We don’t need names in a logline, it’s taking up two words that could be put to better use.

This is incredibly vague. A?logline is a concise summary of the story in its entirety using (ideally) no more than 40 words phrased as a single sentence. Currently, all we have is two strangers with secrets in a dark town realising that their secrets can’t stay hidden. We need to know why they’re in the town, what is the inciting incident that kick starts the story, ideally one of these two would be the protagonist – who is this person, we need a goal and we need to know what antagonistic forces are working against them. This is the bare minimum required for a logline.

Check out the formula page for help with formatting, or better yet, use the logline generator to help you understand the different components of a logline and their purposes.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the additional comments. Please don’t take anything I’ve written as overly critical (I apologise if it seems like it). I think there’s a great story in here and I’m excited to see where you take it.

Could you go down a Dennis Nedry approach? The hacker actually meets a disgruntled former employee of the corporation who was a coder and he/she deliberately wrote bugs into the system. This does away with the incompetence of the company issue and also, having an inside man will help with exposition (the half man approach from Save the Cat!). This employee could come into play later in the series but be a main character who has their own goal that is similar to the hacker’s but not quite the same.

The issues of the ability to control reality with computer code…. for me this is a stretch too far. But that’s just me. Other people may be totally ok with it. I just feel like it brings in much bigger questions – if code can be used to manipulate reality, reality MUST be based on code – that’s how code works. Therefore reality isn’t real, it’s a manmade construct. This isn’t a problem per se but it results in me wondering what is the real reality. In both The Matrix and Ready Player One, there is a reason why people exist in the created world and if you don’t find a really good answer for this, I personally, would struggle to get past it. I agree that the logline (and the sotry for that matter) doesn’t need to answer the ‘how’ every time BUT I do think that if it is a question that everyone is likely to ask, and it never gets answered, it could be a dealbreaker for people.

I do think there is something here… so I was wondering if you could try something like this? Rather than the corporation discovering they can control the existing reality, they figure out a way to create living organisms that are controlled by code. In my head, I can see a scene where the hacker has bought a plant, and they hack into this system and they change the code and the plant besides them visibly grows. Or the flower changes colour. You get the idea. She discovers that they’ve created hybrid bioengineered life and through her investigations, during which she comes across the disgruntled former employee, she finds out that the plant was actually created in the 1960s. The former employee could be an older guy and he left in the 80s so he doesn’t know the full extent but he can fill in some of the blanks. The end of the first series can be the discovery that this company has actually managed to integrate fully hybrid humans, controllable by code, into our existing reality. They are not controlling reality, but they are replacing reality with their own creation that they can control.?I think this would be fascinating and I have no problem believing this could happen. Google are probably doing it already haha.

Anyway, that’s just my idea for it. Obviously, this might not be the story you want to tell, but I feel like it answers problematic questions in your idea. There’s still a leap of faith, but it’s like Jurassic Park – it’s plausible and with a little explanation it can be bought into.

Hope this helps.