4/15/2019, Monday
"Be a shame if something happened to your son's pretty new legs," the man said. Mona knew what he meant. It was the same kind of threat that used to be uttered like, "Shame if your new restaurant happened to burn down." Except these days, she had excellent restaurant insurance and there was drone security everywhere in addition to her own little cameras. But the drones couldn't see a virus infecting her son's brand new legs, making them stop working, and it would take months and months to have them replaced even if they were covered by the healthnet. Her son had just started to smile again, naturally, a real smile and not one just put on so that they would think him brave.

Inspiration: Thinking of cyberpunk.
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Not really a story in and of itself.

Being a cyborg is more--difficult--than most people think. Sure, you become a massive entity with insane amounts of processing power and an armature that allows you to do pretty much anything you want. But all those grafts come with a price, and that price is an amount of pain that would drive anyone homicidally insane if they weren't drugged and soothed out of their minds. It's why we're all such calm, distractable, happy people. You know the old cyborg joke. "What are your demands, O horrifying warrior?" "I want all your resources, your credit allocation for the--ooh, a butterfly!" That's one of the reasons why the first thing any customs party checks (usually, the first thing they send a customs scout to check, while everyone else stays back with their finger on the weapons trigger) is the med dispenser record in the cyborg's armor. Want to make sure we're all good. It takes an insane amount of willpower to finish anything, once you're as drugged as you have to be in order to function with half replacement parts and another quarter added on that were never there in the first place.


Inspiration: A friend in the hospital, heavily sedated with a breathing tube, and remembering how it was for myself when I was under serious drugs.
Story potential: High.
Notes: This--makes sense. I think it could be a good character base.

The elephants were pink, that day. She had to explain to her son why the signs saying that detox was free were funny, but that's why you went to the artzoo. You went because it made you explain things and discuss things that otherwise might not come up. He didn't ask why the ostrich had a balloon tutu, which is just as well, since she had no idea either, and the sign by the pen just said, "Because." It was fantastic, being able to walk through the petting section and touch things that one usually only saw through the augfilter on a phone (or goggles, if you were a glitch like that, but she didn't allow goggles out of the house or during dinner time). The tanuki made them both giggle, as the raccoon with giant balls sunned himself with a smug look upon his face, while he plucked grapes.


Inspiration: A BoingBoing link to a Bruce Sterling article about the New Aesthetic: http://boingboing.net/2012/04/02/bruce-sterlings-critique-and.html
Story Potential: Medium. This is just a bit of setting, not a story. Mind you, this is a zoo that *I'd* love to visit.
Notes: Conclusion: Boingboing makes decent story seed fertilizer.

"Please sit nicely next to me. If you don't, I'll slit your throat. So won't you please be nice?" The young man stared at the grey-haired lady holding her knitting with a disturbed expression. That was not the order that this was supposed to go in.*He* held the knife, after all. He mustered up his courage and growled, "Hand over your purse, lady!" The security cameras in the high-speed rail compartment must have malfunctioned, as no record remained, but eye-witnesses insisted that the little old lady (who was not so little and not so old, though the grey hair was all her own) took the young man's knife away from him and slit his throat with it, then told his gang that they should sit down and "be nice."

Inspiration: "Won't U Please B Nice," by Nellie McKay
Story Potential: High
Notes: Many stories are all about how dark and gritty and overpopulated and dangerous the future will be. Great. Let's let it be that. And then let's have a "be nice" movement swinging back against the momentum--in their own, particularly noir-future, sort of way.

The techno-anarchist stopped in the shadows and twiddled his mustaches, the wire filaments wound into them gleaming even in the darkness. Really, if he was going to be that obvious, it was practically not worth her time. The house system would spot him in another ten steps and take care of matters in a way that would leave the garden well-fertilized for winter. She sighed. He might not be worth the trouble, since he seemed to be entirely incompetent, but he was still human, and it went against her core to let a human be wiped out by an unthinking machine, even if he was the kind of human that would probably claim the machines were the way of the future and it was humans' responsibility to get out of their way--

Inspiration: "techno-anarchist" from comment on previous entry.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Although she likes thinking machines just fine. She'd better, since she might be one.

It was her turn at the wheel, and so she snapped the synapse leads into her temples, slipped her hands into the gauntlets that would keep the gears from crushing her tender bones as they rotated around (but wouldn't keep her fresh from bruising), and put on her game face, a silvery blank surface that would shine from among the black greased gears like the Madonna hanging down from the sky. Wouldn't do to have the normals see the contortions of her face as she fought down the screams. It wasn't as if she was even suffering, not precisely, it was just a matter of extreme discomfort and widening and that the human brain wasn't designed to expand that wide--though it could. And it must.

Inspiration: Was thinking about "Girl in the Gears," the steampunk, Vicesteed-world, nano-fic that I'm going to tweet this month for Nano WriMo (*not* NaNoWriMo)
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: Some nice imagery, but nothing special here. Can tell my mind was elsewhere!

The signal went down and she slumped over sideways in her chair, abruptly disoriented from the cutoff of all the balance stabilizers and infodumps feeding her surroundings like another sense that she'd only gained once she was of age. She recognized the feeling, the isolation and the disorientation in a place without info overlays to make every/any place seem comfortable and familiar. She'd thought she was done with that when she took the adulthood augments, and she was very distressed to find that certainty leaving her. She tried to send in a query reflexively, to figure out what was wrong with the network, but nothing answered her, of course. She stilled the twitch of her fingers.

Inspiration: Internet down. And customer service line giving a busy signal when I tried to call them. Harrumph.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: It's one possible future, and that is what would happen if the ability was suddenly stripped away. Kind of interesting, but not a story in and of itself.

She was hunting the news when the news found her. In years to come, she would wonder if somehow she'd lured it to herself by wanting, so passionately, to scoop the big story. The newsfeeds were rough on newcomers, mocking them for newbies and pointing out their every mistake, while allowing them no budget and no fan network. You had to get that yourself. She'd started to build her network, just a couple hundred people, but she could tell--she knew she was getting close. When it found her, she would have danced for joy to see how her numbers skyrocketed as one person told another what was happening. Get that close to death, and you've got a tag on a fan's friend page for life, or at least for a year or so until they cull.

Inspiration: I was going to Google News to glance at the science stories for inspiration, but the clock ticked over before I got that far, and it was time to start writing.
Story Potential: High--sort of.
Notes: This isn't, in an of itself, a good story idea. But I really love the idea of using this as a paradigm shift for future society, in terms of how news gets done. That said, it's still not too original. Too close to what's actually happening--but then, we do live in the future.

It was a swarm of love, pouring over her in a thick heavy smothering wave of pink. Love, love, love--screamed the love-gnats as they danced around her, trying to take their love into her orifices, up her nose, into her fragile inner ear, through her clothing and into the bits of her that she most didn't want to catch the love bug. She knew that if they got anywhere else they'd die fairly quickly: but they were designed to live in the "love canal" as their creator had fatuously called it. She'd more than half expected a love attack, walking in this part of town, with her credit reading open for any to read. She must have looked like a prime target for any of the brothels that lined the streets. She stared at them with eyes narrowed from the attempt to ward off the love-bugs by her filters.

Inspiration: I was being "attacked" by a very loving cat. Also, have been reading "Counting Heads."
Story Potential: High, maybe.
Notes: I like the setting. The reason she's there opens up some interesting avenues. Investigating? Horny? Enmeshed in a plot of some sort? All of the above?

The rabbit ears bounced around on the top of its head as it rolled along the cracked sidewalk. Not ideal operating conditions at all. It would have shaken its head regretfully, but it had lost that functionality two years ago when a couple of teenagers threw their beer bottles with unexpected accuracy. Perhaps, had its trajectory-calculation program still been functional, it would have been able to dodge the bottles. That had been knocked out when it was only six months out of the factory, though, entirely by accident, but still distressing. Piece by piece, its equipment was dying, and with it, its usefulness. Graffiti crawled up the sides--

Inspiration: I saw a guy with rabbit ears on his head today. Bunny rabbit ears, but still....
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I was going to say low potential, but then I thought about an old, mostly defunct police robot starting to scavenge parts, to improve himself and his neighborhood, and how he'd get them, and what the results would be, and I found it more interesting.


Status: Written as
"Salvaging Scottwell." Published in the December 2009 issue of
Baen's Universe.