(Look, a poet and didn't know it! Erhm.. anyway...)
I often am struck with recurring thoughts for story plots that simply refuse to be silenced. Since I am not really the best at writing, and because I deeply feel that all stories and forms of art should be shared, and through that sharing, receive life independent of the artist or author that created them, i'd like to start this thread.
This is meant to be a place to put down the basic germs of stories, characters, and worlds that come unbidden into the imagination, and refuse to die quietly when one wakes up. The kind that want to live, but can't, for one reason or another. (And there are many such reasons.)
Due to the way the modern world works, sharing these primordial essences of creation is dangerous and fraught with risks and legal obstacles, so we need to set some simple rules.
1) all ideas, character references, and artwork in here has to be CC licensed, in some fashion.
2) All ideas must either come from this thread itself, or be wholly original. (Eg, no fanfics, or worlds created by people who clearly don't want to share them with others by releasing them into the world.)
To get the ball rolling, here's some story plot and world germs I have afflicting my subconcous mind, that I don't mind sharing with others to play with, or make into their own in some fashion.
This world is a combination of post-singularity (technological), and post-apochalypse. The residents of this world do NOT have any memory, nor true history of their technological past. They live in what is essentially bronze age conditions, but with a twist:
The nature of the apocholypse that struck this world is the "grey goo" kind, but not exactly the kind you think of immediately. Instead, the "lost history" this world has forgotten goes like this.
At the pinnacle of their technological era, they had achieved true post-scarcity, and had reached a kardishev type I civilization, tapping 100% of their planet's natural energy, and literally wanted for nothing in terms of physical wealth. Money had become useless, and their machines provided all possible labor. The first few centuries of this era were racked with people suffering innui over how to handle unlimited freetime, the destruction of social economic classes, and initially, wars waged over this, radically reducing their populations. In after centuries, fertility rates had been radically curtailed by the industrial pollutants and biproducts of the ages of scarcity and war. Unable to replenish their numbers to outpace old age, they developed and employed technologies to extend their lives.
At first, it was little things, like synthetically produced microbes that produce beneficial compounds for people with failing biochemistries, solutions to rejuvinate adult cellular tissues, regrow limbs-- that sort of thing.
This mix of low fertility and extremely long lifespans radically shaped the after war culture of the planet so much that by the time their numbers had reached 400 million again, the major focus of the civilization had shifted from social issues, (since they had long since overcome poverty, and now, social adversity, leaving very little left to resolve), and toward deeper, cultural and intellectual fronts. This made the desire for true immortality very appealing. If they could live forever, even the very long expanses of time needed to cross space to another star-- just to see it-- wouldn't be more than just an inconvenience. A hundred thousand year round trip, would end with a return to a loved one's waiting arms. As a whole species, this dream was very intoxicating.
It was also what destroyed them.
The technologies they had created to provide for themselves were a marvel of efficiency, and utilized every gamut of scientific inquiry imaginable, ranging from electronic, chemical synthesis, biotech, and nanotechnological. The last one especially, has been among the most difficult to master, but had been the real breakthrough that had led to their new post-scarcity way of life, through the very real creation of artificial von-nueman machines. (Machines that build themselves, and others.) As they had come to exhaust the limits of what biology and chemical medicine alone could achieve for preservation, continuation, and quality of life, they turned to the nanorobotic realms to provide.
It isn't certain where on their planet "the plague" first hit, because all records and knowledge of this age was digitally preserved and lost, but the effects are at the forefront of what makes this world very unique.
"The plague", in a sense, destroyed *everything* about their culture. What had been intended as a means to achieve immortality, backfired spectacularly. Instead of restructuring damaged tissues, and guarding against scenility, dementia, and the slow but never ending evolutionary pressures of the microscopic world agains a people who had chosen to conquor time, the nanotech machines they had created as their salvation instead destroyed their bodies ruthlessly, and the evolutionary programming they had been equipped with to adapt to, and deal with a changing environment, caused them to mutate wildly out of any degree of control.
But it didn't stop there. Most of their technology was built on nanotech replicators of one fashion, or another, and the out of control menace "repaired", "subsumed", or "consumed" essentially every scrap of their technology it came into contact with.
Faced with certain doom, and a spreading epidemic of disasterous proportions, they segregated themselves, and people exhibiting symptoms of the infestation were forcefully kicked out of ever increasingly paranoid population centers to die alone, either from the plague itself, from exposure (since these people had long since forgotten how to survive without technology), or from predation by natural predators.
By using very low-tech methods to physically isolate the contaminated outside world from their small bastions of remaining populations, they were able to hold back annihilation for nearly 6 centuries.
During that time, they built devices to destroy all nanomachines that got too close, through forceful decoupling of their construction, using high intensity electromagnetic fields. (The kind that are also harmful to living things.) As a consequence of this "protection", they had to live in deep, burried shelters, and so cut off from each other and the outside, died out.
"The plague", however, was more resourceful. Afflicted people eaten by wild animals inadvertantly ingested the devices they carried in their tissues, and became affected themselves. Constantly adapting themselves and each other, and still driven by their original core programming to improve and enhance their hosts, those animals became living culture dishes, and evolution ran wild on both fronts; vectors adapting to resist the infection, and the machines adapting to, and forcefully adapting, their hosts.
As a consequence, in the last days of the great plague, not all of the people expelled to die on the surface, actually died. Instead, they came into contact with this highly volatile environment, and its rapidly diverging and adapting features, and the plague machines they carried, likewise incorporated the combined evolutionary potential of that environment, through their technological natures. The result; the plague was no longer deadly. It had adapted to life, and life adapted to it.
The machines themselves have limited memory independently. This is important, because it means that any stored data they carry comes at a high cost. Evolutionarily, this means only vital or useful data will be retained. The machines instead have to form assemblages to make use of any communal memory capacity, and this greatly diminishes their ability to pass complex data onto other communities through their normal migrations. (This means no persistent technologically fascilitated learning, or 'race memory'.) It also means that to function as a colony, they have to coopt their host's memory and nervous systems. Over time, they couldn't survive outside their hosts, and ceased being infectious.
Now, 10,000 years after the great plague, a whole new and changed world sits where the great civilization before it sat.
Aspects of the old culture persist, twisted beyond any but the most superficial of recognitions, persist as old wives tales, and as the basis of religious dogmas, sewing strife and hatred millenia after the threat that had divided a people had vanished.
Where once there was a single culture and racial identity brought together by the adversities of war, now there are 2.
People who hereditarily carry colonies of the once rougue nano plague machines, and people born without them, products of evolutionary pressure to survive the initial virulence of the infection.
(The same is also true of plants and animal forms as well, though they don't make war, or hate like people do.)
Why is this still important? Afterall, the machines aren't deadly anymore. Why does it matter if some have them and others don't?
The simple answer, is best answered by A. C. Clark. "Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indestinguishable from magic."
The people carrying the machines inside them, can do "miraculous" things, and are even unwittingly dangerous at times. Naturally, these aren't really supernatural things, but without knowledge to understand, no one can tell that.
People afflicted have odd mottled and geometric patterns and marks on their skin, strange coloration of hair and eyes, and can unconciously rearrange matter, or start fires from skin contact alone, among many other things. Testaments to the remnants of "industrial" software consumed eaons ago, and now forgotten about.
And the people without?
Religiously devoted to their "purity", a perverse belief system that emerged from they dying hysterias of the last days. With dogmatic and religious zeal, they hate, and murder anyone bearing the "witchmarks of corruption", even if those people are their own children. They believe that it is their sacred mission to stamp out that corruption, and "retake" the world.
As for the acient race? The low-tech barriers of solid stone, concrete and steel they encased their enclaves with withstood long enough to outlast the viral stages of the technology destroying plague, and being helplessly dependent upon their mechanical means of production, even as they died out from genetic bottlenecking and islation, their von-neuman technology outlasts them still, burried deep below the earth, holding a silent vigil against a menace long dead.
Now, these places hold religious significance to the "clean", and a deadly curse for the "witches", as the intense fields they project up to the surface to keep the machines at bay, are still disasterously effective, and cause a horrible, slow, and painful death for any living being that has evolved to carry colonies of the machines, as the machines they are now biologically dependent upon, are ruthelessly demolished. (For an analog disorder, look up "mitochondrial disease". Some people are born either without inherited mitochondria, or with defective ones, and suffer and eventually die horribly without treatment. This is a similar condition, with a similar fate.)
And now... the story born from this world.
At one of the villages of the clean, a family has a dark secret. Two brothers live there, one is clean, as expected, but the other.. he was born a witch, and his family hid this fact, rather than destroy him. His parents, having tried for years after their first born, found they couldn't conceive, and this child was a miracle for them, and they could not bear to kill him. As an infant, his parents chose to conceal his condition instead, and burned him, removing all traces of his "witch marks" to be burried beneath wicked scars. It seemed as though all would be well there, as the parents claimed the maiming had been an accident, and none of the others in their community had any doubts otherwise.
Until the pilgrimage to the sacred temple on the white peak.
Travel there is a right of passage for their community, it being the closest of the sacred sites, and soon after his journey, the youngest son became deathly ill.
The story involves the older brother, embarking on an adventure of discovery, to find a cure.
Either put something that gnaws at the back of your mind, demanding to be let out, or pick up an idea posted, and cross pollenate with it.
Remember, all contributions need to be implied creative commons licensed, per the rules.
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Topic: recurring thoughts for story plots (Read 920 times)