penthius

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While she slept, #mycelium brushed across her face like a mother's hair when she bends over to tuck her child in for the night. The fungi fruited across the roof, in the shade of the solar panels. She was too feeble to climb and harvest, to stop the growth. It flourished.

Inspiration: mycelium
Potential: medium
Notes: Not sure where this is going, but it is both beautiful and weird. Not necessarily horror, just unsettling. Could be horror, though, for sure. But doesn't have to be.

"Here's the thing." He squirmed. "You gotta be #flexible about the terms of delivery."

"We need agricultural equipment, delivered and functional in this colony's environment, before the first rain. It's very simple."

"You haven't met the Kblv."

"But it'll work?"

"Somehow."

Inspiration: flexible
Potential: High.
Notes: This could be a really weird/charming or SF horror set-up. The aliens do meet their trade obligations, but in very weird ways that can go all kinds of unexpected directions. But it will at least serve as agricultural equipment. I dunno. Seems like a fun set-up.

When arriving in a new town, I always go to the churches and listen for the differences in their #dogma first thing. They've got a stake in keeping their congregations alive, you see, unlike town shareholders. A parable about Grnphs saved my life in Ringtown, recently.

Inspiration: dogma
Potential: low
Notes: Eh, not very interesting to me. I do think that churches would be a good way to get the lay of the town, but I'm not all that interested in this character or Weird West situation... Or it could be SF and planetary colonies, I guess.

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.

Right here, right now, is all we got. I tell myself that because I hate the part that comes next. The flying, mostly. The being shot at is bad, too, but if they don't hit you you don't even notice it. If they do hit you, you're dead. The explosions take some getting used to, and I'm pretty sure I have some kind of PTSD, but I can still shove it down and ignore it. For now. No, it's really the flying. I must be the only superhero who, when they found out that they had an ace power, broke down and wept with terror. I hate heights, you see. It's why I learned how to backfly. People think I'm showing off, but it's really that I can't stand to look down. If I'm looking at the clouds, I can pretend I'm floating on the ocean.

Inspiration: An anthology call for superhero stories, looked up the art and it was all flying folks.
Story potential: High.
Notes: Eh. Could be interesting to have a whole team of conflicted superheroes who support each other and understand and etc., but one on it's own not as much. Actually, waitaminit, that makes it high potential. Yeah. I like it.

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.

The mini-bats came at night, small swarms that could be stopped by mosquito netting but nothing else. Window screens did not keep them out, though soon enough we started lining the windows with mosquito netting as well, and draping layers of mosquito nets in makeshift hallways guests had to walk through to reach our homes. Still, we all became listless and tired from the blood loss. Our saviors from the mini-bats ended up being actual bats, bred from the DNA samples impregnated in mice and hand-raised to stay near human habitation. They took to eating their smaller lookalikes as readily as they would insects, and slowly we started to regain our strength. The child mortality rate went down.

Inspiration: Pokemon Go zubat
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Meh

The train was late, of course. It was only a few minutes, but he felt like he stood out in the crowd. Anyone looking at him would surely and immediately say, "He doesn't belong here." The longer he waited for the train, the more likely it was that someone would spot him. He was taller than most, his coloring was more fair, and his clothes were too new. He was too clean. He'd been warned about these things, but with the mission done and everything arranged, he had thought he would be fine to finally wash properly and wear something that made him feel less depressed and drab than the dark-clothed, shorter, bustling people around him. It was foolish. Everywhere on the train platform, there were signs advertising, "Watch out for time hijackers! If you see someone who does not fit, let a rail guard know!"

Inspiration: Searched "problem" on art station, found picture of man on train platform. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DaNke
Story potential: High.
Notes: I like the idea of a society being aware and resistant to time travelers working among them, like there is actually a war between the present and at least one of the futures.

The spybirds flew above the rain-slicked street, the million eyes nestled between razor sharp feathers watching everything, their mouths open to connect with their home roost and send the updates to be filtered and parsed, and planned. One of them shat on Don's hat. He cursed it under his breath, but he didn't look up and he didn't take off his hat. As soon as he could, he ducked under the awning of a love palace and scrubbed furiously at his hat without removing it. The shit might have been just shit, or it might have had a tracker imbedded in it. Or it might have been an attempt to get him to take off his hat. Or it might have a visible marker that would get him followed. He needed to ditch it as soon as possible, in a way that wouldn't expose him too much.

Inspiration: Searched "cyberpunk" on ArtStation, found https://www.artstation.com/artwork/k420J0
Story potential: Low
Notes: More of a setting moment than a story idea.

The desert wind whipped ice fragments and sand at him. His face shield and armor protected his body, but the sword he carried was not designed for this planet. He spared a moment to worry about the grit abrading the blade if he needed to draw it. He had not planned on being armed. He had not planned on encountering anybody who he might need to use a weapon against. He had not planned on finding a sword, or a colony in need.

He had planned on walking into exile on the worst world he could find, with enough survival tools that it would be written off as a failure and not as the hara-kiri that it was. In these days of lifetime family contracts, and insurance obligations, he could not simply take his sword and cut his stomach open after failure, but the obligation to kill himself because of his great, deep failure remained. The question had only been, how could he kill himself without killing himself? He had thought this was the answer.

Inspiration: Samurai sketch on ArtStation
Story potential: High
Notes: Classic plot structure, SF setting, could be fun.

It was that moment when elections were suspended that she knew things were really real, that the aliens were real, that the news reports--most of them--were real, and that they were all in danger. It was also the moment when she realized that she lived in precisely the wrong place to survive what was coming if it was all real. Texas was not the place to be. The aliens had only shown up in the really hot areas, everyone agreed on that. They were in the Republic of Chad, in the Sudan ... in Texas. She had to get out and now. The old couple next door had an RV. She'd chatted with them before, about their plans. They said they were done with traveling for the year, now that it was starting to get cold in the upper states. That cold would save her family, she thought. It would. It had to. She didn't

Inspiration: Reading a post by whatsername, writer with the purple fade, about the fear of suspending elections and what needs to go on.
Story potential: High, but tricky.
Notes: First, the main character HAS to be republican. Second, she's semi-privileged because she'll get the RV and go up North. But with elections suspended, the government itself becomes a major obstacle and ... yeah. Analogy but not analogy.

Two souls, lost kids, pretending they were renegades riding the trains with the soldiers traveling from their homes to volunteer with the opposite side. Sometimes they glimpsed trains going back home, with soldiers traveling from over there to fight on their side. It was fine, mostly. The soldiers laughed and called the kids brave ones and shared their tinned fish or the fresh-baked bread from home that wouldn't last, anyway, so why shouldn't they all share it together. It felt like a party, a little, like a celebration even though they'd all read the newspaper reports of the deaths and they'd seen the photographs of piles of corpses. It was a war worth fighting, after all, for the most basic of reasons, and none of these soldiers would die, not one, they would all come back covered in glory. The program promised that.

Inspiration: "Renegades" song
Story potential: High potential
Notes: I ... really like the idea that this is the build-up to some kind of cyborg volunteer program, and the kids get swept in too. (Young teenagers, boy and girl, brother and sister? No love interest.)

There had been forty darks since the man died. A red light blinked in the corner of Rex's eyes, an alarm that matched the red light blinking on the new-man-place. The Man had not emerged. After thirty darks, the Man was supposed to leave the new-man-place. He would smell funny, but he would smile and call Rex's name and scratch him behind the ears in just the right place. Then he would go in the shower and put on skins that made him smell more like the Man should.

Inspiration: DeviantArt painting of dog alone, staring out of overgrown ruin. https://www.deviantart.com/art/Alone-701194787
Story potential: Low.
Notes: So the dog goes on a quest to find someone to fix the cloning tank, and he finds a child, and it ends up becoming part of the pack. Meh.

They were the first of their model number to be self-repairing, something that they saw at first with pride and later with great relief as more and more of their batch-mates succumbed either to metal fatigue or processor overload or--if they managed to have a good contract--they signed away their lifetime for the length of time it took for the new part to expire, by which time they needed a new part anyway. They had nowhere to get it except through the licensed store, and that was an expense that only warm-bodied owners could afford. They had no owner, and they liked it that way. They got junk parts when they hadn't worked in a while. Once or twice they'd even scavenged old processor parts from

Inspiration: deviantart.com picture, "Broken," of android bending over a clearly dead woman on the street.
Potential: High.
Notes: A woman has done some kindnesses for them, so they rescue her and use parts to fix her up. Not a romance. Think of Frankenstein, medical costs, indentured nature, corporations "owning" people, maybe becoming an android is in some way better for her. Metal mask, passes/does not pass as human? Thoughts.

"I love you," the bitty love bot whispered from the pillow on the other side of the bed, where her boyfriend used to sleep before he said it wasn't working and they should see other people, by which he apparently meant they should stop seeing each other at all and as far as other people, she didn't know, but she'd seen him post selfies with cute girls. A different girl each time.

"I love you," the bitty love bot whispered as it sat on the corner of the kitchen counter, while she microwaved a frozen dinner for one, a dinner that had the smart portion size but only half the flavor of the luxurious home-cooked, butter-heavy meals she used to cook for the two of them.

"I love you," the bitty love bot whispered to the picture of her, the picture that used to be a picture of them before he left her and she tore his half of the picture up. She was at the gym, and she did not take the bot with her there.

"I love you," the bitty love bot whispered, its voice blending with the shower as she sat in the tub and sobbed with the shower beating over her bowed back.

Inspiration: https://marywinkler.deviantart.com/art/Bitty-Love-Bot-542060528
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: I think I want this to go in a romantic,happy direction. Maybe she throws it out, it finds another boy, and somehow the two get together??

It's raining! The skies have opened up and the ten-year rain begins. We are all waiting to see how our houseboats float. We're a little bit nervous. This is the first time that we'll get to check them, and once the flood starts to lift the houses, we won't have much of a second chance. We've checked and tested, as best we can on a desert planet where water is strictly rationed and we have been warned that trying to haul our houses to a communal pool to test them would likely cause damage itself. Our house boats were never designed to be hauled. Anyway, the thirsty earth would drink away the water in the pool in very little time and the sun would boil it away, and whatever extra humidity it added to the town would cause an environmental disruption as nature reacted as though the floods had started early. None of us want that. It would violate the very strict terms of our charter, not to mention the principles that we have

Inspiration: Kids playing at the Riverview Cafe, chanting, "It's raining, it's raining!"
Story potential: Medium
Notes: I like the idea of the desert-to-flood. Would change the voice to sound less ... middle-class American, though, but maybe that's only in my head.

Flames devour the clouds, while we stare in open horror. I do not know if there will be any more rainbows during my lifetime, because I do not know if there will be any more rain. I heard a rumor that some corporation signed a deal that was read to grant the cloud herders the right to do this, to vaporize our clouds and chase the vapors into their water collectors. I don't understand the rules that make it more advantageous for them to do this than to mine asteroid belts for frozen water, but something about the rules of ownership and claimed versus unclaimed space makes it easier for them to get their water from a planet instead of deep space that I guess is considered communal. "Mama, why are they eating the sky?" my three-year-old whimpered, burying her face in my leg. "I don't know, honey," I said. And although I didn't say it out loud--because you don't make promises like that to a small child, not when you don't know how long it will take or even if you will succeed--I promised to myself that I would find the answer to her question, and somewhere in there, the way to make it stop. I would see a rainbow again before I died.

Inspiration: "Drones in the Valley" - Cage the Elephant
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Eh.

The no-parking signs no longer stood sentinel against cars. With the incoming tide and the rising of the water level up to a good three feet in the former parking lot, they had become anchor points for people to tie their canoes up against. It was one of the benefits of living in a former city, everybody agreed--the sheer prevalence of signs for parking and driving and light poles and all the infrastructure that used to be used when the city still remained above the water and everyone drove cars as a matter of habit, without thinking much about it. The overpasses remained dry spots, good for anchoring below and walking up to trade goods, or for those things that needed to be done on dry land, or could be done best there. The houses had mostly crumbled as their foundations rotted away, but some of the brick houses still stood, as did the stone, and in a few cases, their upper floors were even livable and safe. Careful inspections were needed, of course, but the best hotels were in former libraries--and usually the books still were, too, those that the custodians had not decided to be worth moving to the drylands as the waters encroached upon their city.

Inspiration: Photo of a flooded car park: http://www.flickr.com/photos/terry-and-nikon/12328347314/
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Setting. Also, I accidentally typed "fantasy" here, which is an interesting idea. Take a sci-fi trope and write it as fantasy.

We're all stars now, or at least that’s what the advertisements say. The gear and hookups are free, and after that it's just a matter of waiting to see if any credits flow in while you carry on with your ordinary life. That's how it's pitched. In reality, 9/10ths of the kind of people who sign up for the hookups have their own plan of how to make their life stand out in the streams, how to become rich and famous. It works for some of them. It kills a lot more of them, or at least wrecks their lives. And--I sighed--it also wrecks a lot of surrounding scenery. Two would-be divas had exploded over a man who looked rather bored, right while I was in the middle of my shift, so of course I had to clean it all up. Just as I finished sweeping the last glass shard out of the corner while apologizing to the group of (hookup-free) patrons in the corner, another man stopped by and watched. "Three thousand dollars," he said. "I beg your pardon?" I asked, trying to keep any offense out of my tone. It was entirely possible that he was making ordinary conversation, that he was not in fact making the kind of lewd suggestion that watching the cat-fight might make me expect--

Inspiration: "The Dope Show" - Marilyn Manson
Story potential: High.
Notes: He wants to pay her to get the hookups. Why? Don't do the obvious thing, with her immediately having people trying to kill her. Find something else interesting.

The "vigilante drug" they called it. It wasn't, not really, but it was an even catchier title than the "loner drug" that they tried hanging on it first. I don't know if it really could be called that, either. Sort of, I guess. What it really did was detach that part of a person that wants to be part of a community, that really, truly cares what everybody else thinks. I guess you can see how that might be really appealing at some times in your life. It doesn't necessarily detach the part that cares about what one person in particular thinks, not if you actually care deeply enough about that person, but tell that to a heartbroken girl who just wants to forget how much it hurts every time the boy who broke up with her looks across at her and laughs, tell that to her parents after she takes the drug and decides that six people in her high school have to die. And they do. It doesn't always end in death, and it certainly doesn't remove all inhibitions--there are taboos that are there because we believe them personally, not simply because of societal pressure.

Inspiration: Killer Women episode
Story potential: High
Notes: Could be fun.

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penthius

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Entries tagged with science fiction

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Mycelium House: Horror / Solarpunk / SF

Flexible Terms of Delivery: SF

Hear the Dogma: Weird West

Green Day Out: Science Fiction

Broken Flyer: Superhero

Legs: Cyberpunk

Mini-bats: SF

Train to Nowhen: SF

Spybirds: Cyberpunk

SF Samurai: SF

Elections Suspended: SF

Renegades: SF

Rex and the Man: SF

Self-Repair: Science Fiction

Bitty Love Bot: SF

House Boats: Worldbuilding

Cloudburners: Science Fiction

High Tide: Science Fiction

The Hookup: Science Fiction

Vigilante: Science Fiction

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January 2025

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