He signed on with the exo-army as soon as he was eligible, just to get out of his house and get a legit funding source when welfs came sniffing around. The realbody recruiter looked tired when he left, but every warm body to plug into the expansion mattered, and so he got a smile and a handshake and a signature authenticated with a retinal scan and a signature and a DNA blood capture--all of which could be faked, maybe, but why go to those lengths to bother? Not to mention that the fate of those who faked it was spread around wide and loud--but without any distinguishing details, to keep martyrs from trying it on. He hacked himself a captainship before he left the recruiting office, figuring that with cheat codes and swiped XP, he could get himself a nice cushy berth with good rank. It got him a cruise on a fast military boat to the new post, but the realbody Sergeant took one look at him, asked a couple of polite, getting-to-know-you questions, and before he knew it he was shipped back to training in the brig.


Inspiration: Googled "ranking," landed on some cheat code site.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: If the military future is digital, there WOULD be cheat codes! And I like the idea of the protag kinda bouncing around using them, getting caught, getting shipped, switching it out, etc. Then, of course, Something Bad happens, and he must Man Up. In his own way.

The marines were uneasy. They were used to guarding dignitaries: ambassadors, head cooks, sons of rich and powerful families who had their brothers gunning for them, the usual. Guarding a word was, well, weird. The word was written on a canvas, painted inside their helmets, and locked away in a hypno-secured portion of their minds, so that if any of them survived, so would the Word. That was unsettling enough, since it essentially turned all of them into targets instead of collateral damage or obstacles. If they lost the banner and the book, they still had to guard at least one other of themselves who might escape with the word. I mean, they'd been blood-bound to each other for years. They would have saved each other anyway, when they could, and eaten the dead to preserve their skills when they couldn't. But this set them all up as targets for elimination. At least, as the tusk-commander had joked, this package wouldn't make them follow it into whorehouses....


Inspiration: Word Bearers Chaos Space Marines.
Story Potential: High? Medium? This is not my usual, at all, but it could be fun if I felt like writing space marines.
Notes: I have no idea what that actually is, but I tried to imagine it.

It was, her mother assured her, the best job available for a snot-nosed Ensign dropout. She bit her lip and did her very best not to remind her mother that the only reason she dropped out was because a certain someone, somewhere back in the family tree, had modded the genes just enough that she qualified as an Extra, and needed to hit higher scores to get in. Scores that were set impossibly high, for the Extras who modified themselves out of the human race and into something just as alien as any of the Associated. The ability to see in the dark, the ability to hold her breath in vacuum without rupturing something for a few minutes, the ability to sleep only four hours a night--they didn't stack up. They didn't give her the ability to nail a shot from 500 yards without a sighter, or to scale a sheer wall in 2 minutes, or to swim--she cut off the memory. She'd scored quite well for a Standard, which she thought she was--until the damn gene-test, which they hadn't introduced until *after* her mother had gone through.

Inspiration: Reading through the Kris Longknife series.
Story Potential: High, not because it's particularly original or compelling, but because it's a cozy kind of story that I like to snuggle up to sometimes.
Notes: The old "send the newbie in," "whip a situation into shape," "something unforeseen develops" saw. But not military. Say--an amusement park type station? Something like that. And the something that develops shouldn't be military either.

The rebels were coming, the war was not won. They'd lied--why had they lied to them? They'd said the rebels were defeated, soundly, and that was why the brigade was withdrawing. It had been on all the newsfeeds, local and system-wide. But here came the rebels, and not some raggle-taggle survivors, but a full wave of what looked like most of their strength. He swore and slammed the emergency evacuation button. The alarm went out, the people went to their lifepods or into the deep reclamation shelters, fat lot of good it would do them with the rebels and their tin-can openers there to pry them out. And then he saw another bank of lights switch to red on his board, the instant he'd hit the evac order. The power plant faults. They couldn't all go at once--


Inspiration: "Rebel Waltz" - The Clash
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: Oooh, a baited trap, how evil!

In space, no-one can hear you scream. Except for the twat on the other end of your intercom, the one who persuaded you to do a one-only spacewalk on the outside of the ship because he thought he saw "something weird" and he's going to stay inside to give you directions. Right. She sighed, more than entirely expecting that he was about to sever her umbilical airline and go straight for the main base himself. All the heavy lifting was done. He could get in, sell the ore they'd harvested, and laugh all the way to the bank. There were always spacers looking for a berth, and maybe this time he'd get lucky and find a not-hideous one who didn't recoil when he offered to bunk together, one who would be happy to play second fiddle to a man who she now suspected only had the ship because--

Inspiration: Ah, I've been reading some space opera lately, and I really like it.
Story Potential: High, if only because this can go so many directions.
Notes: Does he? Doesn't he? What comes next?

The robot sniveled at his feet. He scowled down at it. Its silky hair glistened light blue as it poured over his shoes, and his toes felt damp from the tears that came from its eye vents. "Oh great master," it wailed, "do not decommission me. I swear I will serve you truly, whatever your wish may be!" From the shape of the robot, he guessed that he knew what the wish of its previous master had been, which made the groveling program the robot was running even more disgusting. "Revert to default mode," he ordered it. After a minute, the robot stopped sniveling. It straightened, brushed its hair back, and stood. Its face was impassive.

Inspiration: 'snivel'
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Science fiction, pirates, space opera, etc...blah.

The prickly feeling along the back of his neck was the tap--tap of scorpion's claws as it climbed up from the base of his spine. He closed his eyes against the crawling sensation. Hawk had startled him when it first fluttered, fish's flop over his stomach was pretty unsettling, but the crawl of scorpion up his spine was the worst of them so far. He did not look forward to finding out what the other twelve felt like, and he cursed the day he'd thought it a good idea to get high on the native hallucinogens and stumble out to a reservation to have a tattoo done. Along the way, it became a good idea to get many tattoos, not just one, and he'd decided that only the shaman would do as the tattoo artist.

Inspiration: I kind of wanted to write a mood piece, so I started with "the prickly feeling along the back of his neck"--of course, then the story took over.
Story Potential: medium-high. not a whole lot of forward momentum here.
Notes: Gee, I wonder what the living tattoos do?