What the Eye can See

A rewrite of James Cameron's "Avatar"

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the properties contained herein. They all belong to James Cameron. I'm just mixing them up a bit... for fun and nonprofit, of course.

Authors Note: This story is more than mere tweaking but not quite a total rewrite. As such, I would deeply appreciate constructive criticism.

Summary: A rewrite of the movie with an Earth in (relatively) better condition, a smarter RDA, more developed Na'vi and... well, a lot of things, to be honest. Some of Jake's voice-overs will be kept in order to keep the feel of the film... with the appropriate changes.

It was that dream again. For the last year, it'd always been the same one. The trees... the clouds (or maybe mist or fog or... something). But what was really odd about the dream was the angle.

'When I was lying there in that VA hospital, with a big hole blown in the middle of my life... I started having these dreams of flying.'

The forest began to rise from below. Higher and higher it came, until you could almost touch the leaves, smell the dew.

'Sooner or later though... you always have to wake up.'

Earth, 2148 CE, Standard Gregorian

Jacob Sully awoke with a start. For a minute he almost began to panic before he remembered where he was. He was sitting... reclining in a comfy chair. To his left, there was a cabin filled with similarly seated, smartly dressed men and women, reading or poking at mobile tablets in their private niches. To his left... a window with the hard blind down. He opened the blind.

In the background, the air-steward made an announcement over the PA. "This is American Airlines Flight #514, non-stop from Arlington, Virginia. Please note that we will be landing withing the next 15 minutes." The obvious requests were made: please stow any carry-on items you had taken out; please return table trays and chairs to their default positions; please fasten your safety harnesses.

Jacob (or as he preferred to be called, Jake) began raising his chair fastening his harnesses, closing the blind. Besides... looking out the window at an endless series of green hexagons had reminded him why he was here. And where here was. Neither thought had any sort of positive connotation.

The airliner, kept aloft by eight massive VTOL turbines, veered sharply to the left. Above it, the thick, gray blanket of cloud that promised a prairie downpour. Below it was a massive network of interlocking, hexagonal fields, each subdivided into six triangular segments that were completely automated. Down there was grain, potatoes, beans, carrots, maize, soybeans, gourds and greens and root crops of all kinds... not to mention hemp and various oil-crops. From horizon to horizon, enough produce was being grown to feed (and clothe, for that matter) a city of five million people.

That city was where Jake Sully was headed. On the horizon, the skyline of Corporate City rose like some strange string of mountains from the flat Kansas plain. This city... this city-state... coming here was like coming home to a foster family.

For a funeral, no less.

The passenger craft hovered over the lower-lying buildings at the edge of the city, before coming in to dock at the city airport, landing smoothly in a shallow, ground- level maintenance pit at the flank of a pier that jutted from the main terminal. After the passenger bridge was firmly attached, First-Class began emptying out and Jake made to leave was well. However, getting out of his chair required the use of his own upper body strength and two airline attendants in order to get into his carbon-fiber wheelchair. He only accepted the help because it was absolutely necessary.

"They can fix a spine nowadays... if you've got the money. A procedure that experimental means you'd have to sell your soul to come up with the first payment. Needless to say, vet benefits wouldn't cover it unless you've got 'guinea pig' tattooed on your ass"

Jake began wheeling himself towards the exit, his duffel bag on his lap. For the first time since he boarded, the other passengers began looking at him in disdainful puzzlement. He was shaven and had a decent haircut... but his rumpled t-shirt, torn jeans and "Born Loser" squad tattoo really made him an oddity in this place.

"I became a marine for the hardship, to be hammered on the anvil of life. I told myself I could pass any test a man could pass."

Jake wheeled his way into the pier and began toward the main terminal.

"Besides... getting away from 'mommy' seemed like a good idea at the time."

As he reached the main terminal concourse, the proof of where he was hit him like a falling AMP suit. Everywhere there were signs of who ran this city, who had built it and kept money and people and life coursing through it

Back in the old fission days, when the first prospectors began probing the Martian crust, when the eyes of industry were already looking to the asteroids of the inner Belt, the United Nations had recognized that separate countries (or even unions of countries) couldn't keep all their nationals from creating total anarchy in the rush for off-world resources. Towards the end of avoiding that anarchy, the UN (through ECOSOC) had voted to establish a for-profit consortium that would be be the exclusive, monopolistic agent to develop, refine and market all resources and resource bases outside the territory of Earth and it's moon. This had been the beginning of the Resource Development Administration, the RDA.

That acronym was everywhere in this airport. Everywhere there were ads: ads for job openings with "The Company", ads for stock and ads for company bonds. It seemed every third video screen (the ones not showing arrival schedules) was tuned to some sort of business-related news; stock prices, business rumors and the currency rating of the RDAC among them. There were digital posters mounted into the walls: one minute it would be for the airport itself, then for some public service. Then they would change to advertisements for projects associated with RDA: re-greening the Sahara for example. Then they would change to career destinations: the Mercurian mines, chemical extraction on Venus, the promise of a new life on Mars (this one in particular caused momentary pangs of grief and bitter irony in Jake) or gas mining among the clouds of the outer giants with colonies on their moons.

However, there were ads that never changed. The largest screens constantly cycled one advertisement, a montage of still images, video, and voice-over that featured verdant forests, bizarre life forms, the gentle tunes of a decade-old soft-pop song and the general spirit of good-will and cooperation between worlds.

Pandora.

Jake simply starred at one of these for a minute before moving on. It was just... something about one of those images seemed familiar. Maybe it was just that was where... Tom.

Finally reaching the entertainment concourse, Jake wheeled himself into his "rendezvous point", the Olympus Grill, Lounge and Sports Bar. Wheeling himself up to the front bar, he proceeded to order a beer.

"Let's get it straight up front: I don't want your pity. I got enough of that from the nurses at the VA."

Spying some attractive young ladies in slinky garments looking his way, Jake threw some of the old "Marine Charm" their way in the form of a raised glass and a wink.

They just turned their heads away and began laughing amongst themselves: not the giggle of the flattered, but that of someone a bit too polite to laugh in your face.

"To be honest, I would have preferred comm numbers from a few of them."

As Jake drank his can of brew (having forgone the glass with the lack of mixed company), he began looking around. The lunch crowd was just emptying out from the raised dining room, there was a soccer game on the main screen down by the dance floor, the other TV's... ah, news reports. Currently, a news report on the re-introduction of tigers to Java was ending, and something else was beginning. The newscaster, an extremely sober Indian man with a British-Derivative accent, was announcing the 20th anniversary of the establishing RDA voyage to Pandora.

The original, twenty year-old footage was shown, with the RDA Executive Secretary of the day announcing the inclusion of Col. Miles Quaritch and Dr. Grace Augustine to the mission "To maintain the atmosphere of Humanitarian Cooperation and to further Understanding between our two species." Quaritch, a tall, beefy man of about 40, had his light brown hair in a tight crew-cut and wore the typical Army Service Uniform, his face impassive. Beside him sat a woman wearing a shirt, vest and slacks combo that wasn't formal in the least. Her red hair up in a bun, the 40 year-old tenured Stanford lecturer looked 10 years younger than she actually was; a testament to the longevity gene-mods that her parents had paid an arm and a leg to procure for her in utero.

She just looked amused.

Watching this, it took nearly all of Jake's residual combat senses to detect the man coming up behind him on the velvet carpet. He spun one wheel on his chair back to swing to face the figure, a man in a close fitting two piece suit. "You the guy I'm supposed to meet?" Jake asked.

"Yes sir. We should hurry: you probably want to freshen up before the... service."

"As if he had to remind me." Thought Jake as he followed this man... his driver.

The vehicle was a luxury sedan with electric drive and modded to be wheelchair accessible. As they drove into the city proper, Jake looked out the window. Business-people, yuppies and even the odd family that had been out during the morning were hurrying for cover as the rain started.

"The Company built and marketed this city as the perfect, planned, metropolis: A place where one could work and play and have all the comfort of the old suburbs without the insane commutes."

Jake looked though the raindrops splashing on the window, gazing upon the lit windows of shops and galleries and other places of amusement and leisure. This section of the city, especially, seemed to be quite affluent.

"No poverty, no crime, no corruption, they said."

Then, in an alley, Jake spied a man wrapped in thick layers of tattered clothes and jackets despite the rising June heat, looking for a place to wait out the rain.

"Try telling that to a man desperate enough to shiv another human being for the Company credits in his wallet."

The car sped on, and the man passed out of sight.

"Try telling that to the man who killed my brother."

Later...

Jake wheeled himself though the hallway of one of Corporate City's many skyscrapers. Since he'd checked into his hotel, he'd showered (and been impressed at how paraplegic-friendly the bathroom was), ordered a suit from a catalog over the hotel line (he was certain that wasn't covered by regular room service), ordered a late lunch (which was), killed some time exploring the suite's entertainment options, accepted the suit (a light gray number) when it came, got dressed (he insisted on doing it himself) and called for the driver again.

And now he was here... Here to pay his last respects.

Along with most of the other services in this city, the RDA operate it's own funeral services in a specialized section of this very building. As he approached the entrance to the parlor that had been reserved for Tom's service, he saw another man in a black suit waiting by the doors. "Hey! This room 224?"

"Yeah, it is." The man himself looked familiar to Jake in some odd way.

"You're one of Tom's friends, aren't you?" Jake asked, examining the tall, spindly fellow with the neatly trimmed beard and mustache

"More of a co-worker, really. I'm Norm Spellman, University of Oregon. You're Jake, right? Tom always talked about you." For a second, Jake wondered if that talking had been positive, but banished those thoughts quickly. Now was not the time for recriminations, public or private.

"That's me." Now that introductions were made, the process of grieving had to start. "Is Susan here?"

"Yeah, she's... she's here." Norm opened the metal door for Jake and then followed him into the parlor.

In vast difference to the antiseptic, gleaming corridor they had left, the funeral parlor itself was... to be fair, it was a somewhat bastardized version of English Georgian Revivalism with largely white and cream-colored overtones. However, it was plush while avoiding gaudiness, comfortable yet formal and exuded an undeniable air of affluence.

It was this affluence, especially arrayed in the service of his kin, that irritated Jake the most. By the time he reached Susan, he'd managed to choke that irritation down.

"Susan, I... I'm sorry. If there's anything I can do, you just have to say it." Susan Sully, married to Tom Sully for one year and a new widow, just sat in one of the chairs next to the casket, looking downward toward her hands, clenched into fists in her lap. On the third finger of her left hand, a ring lay; a solid band of rare (and expensive) blue gold from Pandora. She and Tom had met in their first year at the University of Sydney, him in the Arts (Languages and Cultures, Xenology Division) and her in Dentistry. Their courtship hadn't exactly run smoothly: by the time they got engaged, her extended family, having variously adhered over the last 140 years to Wahhabi Islam, Malay Buddhism, Malay Sufism, fanatically nationalist "neo-Buddhism" and an agnosticism borne out of religious exhaustion, had pulled in every conceivable direction to get Tom to convert to their particular faith-or-lack-thereof in a complex, multi-faction religious free-for-all. It had ended when Susan's parents (born and raised in Sydney, like their daughter) had allowed the marriage to proceed in a typically secular-Anglican fashion, thus pissing off almost all the factions at once and the rest soon afterward.

Jake hadn't been able to attend, having been hip-deep in parasite-infested watery mud somewhere on an abandoned tree plantation in Venezuela, gathering recon on radical Neo-Maoist activity with waterproof night-vision glasses. It was part of the price he paid for his own path in life... besides his legs.

For Tom, there wasn't supposed to be this kind of price.

"There's nothing for you to do." Susan said softly. Then she looked up at Jake's face (given his chair, not that far up) as he saw a fragile smile on her face... and indescribable grief behind her eyes. She looked back down at one of her clenched hands before turning and opening it showing a band of blue gold identical to the one she wore. "The police got Tom's ring back from the guy who..." Here, Susan began deteriorating into a mess of sobs.

"I didn't think that day could get any worse after the service ended... but then I got the offer."

After the Service, On-site crematorium

"You want me to what?" Jake whispered angrily at the man in front of him. They were in a far corner of the actual cremation room, a row of incinerators along one wall. Susan was watching the attendants as the prepared for the actual cremation: The casket itself had been an expensive prop; the actual cremation would be taking place in a fiber-board box. Tom's ashes and gases would then be pumped into a sealed canister and sent to Mars to aid the terraforming project, as he had selected on his RDA life insurance.

Luckily, they'd left Tom's suit on.

"Mr. Sully, you and your brother represent a considerable investment of money and resources..." The RDA representative began in an all-too-familiar tone. "But believe me when I say that the project Thomas was involved in completely dwarfs any dollar amount that has ever concerned you. That being said, I inquired whether you would be interested in taking over his contract." Everything in terms of money... this was really familiar.

"So you want me to go into cryo, get loaded on a spaceship and get sent to a planet in another solar system? Why did you approach me? Everything I learned about Pandora came from documentaries." Jake suspected something, an ulterior motive of some sort. However, he always suspected something ulterior with these guys, regardless of fact, testimony or common sense.

"Mr. Sully... Jacob..." The Rep began, trying and failing to act comforting. "While I cannot divulge the specifics of the project, I can say that you are the only other person capable of participating in it." Then came the big guns. "We know about your problems with the VA, namely that they're convinced that you're playing some perverse game of "Chicken" with them. We also know how much you resent being in that chair, which is why they think you'll sign the guinea pig papers soon enough. What we're offering is a chance to avoid that altogether by offering to pay for the surgery when you get back... And the chance for you to make a difference while you're there."

Jake turned his chair around in time to see the support staff load Tom's coffin into the incinerator. Susan was still there, trying against everything not to cry again.

"The egghead and the jarhead. Tommy was the scientist... he was the one willing to get shot light-years out into space to find the answers, whatever they were."

Jake wheeled back to the Rep. "Alright, you've got a deal. But let's make one thing perfectly clear: besides the money for my legs, everything in my pay goes to Susan. Got it?"

The Rep then smiled in a way that Jake just did not like at all. "Mr. Sully, that was always the arrangement, even with your brother alive."

"Me? I was just another dumb grunt going someplace I was gonna regret."