Beneath the Paint: Genre Undetermined

The paint peeled from the wall. Every time that she stood for too long in the alley, she would start to work at it with her long red fingernails, flicking away a small patch. She spent a long time waiting in the alley, and so it became that a quite large portion of the paint was shed by her fingernails. At first, she thought that the bricks underneath were merely discolored, but as she flicked away a piece here and a piece there, she saw that there was a pattern and design underlying it all. It was beautiful, too, something that she did not realize until one patch as large as her palm was revealed. It became her obsession. She would go to the alley even when she had no business being there, and she would pick-pick-pick--

Inspiration: 2046.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: She's not a prostitute, though it's likely something very shady that brings her to the alley. And this would be a very noir, urban decay sort of story.

The Unscrambler: Science Fiction

No human would have seen the pattern, and it was purely coincidence that the latest update to the unscrambler had a fatal error in it, which led it to seek for patterns in every input, whether that was intended or not. It had been pitched as a feature, but people quickly discovered that the unscrambler was focusing on things like the bathroom wallpaper instead of the secret coded message that they'd received. It was programmed to go after the highest level of input, and it was set to receive all varieties on input, from audible to video to digital--. This would not have been so great a problem if it also had not neglected to come with an off-switch. Once it started to decipher a scrambled pattern, it could not be stopped until it either successfully produced the answer or--

Inspiration: "unscrambler"
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Meh. Could also be non-science fiction, but science fiction seems most likely.