penthius

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It was that moment when elections were suspended that she knew things were really real, that the aliens were real, that the news reports--most of them--were real, and that they were all in danger. It was also the moment when she realized that she lived in precisely the wrong place to survive what was coming if it was all real. Texas was not the place to be. The aliens had only shown up in the really hot areas, everyone agreed on that. They were in the Republic of Chad, in the Sudan ... in Texas. She had to get out and now. The old couple next door had an RV. She'd chatted with them before, about their plans. They said they were done with traveling for the year, now that it was starting to get cold in the upper states. That cold would save her family, she thought. It would. It had to. She didn't

Inspiration: Reading a post by whatsername, writer with the purple fade, about the fear of suspending elections and what needs to go on.
Story potential: High, but tricky.
Notes: First, the main character HAS to be republican. Second, she's semi-privileged because she'll get the RV and go up North. But with elections suspended, the government itself becomes a major obstacle and ... yeah. Analogy but not analogy.

Flames devour the clouds, while we stare in open horror. I do not know if there will be any more rainbows during my lifetime, because I do not know if there will be any more rain. I heard a rumor that some corporation signed a deal that was read to grant the cloud herders the right to do this, to vaporize our clouds and chase the vapors into their water collectors. I don't understand the rules that make it more advantageous for them to do this than to mine asteroid belts for frozen water, but something about the rules of ownership and claimed versus unclaimed space makes it easier for them to get their water from a planet instead of deep space that I guess is considered communal. "Mama, why are they eating the sky?" my three-year-old whimpered, burying her face in my leg. "I don't know, honey," I said. And although I didn't say it out loud--because you don't make promises like that to a small child, not when you don't know how long it will take or even if you will succeed--I promised to myself that I would find the answer to her question, and somewhere in there, the way to make it stop. I would see a rainbow again before I died.

Inspiration: "Drones in the Valley" - Cage the Elephant
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Eh.

When the plague came, we lost most of our doctors before we realized that the plague had a dark sense of humor. No, really! Wear a bio-hazard suit and it went after you twice as hard, three times as hard, calling in all the neighbor pathogens until it got you. The scent of alcohol sanitizers brought it running (the only way they figured that one out was by seeing that winos were dying in the same percentiles as people who were obsessive about washing their hands). In the end, we just...lived with death. We lost other people who refused to see the doctor for simple things like appendicitis, for fear of catching the plague. They may have been half-right, but it isn't a good way to go, either. Our doctors began to camouflage themselves a little more. Home visits were very popular. Boiling water and harsh soap replaced antibacterial foam. Midwives were absolutely, definitely the safest option, even though they still meant that many more women died in childbirth. The plague complications rate in the hospital was higher. So you can see that we were still holding a grudge when we found out that the plague had been engineered that way, as a "survival of the fittest" improvement.

Inspiration: Still photo of a person in a biohazard suit from Season 1, Episode 1 of "Helix."
Story potential: High.
Notes: I didn't think this was all that interesting until I realized it would have to be written from the PoV of a young doctor who has been working in this environment for most of his/her life. Then it became more interesting.

I am obsessed with paper. I think this would be easier if I lived in another country, one that shared my obsession. Japan, perhaps. Paper walls, paper folding--it would fit. America is more difficult. Paper is thing to be thrown away, not to be treasured, ironed flat, and saved. Usually not even to be recycled. We have trees; we can just make more. And if we run out of trees, we can just make more of those. I find myself picking up pieces of paper discarded at bus stops, lurking in trash bins (as long as not contaminated by food), blowing along the street. I rejoice when I see one of the delivery guys rubber-banding a restaurant menu to my doorknob. Fish and chips is my favorite food because it comes served on a paper, even if that paper is now stained beyond saving. It seems right. And in restaurants that use real newspaper, sometimes the words print on the fish, a reverse transfer. I suppose it's all very much in violation of health codes, but it seems real and right to me. So when a store opened up in the nearby strip mall--which I only go to because it's the only place I can find jeans in my size (not that I'm fat, you understand, no, I have the opposite problem)--that sold only origami, it was love at first sight.

Inspiration: J.J. Abrams' "Mystery Box" TED Talk
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Character!

Performing live without being allowed to look at the audience that you're performing for is a heck of a lot harder than you might think. Sure, normally when you're up on stage with the lights shining in your eyes, you don't see much more than blurs and maybe a few rows in the front anyway, but that's totally different than being forced to basically black out everything. And it's not like they could just put up a large one-way mirror or something for us, oh, no. They wanted to smell our sweat and hear the little rasps in our breath and effeng our ooblong or whatever that last bit they said was. I just hope it doesn’t mean they were secretly drinking our blood or something, because who knows with these guys? And that's the whole point, isn’t it? That nobody knows? So we went up there in sunglasses that were like the kind that really blind guys wear, ones that blocked out everything all around the edges. Except--and here's the thing--I had such a damned hard time playing drums without being able to see what I was doing that I talked our agent and the politicians and all into agreeing that if I just got a certain frequency of light to show through the glasses, and I painted my drums so they'd glow like that if we used the right stage lights, it should be okay, because it's not like I'd be able to see anything except a rough outline of where my drums were. Except.

Inspiration: Scarlett Johansson talking about playing a character without a body, plus a photo of musicians playing with their hands over their eyes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soviette/10980108605/
Story potential: Low
Notes: Meh.

The plans for the wedding were going as well as any interspecies and intercultural event could--right up until they got to the wedding chairs. The idea of sitting at a wedding would signal defeat to the Zalts, and the traditional Indian family of the bride would be horrified at the idea of leaving out such an important part of the tradition. This was one of those cases where neither side would give, and having only the bride sit would also provide exactly the wrong idea. The Hindu ceremony was fine, the traditions for decorating the bride were fine, the thing-that-wasn't-a-white-horse was acceptable, but the chairs--inconceivable. Also, very very expensive unless she could manage to find a local artisan who could make something appropriate in time. She jotted a note on her pad about finding an artisan. Cost wasn't much of an issue--if it were, these two families would hardly be initiating a dynastic joining--but it was a matter of her pride as a good organizer. And if her second big contract sank in flames over a chair, it would also be her last contract. Her first contract, by comparison, had been simple to arrange.

Inspiration: MillionShort search on "tent bazaar" -> Indian wedding chair manufacturer
Story potential: Medium
Notes: Ah, the interspecies event planner. Another opportunity for a series of linked short stories, I suppose.

Festival of the lanterns began mid-October, just as the leaves began to change colors. We all got the idea from something the Japanese had been doing for a while (even if on a different day), but we did it on a much bigger scale. We wanted to show our appreciation, and to show that we believed in what had happened. We wanted to prove that we weren't the Deniers who still ran most of the news and the government. We gathered from all corners, all religions, all races, all countries, and all ages and genders. We pooled our funds so that we could purchase the hot air balloons that would truly make this a thing, and then we scheduled hot air balloon festivals all across the world. Even the deniers couldn't (usually) refuse the permits, because--why were they so keen on us not doing this again? If they explained why, they spread the truth more than we would, having our quiet lantern festivals without any proselytizing. If you knew, if you'd seen, then you knew. We might talk about it amongst ourselves or tell our children the story, but we knew better than to try and persuade others. Maybe they honestly hadn't seen it and fund it too ridiculous to believe, or maybe they were purchased by the government and decided that the only path forward was to pretend it had never happened.

Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smb_flickr/9728530273/
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Eh. I mean, I'm thinking aliens, maybe fixing global climate change or something like that, but...still meh. Love hot air balloons, though.

Insomnia can be a serious problem when you've got an alien parasite living in your head. For one thing, consciousness or semi-consciousness allows a kind of access that the dreaming mind blocks out. Sure, once you accept a parasite, you're going to have weird dreams. It's kind of how they communicate. You’ll have weird dreams and strange impulses and other things that you'll believe really shouldn't, couldn't come from your own gray matter, and you may be right or you may be wrong. There's some preliminary research on the kind of people the parasites willingly choose that suggest you may be wrong. Insomnia, though, that can be a problem. If it carries on long enough, it can blur the boundaries between waking and sleeping to a degree that allows the little beasties to communicate in live fashion, and maybe even to alter your perception or to guide your movements. No helpful sleep paralysis here! So we're supposed to report it and get drugs and psychiatric diagnoses to help with resolving it immediately, and in the meantime they like to check us into the special "sleep hotels" that are really a lot more like a jail. Good luck getting out on your own unless you can show them a sleep scan printout that certifies you got your needed REMs for the night. They just aren't going to listen to you any other way.

Inspiration: Google "heart don't beat" -> "12 Ways to Beat Insomnia!"
Story potential: Medium
Notes: I like this as part of the setting of a symbiote/parasite story, but maybe not on its own.

You're a fool to break the rules, even if you don't understand why they're there. Especially if you don't understand why they're there. "Don't step into an elevator shaft" is a pretty straightforward rule, and we can figure out why that's a rule, and if we have climbing gear and rope, well, that's not such a disaster to break that rule. It's the rules that seem to make no sense that sometimes have the most severe consequences for those not expecting them. And sometimes, it's the rules that seem to make sense and then you realize that they existed for an entirely different reason than you thought, those are the rules you really have to watch out for. Oh, it's not like there's some great big nanny-alien who reaches down and swats your hand when you break one of these rules that are suddenly there. Nope. The rules are for our own protection, they told us on their one and only public announcement, and we were of course free to follow them or not as we liked. They did insist that we put bracelets on our children to keep them from crossing certain limits. That didn’t go over very well, and soon the bracelet rule vanished and instead people under a certain height and weight simply were unable to go past the borders without a high-pitched, annoying sound (worse by far than any of those mall alarms designed to drive off teenagers) ringing inside their head and getting steadily louder the closer they got (though without damaging them). Kids sometimes dared each other to see how far into the loud zone they could go, but they tended to crumple and pass out at a certain point, before the real danger struck, and then we would all hope that the other kids would come and get an adult.

Inspiration: "No One Knows" - Queens of the Stone Age
Story potential: High.
Notes: I like this mix of free will and alien control. And of course, the reason there are these rules is because the aliens did something else to Earth--maybe turned it into a giant alien preserve/melting pot? Regardless, they introduced a lot of other hazards. Could also play this with a fantasy spin, of course.

Nobody knew where they came from, and after the initial shock and suspicion, most people didn't care. A few did, of course, researchers and government and some of the people who lost their shirts when all the stock in cellphones collapsed. There was generally a consensus that it was aliens or something like that, trying to communicate or figure out how to communicate...but they'd clearly put in the receiver backwards or forgotten the code or were trying to talk in a frequency other than ours, so why worry about it? They couldn't communicate through the device, maybe, but we sure could. Some people tried to scare everyone by pointing out that every call would be monitored by aliens, possibly the locations tracked, and who knew what else. Some people stopped using them then, but most people laughed and pointed out that the same thing had been true for at least a decade, and at least the aliens weren't likely to come down and arrest them or put them on a "no fly list," unlike the government. The night show comedians got some pretty good jokes out of the alien no fly list. The government tried to confiscate the phones, and when that didn't work because the darned things practically sprouted out of the ground, they tried a buy-back program. It might have worked better if they'd been willing to pay enough to cover the cost of a top-of-the-line smartphone and a subscription to cover its use for a year. They weren't. People were pissed off enough at their cellphone coverage companies that they didn't care if this new disruptive alien tech made them go out of business--in fact, many of them hoped so. Eventually, even the paranoid used the alien phones, popping out the battery whenever they weren't making a call in hopes that that would disable in GPS tracking in the phones, like it did in human-manufactured cells.

Inspiration: http://www.gocomics.com/speedbump/2013/08/31/
Story potential: Low
Notes: Kind of a detail in some other story, maybe.

When you see a gorgeous woman dressed in a strapless black dress made entirely out of feathers hovering a good three feet above the sidewalk, with gorgeous black wings stretching out five feet to either side of her, what you think is going to depend on where you are. If you're in Vegas, you'll think she's advertisement for a pretty kick-ass magic show or maybe some kind of magic/risque dance act. If you're in New York, you'll think she's a model. If you're in Goodwin, Iowa, you'll probably think she's an angel of the Lord, or maybe one of those Goth teenagers trying to pull off a prank. If you're in Roswell, you may have an open mind about what she is or you may think she's an alien. If you see her in Chicago or Minneapolis or Boston or some other reasonably sized city, you may wonder what she is and assume she's some kind of city phenomenon, like an art car or a parade of naked painted people. The real fun comes when every assumption becomes right.

Inspiration: The cover art of Apocalyptica's 7th Symphony
Story potential: High.
Notes: Could go many ways. All at once.

You can get a pretty screwed-up power dynamic when the whole reason that you get promoted from Hell (as I call it) to a position of power over others is by biting the hand that feeds you. Literally. You have to attack what you are told is the only source of nutrients, the only source of any medical care, the only source of warmth and heat. I think I'm not as screwed up as some of the people who got their promotions that way, but then, I did it not because I'd just finally snapped and gone crazy in the confinement. I did it because in our case, the hand that fed us was one of the ones who was too damn crazy after the way he'd been brought up. Made, I guess, is probably the closest analogy for us. Or jumped in. Something horrible and abusive from the gang culture is the closest I can get. For all I know, that's what they studied when they decided that it was possible for humans to integrate into their society. The guy who had us, he--he didn't ever stop biting hands, let's say, he just moved up to a position where he could take it out on people who he figured had less of a chance of fighting back. Us. I honestly thought he was going to kill Little One, and that was something I wasn't willing to sit still for. Little One might be six foot four and maybe that's why they took him, but the kid was only fourteen. He just happened to have a build that would have bought him a ticket into playing basketball at the pro level in a couple of years, only a few years ago, and that now bought him a ticket to Hell because they thought he qualified as physically mature. There’s a whole hell of a lot that they don't understand about us, you see. A whole hell of a lot.

Inspiration: "The Hand That Feeds" - Nine Inch Nails
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Meh. Kinda interesting, I guess, but not enough other stuff going on for me.

The flowers were gorgeous and purple and ruffled and quite unlike anything she'd ever seen before. And they were sitting in front of her door. Being the security-conscious type of person that the security chief should be, she disciplined herself and ran a full scan over the flowers to make sure they were clear of any toxins, poisons, explosives, psychedelics, or any other residues that might make it a trap. high level gang ring of rickletons had made her a little wary, since they were known for holding grudges and keeping high level scores of who was ahead and who was behind and sometimes they had the nasty little habit of evening the playing field by killing whoever was at the top. She had a wincing suspicion that doing her job had put her pretty high up on the list, and she was hoping that something else would rise up to capture their interest (and points) very, very soon. She also hoped that it wouldn't be on her station, because she'd had enough trouble for a while and all she wanted to do was relax. That wasn't enough for her caution to make her not pick up the flowers--they were lovely, and real biomass, not one of the scented simulacra!--but it was enough to have her arrange them in a lovely vase and then set them in her fresher. She'd be able to see them regularly, and if they happened to explode or do something else interesting, then the door would add an extra level of shielding.

Inspiration: The gorgeous purple and unidentifiable flowers that I got at the farmer's market. No idea what they are, except purty.
Story potential: High.
Notes: And somehow this is the first step in getting the main character in a dynastic marriage to one of those trouble-making, rule-breaking, score-keeping aliens. Also, not sure yet if the dynamic would be more interesting if it was a male main character (dealing with unusually aggressive females and ending up with the usual female dynamic) or a female (because more fun). I confess, this also made me think of B5 quite a bit.

The world becomes dark blue to you, as if that is all there is, the sky and the goggles darkening the unbearable brilliance of the sun to something tolerable--and keeping the alien flares from burning out your retinas or, if you're one of the unlucky ten percent, opening a pathway in your mind that lets them in and turns you into a traitor to your own kind, whether you want to be or not. Most pilots become so accustomed to wearing the goggles that they keep them on even once they've touched down again. I won't deny there's something about a steel blue, obscured gaze that all the girls seem to go for. That doesn't get me so much, since I *am* a girl, and one look from behind smoky blue goggles isn’t going to be enough to persuade your average pilot-groupie that she does like girls after all. Most of them don’t', you know, though they may have a close friend that they're willing to snuggle with a little bit to persuade the guys that they'll really be getting something special if they get her. Nah, I prefer women who know that they're women and know that they like women, without any of the dancing around and "oh I'm not really" that a pilot groupie would make necessary. They’re groupies--they're supposed to make it easy, right? Not so much for us fly gals. And there are plenty of us, given how much better we can stand up to G-forces at the rates necessary to match the alien fly--boys, I guess. Maybe they've got fly girls too. Can't say that I think much about it or that it matters.

Inspiration: A thumbnail-sized image of this: http://www.dvdklub.cz/dvd-obrazek/5611--Tmavomodry-svet.jpg though the main character looked female to me in such a small size.
Story potential: High.
Notes: Guess who's one of the 10%? And I'm thinking setting this in an equivalent time period to back when there were hidden lesbian clubs, and it was a prosecuted crime, and some of the best female jazz singers of the era flouted it, and...yeah. Jazz.

Setting up a pier market is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, and seventy percent balls-to-the-wall. You find an old pier that's disintegrating, use some C-4 or dynamite or whatever you have on hand to blow the land connection (that's the really tricky part, because it's loud enough to summon zeros from miles and miles around, and because you've got to get really close to the shore to find the right structural support to blow out, something weak enough to fall, crucial, but not that's going to take out the rest of the pier). Then you wait to see if there will be zero-swarm. Zero-sum, my navigator always says with a laugh. He likes his puns. What can I say. I tolerate them where a lot of crews wouldn't, and it's gotten me an A-class nav on a C-class ship. Hell, who'm I fooling. A D-class ship, only saved from an F-class because it's actually still floating. Never mind what all we've had to do to keep it that way. I'm past the days of making landfall in a desperate, reckless raid for machined parts or dumped engines, though. That's a game for the young and the ones with no families.

Inspiration: "Remember the Name" by Fort Minor + http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonpac/8800355855/ + Under a Graveyard Sky
Story potential: High, if only because this is the kind of story I like.
Notes: Not zombies, necessarily, but some dangerous thing that doesn't like to cross water, that has set humanity-as-we-know-it afloat. Could be aliens, or something supernatural, or plaguey, or zombies, I suppose.

Imagine the expression of a goldfish taking flight upon the instant that his safe water balloon is punctured, and you will understand what happened to modern architecture when the K'rath descended from the heavens in their ships of towers and turrets, inlaid with semi-precious gemstones in arching, recurring patterns that resembled nothing so much as a Moroccan mosque. I imagine that in the Far East, most people watching the broadcast nodded their heads in agreement that the aliens at least appeared to have good taste. Not so in the West. Instead, taste-makers (who are, by their own nature, fortune tellers of a sort)--

Inspiration: Pinterest photos of 1) a water balloon bursting with something orange coming out of it, 2) a Moroccan tiled arch, and 3) Trump tower in Dubai.
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Eh. Those I like remembering the pop culture/architecture influence as a grace note in

The drops fell from the sky like rain, and at first we did not know they were anything different. A few were swallowed by people and animals, and perhaps we should have noticed when they came back out looking much the way they had when they went in, in shape, if not in coloration. But they would have blended in, and besides, who studies their stool? We only noticed them over the course of the day because one and all they appeared to be little worlds encapsulating whatever lay behind them, much like a raindrop on a blade of grass may shrink the image of the flower behind it into a perfect, gorgeous world. We did notice when the raindrops didn't dissolve away or evaporate as the sun came out. And we sure noticed when we tried to move them and the image captured in them stayed the same. The image of a flower, preserved forever. Or a child. Or a woman holding an umbrella. A bus going by. A splash of water from the street about to drench a man. All of them. They appeared to be indestructible, too.

Inspiration: www.flickr.com/photos/collurania/8538382175/
Story potential: High.
Notes: Could go either the science fiction or the magic realism route with this. Maybe both, but that's a tricky balancing act to pull off. But I like this idea, and what they might show that would be good, or bad, and how they could be kept, and why, and who sent them, and why, and do they want to collect them again?

Furniture in a flash, shipped right to your house! blared the bright yellow paper advertisements stapled to phone poles. You leave the house, we furnish it! Perfect for house sales, in-law visits, movie sets, or a professional office tour! She snorted cynically, reading that. A professional office tour. Sure. She knew what that read as. A scam, a pop-up office quick enough for investors to be fooled or police to be convinced, taken down and vanished just as fast. We start IMMEDIATELY! Leave your home for ONE hour, minutes after calling us, and come back to find it FULLY FURNISHED. She frowned. This must be a scam, too, above and beyond the usual. Maybe they robbed people's houses during that hour. One of the ways she'd picked up rent money in the last hard months was by working as a furniture mover. To furnish a place that fully took a couple of hours, and that was after driving for at least a half-hour from whatever furniture warehouse the items had been stored in to the new location.

Inspiration: Googled "Flash" -> "Flash Furniture"
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: She peeks, it is teleporting aliens, chaos ensues. Also, teleporting wasn't in my Firefox dictionary yet? Madness. I dunno, though. Something about this story idea feels amateurish to me, not sure why. Probably won't write it.

An auto-responder saved the world. The good Congressman from Milwaukee, who had won his election campaign on his promise to communicate openly with all his constituents, was the one and only politician whose auto-responder promised that he would read and respond to all his mail within a week. And so the alien fleet jockeyed itself into position reversed thrusters on its asteroid storm, and waited. I suppose I say an auto-responder saved the world to make you laugh, since the story that follows is, as we all know, pretty grim. Really, I think it was the astrophysics engineering student who was interning at the Congressman's office since she was wavering about whether really, all along she'd just wanted to be a communications major, and did it really matter that she loved math when all her friends made fun of her for never going to any parties? She was on wacko patrol, reading through the emails and responding with form letters where possible, a quick note and a forward to the Congressman's next-tier-up aide where not, and a forward to the "potential crazies--save for police" folder where appropriate. She almost moved the alien invasion email--

Inspiration: Doing my morning email-processing. I used to be terrible about ever responding to anything, and I've made it a point to improve.
Story potential: Low.
Notes: I don't think this is a story in and of itself, but it could be a nice grace note.

"What do you mean, discontinued?" Lena leaned forward over the counter and glared at the candy shop salesperson. Unperturbed, the man shrugged. "I'm sorry. It's not that we wouldn't order more if we could--it's been one of our most popular items!--but for some reason they are no longer willing to ship offworld. We've asked our supplier repeatedly, and he says we're not the only ones. I guess these things were pretty popular all over the Traverse." Lena's hands gripped the counter until her knuckles whitened. Of course they were popular all over the Traverse. They were the most palatable of several options that supplied the correct balance of trace elements to keep her system in check. She shuddered, thinking of having to go back to eating sandfruit. The innocuously named grubs wiggled on the way down, tasted like somebody had eaten a pot of beans and then farted in her mouth, and left her skin smelling faintly sulfurous for days after their consumption.

Inspiration: It has nothing to do with the clearance bag of Hershey's Mint Bliss sitting on my desk, I'm sure.
Story potential: High.
Notes: And her regular job takes her near there, and she's Something Badass, and then there's politics and the difficulty of living as a hidden people, and.... This stinks like a novel.

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penthius

January 2025

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Entries tagged with aliens

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Elections Suspended: SF

Cloudburners: Science Fiction

Plague Humor: Science Fiction/Horror

Paper Folded: Character

Without Bodies: SF

Wedding Chairs: Science Fiction

Festival of the Lanterns: Science Fiction

Insomnia: SF

The Rules: Science Fiction

Alienphones: Science Fiction

Dark Angels: Spec-fic

Bite the Hand That Feeds: Science Fiction

A Gift of Flowers: Science Fiction

Dark Blue World: Science Fiction

Pier Market: Post-apocalyptic

Alien Architecture: Setting

Rain Lens: Genre Undetermined

Flash Furniture: Science Fiction

Auto-Responder: Science Fiction

Discontinued: Science Fiction

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January 2025

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