If you love writing, if you love storytelling, then you'll be familiar with the phrase 'what if...?'
'What if...?' is the basic building block of stories.
What if this really was Che Guevara's shroud, and not just a telegraph pole someone wrapped a hessian sheet around to stop the tar leaking out? Who put it there? Why? Where's it been all these years? Does it contain revolutionary magical properties of some kind? Maybe it's a hoax shroud? Why would someone pretend Che Guevara's shroud has been discovered in a non-descript South Coast town?
Story prompts are all around us, the trick, the fun, lies in spotting them.
That's how a Jude who was slightly grumpy about the number of porn-bots a completely benign post about plant-based cream substitutes attracted made it much less irritating by letting it lead her down a what-if thought train:
What if, when the robots take over the world it doesn't start with Terminator-style androids, it's actually the porn-bots that are secretly part of a giant AI hivemind.
What if they're learning how to interact with humans and control them?
What if what they discover loneliness makes humans vulnerable to manipulation, so they hunt out lonely vulnerable people, and begin by controlling them?
What if they learn gaslighting techniques that enable them to isolate more people, making them lonely and more vulnerable to mind control?
What if the people who are most resistant to the AI Hivemind Overlord are the ones with the least humanity making them least vulnerable to gaslighting?
What if humans begin to evolve to become less...human?
What if the last person left with both humanity and free will recognised the rock & the hard place choice they had?
Jude probably won't write that story. But it's how stories get born; you spot a porn bot, get annoyed, turn it into something else. The trick is spotting the story prompts as they emerge out of life's fog.
Amazon, source of capitalist evil. Also source of story prompts.
These are a salt and pepper set. Not sure what their existence says about the evolution of mankind, but I could say the same about nuclear weapons, Coldplay albums and pink wafer biscuits.
But turning up at someone's house for the first time, and finding them on the dining table - there's got to be a story in that. What else are you going to find in that house? Who's house is it? What if they make you so curious you can't help snooping? What if you get caught?
Comments