once known individuals in their lives, which to each person infected feels familiar-but-unknown, deja vu of sorts. It starts by giving the infected visuals of the desired life they once wished for but slowly alters into their greatest nightmare as their deepest fears from their subconscious take over. As they fall into this trance, the audience learns the unaffected are forced to bring the frozen and trance-like beings into the hospital in hope of them eventually “waking up”. The virus has the ability to subvert cellular antiviral defences  and mutate normal cells to attack the host. The transformation of the cells began with the distribution of a new purple pill on the market aimed toward enhancing everyday activities to feel “out of this world”, a hallucinogen for the regular citizen promised to fade after 24 hours, without the information of the long term effect of mutation of cells. We grasp the severity of the distribution of the purple pill as cases arise of people around the world dropping to the ground in trance-like states.