Plots You Can Have #3 – Futuristic Edition

by johannespunkt

[Trigger Warning: suicide]

Part 2: https://zombiesintelligently.com/2012/08/26/worldbuilding-3-when-to-let-go-new-stuff/#more-355

Part 1: https://zombiesintelligently.com/2012/08/20/a-few-plots-you-can-have/

This time we’ve got the following genres: existential romance, vigilante fiction, space anti-opera, paranoir, etc (did you know you can just make up genre names?)

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Love-(You)-Not

existential romance

Futuristic Megacity. Boy meets girl. Boy splits into million versions of self, only one which dares fall in love with girl. Girl falls in love with boy. Suicide wave strikes city. Media panic. Boy questions own courage. Girl afraid of outside. City crumbles. Boy meets afraid version of himself. Girl confronts re: this; gets wrong version of boy. “You dared go outside.” Girl breaks down. Wrong version of boy convinces girl of double suicide. Right version of boy is too late. Stays there waiting for either of them to wake up again, because boy doesn’t want to Romeo. Fade out.

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Dog Eats Dog: Breeds Misfortune

vigilante fiction

Futuristic prohibition times. Treen Finckle finds her grandmother’s old vigilante suit in an attic one day. She becomes the Coleoptrata, bane of the criminals of Umborough. Other vigilantes are quickly killed by gangs. Coleoptrata-suit replicates itself. Soon, multiple versions of her are fighting criminals in the city. The economy shatters. Her grandmother is woken from the dead by a criminal gang that wishes to talk sense into her– threatening to torture grandmother. Grandmother grandstands and deactivates all the suits. They are almost immediately picked apart by all criminals. “Flee, dumb child,” is grandmother’s advice, before she drops dead again, voluntarily.

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Long for this World

space anti-opera

Futuristic pirates! Everybody who can, leaves Earth and the other people behind. No-one can imagine a good life on Earth. These pirates cannot either, but they try and fight against their impulses. They try to be comfortable with the riches on Earth. It turns out that a widespread parasite has infected basically everybody’s brains: the longing-for-space. Scientists on Earth find this out but can’t do anything about it, and don’t understand why that would happen. Pirates try to build their ship into a spaceship, but fails and crashes, and that is when the aliens arrive.

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Delusions

paranoir 

Colourless world. This story revolves around how broken you can be whilst still being functional. An author of futuristic fiction believes he is shadowed; hires a detective. Realistic ‘eyes’ are graffitied all over the author’s tracks. The private eye starts believing that he is followed; hires for himself the city’s best detective. Author finds overnight fame. They build statues of his nightmareësque creations. The private eye finds a youth painting eyes on walls, who turns out to be paranormally inducing debilitating paranoia. The effects are permanent. The second detective shoots the youth, but the first throws himself in bullet’s way.
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Vaccuum Theory

steampunk!

Airships! Space race, except with steampower! Vaccuum theory! Spies! Moscow rules! Scientist teams in neighbouring supercountries (both which control about half of the available equator land), and the teams actually meet in secret instead so that they can advance science. The teams of spies that fight and kill each other have no idea, but one starts suspecting, and suddenly every spy has orders to kill this one person. Clearly something is up.

Ends in the sudden launch of a rocket by one of the countries, and the way everything seems inconsequential when you have space. Then the other country invades.