Grace was a hippie, and that's where the trouble all started. If asked, she would have said that she wasn't, but her parents had been (all four of them), and a certain amount of it had sunk in even after she chose to go to a college weighted heavily toward corporate and mil-gov use of sciences. Even after she took a government contract to pay off her student loans at a nice deferred rate. Even after she passed all the security clearances despite her unreformed hippie parents. And so when somebody came to her and gave her the specs for a desired designer aerosol to spray on enemy troops that would result in them being incapacitated for a period of time, but not wounded in a way that would bring a wave of international flashback on them, she thought of love. And that was how the last great age began.


Inspiration: "Trigger Hippie" - Morcheeba
Story Potential: Medium-Low
Notes: Eh.

They were birthday-wishing chimps, sitting at her door wearing silly hats and blowing out streamers. She smiled, keeping her lips closed over her teeth so as not to upset them. They were probably well enough trained to understand that humans didn't mean a threat when they did that, but there was no sense taking chances. She didn't want to be like that woman in Cleveland--no matter what the surgeons did, she'd never look the same. She felt a little sad, looking at the chimps in their silly outfits. One of them held up a clipboard for her to sign, saying that she'd gotten her chimp-gram. She signed it. The chimps' eyes were liquid sorrow, but they curled back their lips in a fake smile and signed, "Thanks, ma'am." She wondered if it was really better to have uplifted them. Certainly, they might have gone extinct without the adaptation, but at least they would still be themselves. It was better for the sea creatures--.

Inspiration: They Might Be Giants song about chimp postcards, plus the recent news story about the woman whose "pet" chimpanzee ripped her face off.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: High potential not as a story--there's no plot here--but as a setting. Uplifting and using as many animal species as possible for manual jobs would be one rather twisted approach to the coexisting-with-other-species problem that humans have.