rantajar

First

I'm at a camping center with some friends. There are also children there. Outside there is a small cottage, very old with gray, slightly rotten wood. Some of the us sleep there and there is a stove. I guess I'm looking for something or cleaning, I'm going trough stuff there and putting them in their place. There is a stove and there's flames coming out of it every now and then. When I look around I see three other fireplaces that are leaking flames and smoke. I'm surprised the place hasn't burned down long ago.

Second

I'm walking from the center of a city, down some stairs and towards another neighborhood. There is a Hindu monk riding a bike past me. He smiles and I recognize him and smile back. He is from a monastery where i sometimes go and have some philosophical talks or something. We happen to pass some Christian monks at the same time, carrying coffin. One of them reminisces about when they were a small order like the Hindus are now, and he had to carry coffins by himself up the stairs.

Third

I'm at home in a room with my wife. My parents and brothers are in the living room watching TV. They are watching the lottery. My father gets excited and proclaims he has won 30 000. It's not the biggest price but it's pretty good. They start watching a movie. It's some scifi from a food author so we decide to watch it, too.

I'm in the movie, I'm a young man who lives alone but seems to be pretty sociable. It's a small settlement on an otherwise uninhabited planet. An old man has just died next door. Apparently everybody knew him, but they were all expecting him to die pretty soon anyway.

I'm walking with a bunch on guys close to the border of the settlement. We are wondering about the slow progress of the habitation endeavor. There's a lot of technology that should have arrived by this point. First we think we should investigate outside the settlement area. I tell the others it would be dangerous and there is some rule forbidding it. They abandon the idea and leave, and I go look outside the settlement alone.

There is another city just like ours. It's almost exactly the same but some of the people behave a little differently. A woman who is shy in my city is very loud and talkative in this one. The old man has just died here, too. I continue to the same direction and come to a third city, also identical. But here, the old man is still alive, but just about to die. People are gathered to a center square to see him for the last time.

Then I remember the story, I've read the book the movie is based on. The cities are actually on a planet that is completely livable. They are there for studying how much of peoples personalities are coded in genes. The people in the three cities are genetically identical, but they have been incubated in different laboratories.