When green code day came, Erin couldn't wait. She had a whole plan for what she would do. First a nice, long walk in the park to see the ducks and the dogwalkers. Groceries, of course, once the stores opened to the general public, and a check of the fabric store to see if they had anything that would match her living room wallpaper. She wanted to recover her couch, which was looking worn since everyone was spending more time sitting on it these days. Then a movie at the drive-in, starting at dusk and ending just before curfew. She'd gotten to know the neighbors who were also on the green schedule, and they'd made plans to park next to each other at the movie, so that the kids could make funny flashlight faces at each other through the car windows. Maybe she'd also pick up some plants from the nursery, she thought, something to give them new green life to enjoy for the next six days until it was green day out again.

Inspiration: Coronavirus
Story potential: Low
Notes: This is mostly setting. One possible future.

"What? You mean to say you knew this was a suicide on the first day, and you kept using departmental resources for the entire week to dig into it and figure out every last bit and tittle?"

"Yes, once you figure that by bit and tittle you mean the possible beginning of an epidemic of suicides."

"Epidemic, what epidemic?"

"The one that hasn't happened yet. Or is just starting to happen, depending on how you look at it. I think it’s either something in this place or a deliberate alteration. My money’s on some environmental factor, maybe linked to some sort of actual virus that spreads. I saw signs in her friends and enemies and work acquaintances of the same thing. Hell, I'd suspect that I have the same thing, but I'm a damn detective, so I've clearly been depressed and suicidal for a very long time. Now that I've talked to you, you should gt yourself checked out regularly and isolation Me, I'm going to go check into a hotel and refuse room service and ask them to leave the food at the door and try to avoid talking to anyone for at least a week. I've already warned everyone I interviewed or interacted with that I can remember."

"You've warned--you've started some kind of crazy health panic because one unstable woman committed suicide?!"

"She wasn't."

"Wasn't what."

"Unstable. She wasn't unstable. She was sent up from the Republic of Uzbek, and you remember how they insisted on all their representatives passing what was basically astronaut-level screening for psychological and physical health and competency? That was because they could afford so few representatives. She passed all the tests with flying colors. I would have been proud to have her at my back."


Inspiration: A series premier with a suicide mystery.
Story potential: Medium-high.
Notes: There's some hints here of space stuff, but that wouldn't be necessary.

Setting up a pier market is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, and seventy percent balls-to-the-wall. You find an old pier that's disintegrating, use some C-4 or dynamite or whatever you have on hand to blow the land connection (that's the really tricky part, because it's loud enough to summon zeros from miles and miles around, and because you've got to get really close to the shore to find the right structural support to blow out, something weak enough to fall, crucial, but not that's going to take out the rest of the pier). Then you wait to see if there will be zero-swarm. Zero-sum, my navigator always says with a laugh. He likes his puns. What can I say. I tolerate them where a lot of crews wouldn't, and it's gotten me an A-class nav on a C-class ship. Hell, who'm I fooling. A D-class ship, only saved from an F-class because it's actually still floating. Never mind what all we've had to do to keep it that way. I'm past the days of making landfall in a desperate, reckless raid for machined parts or dumped engines, though. That's a game for the young and the ones with no families.


Inspiration: "Remember the Name" by Fort Minor + http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonpac/8800355855/ + Under a Graveyard Sky
Story potential: High, if only because this is the kind of story I like.
Notes: Not zombies, necessarily, but some dangerous thing that doesn't like to cross water, that has set humanity-as-we-know-it afloat. Could be aliens, or something supernatural, or plaguey, or zombies, I suppose.

The isolation containment chamber had failed. The facility containment had not. She cast a sideways look at her fellow researchers, trying to spot any early signs. She didn’t see any. Everyone looked nervous, but that was about what she could expect, given what they were dealing with. Or not dealing with. A loud moan managed to escape the break room, and she winced. Make that DEFINITELY not dealing with. They'd designed the damn bug, they knew that although it could be killed, it couldn't be easily cured, and they knew that they didn't have any of the elements for a cure available inside the contained facility. And they certainly weren't leaving the facility. So far as they knew, a nuclear strike would have been called in if somebody hadn't done some fast talking about dispersal particles and radiation-fed bugs and--the most dreaded word of all--airborne! None of which was true to the degree that it would have sounded, but Rob's wife wanted her husband back, or if not back, at least not aerosolized.


Inspiration: Thinking about the delay in finding out about acceptances and contest winnings, and how annoying delay in finding things out was in general...and somehow that naturally led to plague and contagion. La di da!
Story Potential: High.
Notes: These are things that I could play with. Is it a battle for survival? Is it an accommodation? Is it the birth of a new society? All of the above?

I planned to return to the orphanage where I was raised once I'd completed my medical schooling, to look after the sick children there. I had fond memories of old Dr. Franken, and I knew he'd been getting on in years. I had been assured by the head matron that my skills would be welcome, and that Dr. Franken was hoping to retire soon. Of course, it didn't quite work out to the blissfully happy and worthwhile profession that I'd hoped. The troubles began when I didn't complete my medical schooling. Oh, I assure you, I am fully qualified. I simply had the ill-fortune to be caught in one of those student pranks (as the angry headmaster called it) while performing a legitimate experiment (as I called it) that happened to be a crime (as the police called it). So instead of receiving my certification--


Inspiration: "My Orphanage" by Rasputina -> Googling "orphanage" -> Del Toro's "The Orphanage" on Amazon (it seriously killed the google ranking--the first 10 *pages* were all movie).
Story Potential: High.
Notes: But something is afflicting the orphans, or perhaps the whole city but the orphans hold the key, and this not-quite-a-doctor becomes our hero. Of sorts.

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 felt the pain and roared inarticulately before he'd even figured out what happened. His leg burned as if it were on fire. He glanced down into the underbrush and saw a young adolescent girl skittering away crouched on all fours. Her dirty form was clothed in rags. The gush of his own hot blood pouring down his leg worried him. She'd taken a major chunk out of his leg. He wadded up his shirt and pressed it against the wound, then limped after the girl. He had to catch her. It was standard procedure: when bitten by an animal, you had to take it with you to the doctor so they knew what you might get. Even wounded and losing blood fast, he could out think a feral. He knew--

Inspiration: My survival calendar about how to survive an animal bite.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Somehow her irrationality is cured. This is of course after something devastating happened that reduced most of the world back to animals. Knowing that it can be cured (is she offspring or original damage?) could set up a whole hell of a lot of ethical quandaries and shock reverberating though things.

She pulled herself out of the orgy as soon as she felt her mind begin to clear. Then the pain sank in. Her entire body ached and throbbed. Hands grabbed at her ankles. She couldn't run, but she could stomp. She felt the fanny pack around her waist, relieved that it had survived this bout. She had, she knew, eight hours of clarity, and four of them had to be for sleep--she yawned just thinking about it. She inspected her body, applied antibacterial ointment and bandages to fresh scratches and bites--the human mouth was a filthy thing, especially since the disease spread. She applied pain-numbing ointment to her nether regions, biting back a curse as tears filled her eyes.

Inspiration: "Book of the Month" by Lovage
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Strongest written as not erotic, I think, though it could be. Imagine a plague that magnifies the sexual urge several hundred times. Could happen. Or a parasite? Think of the mice drawn to cats. Some would give in, sleeping as soon as the urge stopped, continuing until they died. Interesting. Would leave those who stayed partially sane entirely uninterested in sexual chemistry or romance the rest of the time, which would drastically change human interactions.

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.