Rough Draft Week: Precocious Precogs
/If you’ve read my books, you know I like to incorporate children into effects for their parents.
I will often do this with some kind of video prediction, because it’s something the parents will keep forever.
If the kid is pre-verbal, you can have them grab at a card from a deck which will turn out to be the card one of the parents selects later. A 50/50 force deck is good for this sort of thing because you can show the camera a big mix of cards, but the kid only actually has to grab any one from one half of the deck.
But if the kid is at the point where they are speaking, especially if they’re in that mimicking stage where you can be like, “Say blueberry,” and they reply with, “Boobebby,” or something like that, then you can use them for a revelation in an effect.
You need a trick where you can force a particular word on people. Let’s say you’re using the Hoy book test and the word is, “Yesterday.”
Maybe you’re watching the kid while the parents are out or you just have a few minutes alone with him/her (because you’re not a creep and people don’t flip out when you’re alone with a child).
Record a video of the child and walk up to him and say, “Okay, Billy, say ‘yesterday.’”
Billy says, “Esterday.”
Now, in the same room, at the same time, record a video saying , “Okay, Billy, what word is Mommy thinking of?”
The room tone of these two recordings should be essentially identical. So it’s a simple matter of using any video editing software and removing the audio from the first question and replacing it with the audio of the second question.”
So now you have a video of you walking up to the kid. “Okay, Billy, what word is Mommy thinking of?” And Billy replies with, “Esterday.”
I’ve done variations on this dozens of times. Parents love this junk.
But in the last 18 months or so, I’ve started doing something new as well. I’ve started recording a third clip where I say, “Billy, what word will you think of?”
Now, 8-10 years later, when Billy is 12 or 13, I can send him a video as a prediction and have him think of a “random” word from a book. Then when he watches the video prediction, he’ll see himself as a toddler somehow knowing the word he would think of years later. I feel like that’s going to be a real Mind-F.
“You used to do this sort of thing all the time,” I’ll tell him. “You’d say ‘boom-boom’ 15 seconds before a lightning strike. Or we’d have you point to the team that you thought was going to win when we would watch sports on TV. And you were always right. Then your mom dropped you on your head one day and you became stupid like you are now.”
I know the idea of setting up a trick for a decade later is not something a lot of you will consider, but look, the time is going to pass either way. You know how quickly the last decade of your life went. The next will go even faster. It’s not like it’s a lot of work. It will just take 2 minutes of your time to set up something that will really astonish someone years from now.