“KAYLEY’S CHARGER IS MISSING” — a movie pitch

I was at my parents at the weekend, and my dad started asking me about my relationship with the internet. His point was that life would change drastically if you just remove one piece of the jigsaw of my life. E.g “what would you do if YouTube wasn’t there anymore?”

Turns out he’s quite good for the imagination because I then saw the below movie in my head. If anyone wants to produce it for me, please email stubagful@gmail.com — I’m serious, I want to see this.

KAYLEY’S CHARGER IS MISSING

Kayley is in her mid 20’s, she’s forgetful, clumsy, below average. She’s just getting by. She works a boring office job in a traditional bullpen. She’s just split up with her boyfriend. She then goes in to work one Tuesday, and she gets to her desk, and she realises her phone is at 35% battery. She looks in her bag for her phone charger.

She can’t find it.

Panicked, she empties her bag out onto her desk. The charger isn’t there.

She goes to her supervisor a few cubicles away.

“Erm…Rob. Did I leave my charger here yesterday?”

Rob’s face falls. His lip twitches.

“Erm…n-no. Can’t you find it?”

“No!” Kayley’s voice trembles. “I can’t find my phone charger!”

“Okay, lets not panic,” says Rob, clearly panicking. “We’ll find it. The world’s not going to stop because you’ve lost your charger.”

“What’s going on?” Emma from accounts comes over.

Rob and Kayley try and save face, but eventually have to admit that Kayley’s lost her phone charger.

Emma reacts with complete horror.

Cut to later.

Everyone in the office is tearing the entire place apart, rooting around under tables, looking behind computers, in bins, thirty or forty people are tearing the entire place upside down. Rob is curled up under a desk crying. Kayley is sitting in her chair rocking back and forth and chewing her fingernails screaming “NO, NO, NO, NO!!!”

A distraught Emma comes over. Her suit is crumpled and ruined. Her hair is a tangled mess. She glares at Kayley with complete contempt.

“You know what happens now. Don’t you? Everything’s going to STOP, KAYLEY! THE WORLD IS GOING TO STOP!” she shrieks as Kayley whimpers in terror.

Cut to a few days later.

A news channel is showing a reporter explaining that all international flights have been cancelled. Queues of lorries are stuck at processing at international ports. Empty shelves in shops. In hospital wards, patients are left lying around while doctors are searching drawers. The streets are filled with armies of people looking under rocks, in flowerbeds, in bins, screaming in terror that they can’t find Kayley’s phone charger.

Kayley is at home. She’s sitting on the sofa in shock as police search her home, sealing various odds and ends and stale crips found down the side of her sofa in plastic bags and taking them away for examination.

Kayley’s ex-boyfriend Colin arrives.

“You called me?” he asks.

Kayley runs to hug him “Oh thank God! Do you have my charger? Maybe I left it round yours last time I was there?” hope crackles in Kayley’s voice as Colin shakes his head sadly.

“Sorry Kayley.”

Kayley falls to the floor and screams and cries in a heap.

Cut to later.

Its several months later. Chaos is still ongoing. Supply chains are disrupted around the world, so shops are reduced to selling canned goods and nothing else to hordes of distraught customers. All planes are grounded.

Kayley gets a call from her parents. Her dad is in hospital. He has a tumour. The doctors have told him it is operable, but they can’t do anything because the world is still stopped because of Kayley’s missing charger.

Kayley gets in her car and drives to see her parents at the hospital. She arrives and hugs her mum, and they go in to see her dad, lying in a bed with tubes coming out of him. Kayley hugs her dad, and he puts an arm around her shoulder.

“I’m so sorry Dad,” she blubbers through the tears.

“It’s alright, darling, it’s alright,” he says.

“I’ll-I’ll find the charger! They can do the operation! It’ll-it’ll all be alright!”

“It’s okay darling. If you can’t find it, then that’s okay. If I have to go, then…then I have to go” he says sadly, and he smiles at her through the tears.

“It’s alright. It’s alright,” he says.

His words do nothing to calm Kayley’s floods of tears.

Cut to later.

A year later and the world is in ruins.

Kayley, now dressed in unwashed clothes plastered with stains, comes out of her house that has broken boards nailed to the windows. She’s carrying a petrol cannister. She goes to her car and siphons the petrol into the tank.

She drives through a ruined city centre full of destroyed buildings that have been allowed to burn to ash because the fire brigade haven’t been able to do anything since the charger was lost.

She sees a few deranged scavengers in a bin, rooting through rubbish looking for either food or something else.

She heads on to the supermarket out of town. She wanders through empty aisles.

She freezes when she sees a dead body at the end of what used to be a canned food aisle, now just empty shelves. The body has recently been shot with an arrow.

She approaches the corpse, and sees it was trying to reach under the empty shelf where a can has rolled to the back. Kayley pushes the corpse away with her foot and reaches to the back and pulls out a can of beans.

She smiles.

Back outside the supermarket, she returns to her car with the can. She opens the door and gets in, and the seat buckles underneath her.

Kayley sighs and gets up. She fiddles about under the seat, when suddenly her hand grabs something.

Her face etched with horror, she pulls out her phone charger.

After a moment’s horrified pause, she looks up.

She looks out at the ruined city in the distance. Her eyes are drawn to a tower block. She hears a scream, and there’s a flash and the sound of a gunshot, followed by the sound of a body falling to the floor.

Kayley looks back down at her phone charger in her hand.

With a quick glance over her shoulder, she hurriedly shoves it back under the seat. She gets in her car and drives away.

Fade to black.