The Adventure of the Dan Project

New Netflix film The Adam Project sees Ryan Reynolds play Adam, who travels back in time from 2050 to 2022 and meets his twelve-year-old self. It's one of those films that makes you wonder what the scenario it depicts would be like. So I've wondered and written it...

2004. The boy leans on the windowsill, carefully avoiding the cacti that are housed there, wondering what the noise was. It sounded a lot like a futuristic time-travelling jet had just landed on the playing field at the end of the street. He tried to take in another view from his parents bedroom but still nothing could be seen. Perhaps it had just been a noisy car. He picked up the controller and continued in his attempts to complete the tricky motorbike chase level on his latest PlayStation 2 game James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing. 

There was a sound from downstairs. The boy listened for a moment to confirm and sure enough, there was definitely something down there. The distraction had meant that Jaws had once again successfully driven the tanker full of nanobots into the city in the game but now wasn't the time to worry about that. He attempted to creep down stairs, an impossible task on a floor so creaky that a haunted house would be jealous. He stuck his head around the living room door carefully. 

"Hi there," said a man who was sat on the sofa, clutching his abdomen. Part of the boy felt like he wanted to scream but there was something familiar about this man. He reminded him of his own father, with the same large forehead that was passed down the male lineage. 

"So, 2004," the man continued. "You're not at school so I guess it's either the holidays or the weekend. You're home alone so it's probably Sunday and your parents have taken your brother to play football. Am I right?" 

There was a pause and the boy started saying "how did you-" and then he stopped. Next to the man on the sofa was Dusty the cat who was vigorously attempting to lick the man's other hand. Dusty, the cat that wouldn't go near strangers and loved nothing more than being close to the boy she'd known since he was a baby, who had a strange habit of licking him. 

"You're me," the boy said. 

"I'm smarter than I remember," the man muttered under his breath. Then to the boy he said "yes Dan, I'm you."

"But how-?"

"I'm from the future. I've been shot and I need your help." 

"Shot? Why by?"

"That's classified. Look, go and get the box of first aid stuff from under Mum and Dad's bed will you?"

An hour later Older Dan had managed to dress his wound with the limited supplies from the Tupperware box, even if most of the contents was out of date. Young Dan was now at bursting with a need for answers. 

"So in the future...?" said Young Dan. 

"You accepted that pretty quickly. This is pre-Doctor Who too." 

"What?" 

"Just you wait 'til next March!"

"What is the future like?" Young Dan asked, deciding not to focus on this detail. 

A look of pain passed on the Older Dan's face and it wasn't because of the bullet wound. He knew of the great challenges that the Young Dan had to face over the next fifteen years and there was no easy way to say that life was going to be tough. Besides, the fact he was here was bad enough but telling his younger self the future had the potential to really mess with the time stream. 

"I can't tell you," Older Dan said. "But there are things you should know. You sometimes feel a bit, well, different right?"

"Er, yeah," said Young Dan, shifting uncomfortably. 

"You have something called dyspraxia," Older Dan began. "It's a mild special need. You can find out much more about it and hell, you can probably even get diagnosed at your age. It doesn't define you, it doesn't mean you can't do things but it does mean you might have to work harder at certain things than other people." 

"OK," said Young Dan, still processing this information.

"I can't tell you the future but I can help you to prepare for it. I spent so long trying to be someone else, trying to be like everyone else but eventually I realised that it was OK just to be myself. You have the ability to do great things within you but you need to have the confidence to do them." 

"Right," Young Dan replied. This was going to take a while to sink in. "So why have you time travelled to the past?"

"I was aiming for two years earlier." Older Dan began and then paused. If he was following the narrative thread of the film he was supposed to be looking for his wife but seeing as though he didn't have a wife this was a tricky thing to imagine. He also wondered how his father could have been involved with the invention of time travel like Mark Ruffalo in the film. Around this time he was a bookkeeper so maybe he kept the financials of the company that invented time travel? It was a bit of a stretch. 

The narrative fell apart. Older Dan remembered he was actually sat on his sofa on a Sunday morning, looking forward to the roast dinner he would be having later and was not actually in a Netflix movie. He realised he was now stuck writing in third person and couldn't come up with a end to the blog post he was writing. He decided to thank the readers for sticking with this unusual concept and headed off to have the roast dinner.