She craved the rehydration fluid desperately, and it tasted--icky. Like drinking fruit juice mixed with sweat. She focused on her annoyance over the flavor of the rehydration fluid so that she wouldn't think of the other things going on. Like the missing limbs that she was assured she wouldn't miss...given time. Like the sluggish way her brain moved, with thoughts tunneling through like giant worms underground, running into obstacles and veering around them off into unexpected directions. It took her five minutes to be able to come up with that metaphor, and once she had it, she wasn't comforted. There were strange things in her brain,obstacles that her thoughts were not accustomed to. There was the pain, both physical and emotional, of her missing legs. Most of all, there was her disbelief that she had willingly volunteered for the process. She had done this to herself. What on earth had she been thinking?


Inspiration: Guess what I'm drinking today? Yeah, stomach flu, not so fun.
Story potential: High.
Notes: I like this perspective on it, at least.

I do not think the satellites can see the potential lurking inside me to tear them down. The additions are too fine to see, too masked by the pump and throb of my heart and the fizzing of my neural circuitry (normal for a genius, when I was a sub before the surgery, but even so, there are enough geniuses in the world that they could not track us/them all, even if they cared to). I removed the tracker imbedded in my spine myself, with the aid of a scalpel, a mirror, and enough bedsheets to tie me in position so I would not do myself irreparable harm when I inevitably blacked out. Five blackouts, it took, and ten cuts, but it's out. They can't find me now. The pain was--I can't remember, it was so bad. I might have bled out and died, but I avoided the major arteries. I might have accidentally paralyzed myself, but I was so very, very careful. I did not move for two weeks after the surgery, to let it heal right. Tied in position with bedsheets, pissing myself and sucking fluid up a straw from gallon jugs. I could have freed myself at any time with a swipe of the scalpel, but I didn't. I think that is what makes me different, not the surgery. This stubbornness and self-control is something I have had my whole life, even when it only meant that I could keep my job sweeping the floor because I always kept it real clean even when the ladies walked in with dirty snow on their boots.


Inspiration: "The Great Destroyer" - Nine Inch Nails
Story potential: High.
Notes: I didn't think this would go anywhere new, but I was hooked on the character by the end.

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.

I want a girl with a mind like a diamond, I wrote in the profile. What I was hoping to net was a smart girl with an affection for last-century ironic pop. What I netted was--well, you'll see. She's a girl with diamonds *in* her mind. How could she help being smart with an advantage like that? And sure, she's smarter than most of the smartest people I know. Took me a while to decide if I thought she was really smart or not, but I think she is. That sort of thing matters, you know, when you're thinking of asking a girl to marry you and start a family. It also means that the family jewels are going to get passed down to our kids, and that's--well, that's a bit harder to swallow. Not that swallowing is how they get implanted. Nope. It would be my wife, the black market brain surgeon. I ended up deciding that the connections, the leaps, the intuition, and the sense of how it all hangs together means that she genuinely *is* brilliant. The diamond network gives her perfect recall and the ability to execute any visualized or indexed action perfectly, but it doesn't help her sort out what to use or cue her to what's funny about the situation.


Inspiration: "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" - Cake
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: Not original enough to be a good story on its own. Good title, though.

It's quite hard to stand out, these days. Some go the reverse, shroud themselves almost like dark age Muslims with their hijabs, or they wear the full length robes of the Catholic popes of those times, full of gold embroidery and white, but still so shrouding that everyone inevitably wonders what's underneath them. Others go for minimalism, reducing their limbs down to the necessity for life support (zero), shrinking the torso as much as possible, and deskulling themselves so you can see the dance of neurons across their brains. Or so they say. Really, you just see whatever their programing replaced it with. Some of them have pretty nice conceptual ones, although the tweener with rainbows and unicorns shooting across her skull cap made me want to vomit. Sure, it's all reversible, but what kind of genetic precursor lets their successor do that?


Inspiration: Google tutu -> http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/04/hairy-man-in-tutu-raises-money-for-breast-cancer/
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Setting, I guess.

The squarehead stopped him before he reached the gate of the factory. "State your name and business."

"I just want to see Kitty," he said quickly. "Nothing official, no business, I just want--."

"No business is not allowed."

"It's her break time in five," he insisted. "Her legally allotted break time. That's like not being in the business at all. I can see her if she's not in the business." He waited, watching the nanny circuits in the squarehead click through their paces, and hoped that would be enough to allow him in. What any roundhead would know without even having to think about it, some of the squareheads--the ones who went too far to the machine--would agree to because it made squarelogic. The same kind of squarelogic that--


Inspiration: This photograph of a piece of really awesome graffiti art.
Story Potential: Medium-high.
Notes: Not a new idea, really, but I like the setting idea. And hints of some difficulty with Kitty.

The cyborg arm wasn't all it was cracked up to be. It had seemed fine, at first--good and stronger than her injured arm was. The pain in her joints had gone away. The interface didn't look very good--but she'd just looked away. It didn't keep her from getting laid; novelty could do wonders for a girl's prospects in that department. It was kind of addictive, like getting a tattoo. It wasn't long before she was thinking, well, that hip had been bothering her for a while, and so had her knee and ankle. She would eventually have to get an old-fashioned hip replacement anyway. Why not skip ahead and get the better model? She'd saved enough to replace the hip--

Inspiration: A facebook friend talking about how she just wanted to skip ahead and get a cyborg replacement for her shoulder, which had been bothering her.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: And instead the flesh gets all puffy around it and there's severe stump irritation and--well, in general, the usual irritations of prostheses, ramped up.