Home Invasion – A brilliant engineer and his family get trapped in their home when his highly sophisticated, prototype security device goes rogue.
Tim AucoinLogliner
Home Invasion – A brilliant engineer and his family get trapped in their home when his highly sophisticated, prototype security device goes rogue.
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Hello, this seems to me like the situation rather than a picture of the whole plot.
When a brillian engineer and his family are trapped at home by a?sophisticated security device, then what happens ?
I presume the objective goal is that he needs to? escape.????So:
As days pass and food runs out, an eccentric?engineer, trapped?at home, and cut off from all outside communication by a security system he invented, must defeat his own ingenuity before he and his family?starve to death.
(39 words)
Awkward, but fwiw.
I like the irony, that the?main character has?been hoisted by his own engineering?petard.
It’s interesting how Ideas come back around. There was a movie called Demon Seed ?in 1977, based on a book by Dean R. Koonz. It was about a home security system that grows sentient and traps one of the homeowners inside. Your story sounds different. However I would take a look at that movie so your idea doesn’t overlap.
“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
— Willa Cather
The challenge is to come up with?novel??variations and twists.
Any chance the security device is an android dog ?(SPOT – Security Prototype Of Tomorrow) who goes rogue when the scientist develops and introduces Canny the?android cat nanny. Now that would be fun and uncanny. ?Title suggestion: Spot on Canny.
Okay playtime over. Back to the serious discussion.
This one’s tough. ?It’s a good idea. ?A cool monster in the box. ?And a nice dose of irony.
But to really hook us we need that impending danger. ?The security system is?going to kill them.?There’s something that’s keeping it from outright killing them, but maybe that something is temporary, wearing off, “processing”… ?This feels like Asimov and the 3 rules where one of them has been perverted and now the machine is working out that the best way to keep the hero safe is first by killing his family and eventually by killing him. ?If so that gives us a ticking clock. ?Whatever the circumstances, the implication is that something pivotal is going to happen that is going to make the house kill the hero and his family.
So give us that. ?This won’t be a simple rework of word choice in the existing log line unfortunately. ?You’ll have to come at it fresh. ?But you have all the pieces so you’ll get it. ?Focus on the mortal danger. ?The machine you trust to keep you safe kills you. ?That’s your hook.