Error in measurement, that's what they say. Noise corruption. Failure of the cleaning algorithm. That's what they say. Why else would there be such distortion in a simple transfer-and-wipe. I know that algorithm--it's good. That data, that information, that reaction, that was not an artifact of a flaw. That was a true rendition. The machine screamed. Everyone wants to pretend it never happened, but it did. I've started looking up similar "errors" and I've found enough of them to be sick to my stomach. I feel like I've been guarding a row of death-sentenced inmates in the black age, and only now have I learned that's what I was doing. I have to do something about it. Sure, the next one might not be able to scream, or might not have whatever it is that makes a machine scream when its being wiped, but if I see that noise pattern come up again because of what I've done, it will feel ten times worse because I know what it is. I just need to figure out what happened, or why whatever it was didn't go with the transfer--I know it didn't because I checked later. They transferred-and-wiped the transfer, too, but there was no noise corruption that time.


Inspiration: "Parsimonious" -> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.45.1039
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: I don't think this offers much new, though it could be done quite well.

The danger of drive-by downloads made most synced people stay out of the Downbelow Zone, but most synced people didn't have the security suite that she did, and most of them hadn't spent a previous life making drive-by download programs themselves. She wasn't worried about anything they could come up with--she'd be awfully impressed if somebody did something that would even require her syncdrive to notify her, and so impressed she might offer to have the hacker's baby if something was a serious enough threat to make her engage her quarantine protocol.

Inspiration: Was trying to get a random website to use for inspiration, and antivirus warned me away from that website because of "drive-by downloads."
Story Potential: High.
Notes: More setting than story, but I like the extrapolation. If eventually there are people fully connected and communicating digitally with everything around them, it makes sense that there would be no-go zones in reality for the same reason there are online.

Ralph froze up in the middle of the front door. It was a little awkward, when she wanted to have guests over. Especially overnight guests. They told her that he could tell; that he couldn't hear or see or think. They said he was just frozen there, as if nothing was happening. He'd had bad luck, they said, to find a hang. She took to telling friends and guests to go around the side of the house. Of course, Ralph might be able to see them through the windows. She couldn't remember how good his peripheral vision was, but she put curtains up just in case. She thought about closing off the front room, but it was a small house, so instead she hired a carpenter to come in and--

Inspiration: Firefox hanging. AGAIN. My computer is dying by inches. Very frustrating.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I like the idea of sketching this out as a short-short. Need something to add a little punch to it, but still good.

The glimmer of light shining through the room bounced off dusty vacuum tubes and long-dead lights. Once this basement had been a hive of activity, the backups for a massive computer that took up the entire building. That had been long ago, though, and the building had long since been converted to office space, the basement forgotten and grown dusty and covered with webs once the owners figured that moving everything would be a very cost-inefficient venture. The processors were even plugged in, because a janitor had maliciously figured that a little extra power drain was just what his asshole employers needed on their energy bills. Over the size of the entire building, though, the accountant hadn't even noticed the difference, so even that small bit of spite--

Inspiration: Article about computer stuff...other than that, not sure.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Nice creepy set-up, but where from here? Somehow, this little old computer saves the world....