La La: Post-Apocalyptic

It was all around the world. Everywhere she went, people were just singing, "Lalalalala." She flinched when she heard it come over the intercom after she boarded a plane to Australia (figuring that Australia might be the best, most isolated bet), but everywhere else, people seemed to be mostly functional, going about their everyday routines and chores in a perfectly fine, rote way, even if they no longer talked to each other or initiated any new behavior. Sometimes she wondered what would happen at the end of the year, if the children would still go back to the same classrooms that they'd been in when the singing started. All they did was sit there and sing, the teacher standing oat the head of the class to supervise them. She’d checked the school near her first thing, to see if there were any--any kids like she was, anybody who would not be fitting in. She assumed they'd still be fed and cared for, because that was a thing that the singers did, but they'd probably be horribly confused and terrified. In some ways, she supposed, they might even be safer. She didn't know if there was still much crime, since the newspapers just printed black squares of photos and La lal alal laalalaa for text, but she knew she'd heard no police sirens since it started, though the officers still drove by in their cruisers, driving slowly and staring straight ahead.


Inspiration: Around the World (La La La La La) - ATC
Story potential: High.
Notes: A different, non-harmful, non-(immediately)-infrastructure-destroying apocalypse. Only the deaf and the tone-deaf aren't caught up in it.

Utopia vs. dystopia: science fiction

Utopia vs. dystopia depends on what people do with it. Could be fun to set up some dystopic premises with tech, etc., and have it *not* be a dystopia.



Inspiration: CONvergence 2013 "Dystopic vs. Optimistic SF" panel.
Story potential: High.
Notes: Fun worldbuilding.