The Book of Babel
2019, 10 minutes
An ambitious city worker finds a book with the power to control the stock market.
Max works as a stockbroker in the city. While visiting his favourite cafe for lunch on a particularly stressful day and ordering the usual from the waiter. Max notices an old man at a table reciting gibberish from a tattered old book. The old man mentions Max's address and tells him that him and the owners of the book have been looking for him for five hundred years. Max demands to know more and grabs the book from the old man who suddenly has a heart attack. Attempts to revive him are fruitless. Max becomes intruiged by the book's numbers, letters, statistics and equations. He discovers it's a tool to decipher the market and know in advance the rises and falls in the values of stocks and shares. He utilises the book in order to get ahead in his competitive line of work, spending more time trying to work out its meaning. The contents have no ending and no beginning with no rhyme or reason to it but Max's naked ambition gets the better of him. The more Max gets sucked into the book, the more he finds himself pushing away everything he knows and loves in the name of knowing the truth of how to pre-determine and even bend the stock market to his will. By the time Max realises what is going on, it is already too late. The book has consumed him, his spirit, heart, body and mind totally and utterly and he is a slave to its nonsensical and warped bidding. He has replaced the old man and has become the very thing he marvelled at. Max ends up in the exact same cafe where he started his descent into madness, talking seemingly even more gibberish than the old man. The cafe looks like a bomb has hit it and seemingly everyone else is utterly consumed by the exact same nonsense as him. At this moment in time, a young man who works in the city enters the debris-strewn cafe and approaches the bar, asks what the matter is with the raving lunatic in the cafe. Whether the cycle begins all over again is up to the audience to decide.
