The doctor squinted at him. "This is a very asymptomatic broken leg." "You mean because it's broken but not swollen and it doesn't hurt or anything?" "That would be the one." He shrugged. "Can't tell you how it happened because I don't know." He'd been unconscious at the time, but he figured telling the doctor that would get him even more worked up, especially since it happened in Alien Sector. He knew how the med-techs got about alien quarantine and the possibility of alien experimentation (mostly, that they'd like to do some of their own to get back for all the years earth had gotten visited). He was--


Inspiration: Phil's otherwise asymptomatic fever/viral infection.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Eh.

The spores floated across the channel out of season, and she didn't notice them until she heard the sheep bleating in panic. She grabbed a pitchfork and a lantern and ran out to the barn. Sheep were usually safe from zombies; their wool was thick enough the spores couldn't take hold, which provided some cover, and as long as they were kept inside when the spores were flying, they would be fine. Somehow, one of the spores had gotten into the barn, which was as protected from the wind as anything could make it. The zombie sheep looked up with eyes red with bacterial bloom as she came into the barn. She swore and stared at her flock. Three were on the ground, kicking faintly, their flesh ripped open and what looked like sores starting to suppurate on the torn flesh. They'd thought those were--

Inspiration: Separate conversations about zombies and fungus.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I really like the idea of making the zombification process be based on a fungus spore. Has a lot of potential for some seriously creepy and horrifying stuff.

It was the blank that worried her. It was a small thing at first, she thought, because she could remember remembering things surrounding it, but the blank grew, and that worried her more. She could, if she was clever, skirt around it by remembering herself remembering the blank, and she could write down the memories and hide them and find them later, but the original memory--was gone. IT was strange, remembering herself remembering a void. She developed all kinds of tricks to deal with it, and she had to use them faster and faster as the gap grew. Bad enough that the gap grew for herself, but she was sure it was a medical problem and that her doctor would be able to solve it, give her a medication or an operation or some cognitive therapy that would fix it all. She grew really scared only when she realized that others there had a gap, too.

Inspiration: Having a blank page to fill.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Don't we all fear forgetting? This could be strong. Some nice Steven King/John Wyndham-style of story.

He'd never thought he'd be happy to be walking-around-sick. It had always struck him as the worst of all possible states--either you were sick, really sick, sick enough to stay home from work and be taken care of and not worry about anything except getting healthy, or you were healthy enough to do anything you liked. That was the way it should be. He'd announced this fact loudly whenever he happened to be walking-around-sick, which was a lot more often than anybody else seemed to be. He didn't catch illnesses too much more than others did, he supposed, but he seemed to stay in the indeterminate in-between stage longer. He didn't need a week off work--just a day or two, and then the rest of the time he'd be walking around, going to work, and feeling entirely out--

Inspiration: Could it be that I'm sick of being mostly sick?
Story Potential: High, at least as character set-up.
Notes: So he's walking-around-sick with something that has almost everybody else flat out. I do have a certain attraction to plague stories, don't I? I blame Steven King--the first part of The Stand is sheerly brilliant.