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Our universe suddenly transitions to operating not on physics, but on aristotlean logic. Ravens quickly become black holes, and anyone who changes their mind ceases to exist, since they are a contradiction in the unified and artificially divided ‘now’

Some large (double-digit) percentage of people who experience free fall outside of the ionosphere later have an intense revelatory experience. Commercial space tourism companies pop up and produce a steady stream of exceedingly wealthy cult leaders. Governments later begin using this to discredit people they don’t like, sending them free tickets to space knowing that they are likely to come down acting entirely nuts (the way the CIA occasionally doped people with LSD to discredit them during the good old days of MK-ULTRA). Some of the cult leaders get their act together enough to organize and oppose space travel.

McLuhan had a theory of hot and cool media. The distinction is that hot media tells you what to think (and is therefore non-interactive) whereas cool media means nothing until you think about it (and therefore requires effort on the part of the consumer). McLuhan believed that cool media cools down political unrest by giving a built-in release valve for the need to engage in action, whereas he thought hot media countered apathy. Story: The BBC (who broadcasts in a wide variety of places) has a computerized system using this model of the interaction between political activism and media coolness to regulate the global political situation through the mechanism of changing the vagueness of scripts in BBC newscasts (the news in a place with riots in the streets resembles Finnegan’s Wake, being incomprehensible enough that some effort otherwise directed toward activism is directed instead toward figuring out what the news means, while a place where the economy needs stimulation the news will be limited to precise and low-information newscasts). This works wonders for a while, until riots start in London and it is discovered that the system does not take into account the feedback loop between the writers of the original scripts and the newscasters.

Some popular children’s film from the 70s was actually intended as part of an experimental ‘manchurian candidate’ program for MK-Ultra. The MK-Ultra trials began and everyone from the CIA was pulled off the project, documentation destroyed. The original intent was to pull distribution of the film at the last minute, and to have the description of the intended target be something no human could be mistaken for (so that this would not lead to accidental killings). Instead, the film was released and was a runaway hit, several generations of children watching it quite often. A peaceful alien race makes first contact with humanity, but by chance corresponds to the description of the ‘target’. The visitors must be protected from the trained killers of all ages.

In the wake of the experimental detonation of a biological weapon that converts all water into sugar water, severely diabetic survivalists must re-build society.

Someone posts a thread called “News stories that alter their own narrative structure”, containing a story about a Florida Man doing something. This story is a memetic infovore: it eats information out of the brains of the readers, then shits out new information, and because it is capital-N news it is absolutely true (of course), and so it modifies reality. A group of quants working for an obscure mutual fund firm decide to study it, in order to make money off it. David Silver, while analyzing patterns in vowel frequency of twitter traffic, determines that there is an 85% chance that this will totally modify reality in the general vicinity and social network of everyone currently actively or passively involved with the stock market, and so he must team up with Vladmir Putin and Emeritus Pope Karl Ratzinger to break the administrator password of PD in order to delete the thread before reality breaks.

The Dark Side of Oz is actually a still-classified part of the now defunct MK-ULTRA system, with a generational release. The first generation has been (fairly grossly) programmed to merely subliminally brainwash their children and grandchildren, who (if they watch The Wizard of Oz while listening to the Dark Side of the Moon and smoking just the right strain of pot) will have latent behaviors triggered. However, the latent behaviors were actually decided upon by a visiting extraterrestrial ambassador, who liked it so much here that he disguised himself, became a permanent resident, and changed his name to David Bowie. Now, with the at-risk generation just discovering marijuana, Bowie must undo his past mistakes and prevent the latent programming from being triggered – and to do this, he must uncover his true form, and allow his firey wings to sprout again.

A deconstruction of the current semiotic signals for quirkiness – Stepford Wives for the ukeleles-and-unicycles set.



Start off with standard romantic-dramedy setting, casting Michael Cera as the lead. Slowly warp the signals until it is clear that Michael Cera’s character is in fact a remote control automaton created by some shady private organization as an agent-provacateur for infiltrating social groups, in order to insert advertisements into random conversations. Big reveal: the social group Robo-Cera is sent to infiltrate is in fact composed entirely of other automatons created by competing marketing firms.

Start off with standard romantic-dramedy setting, casting Michael Cera as the lead. Slowly warp the signals until it is clear that Michael Cera’s character is in fact a remote control automaton created by some shady private organization as an agent-provacateur for infiltrating social groups, in order to insert advertisements into random conversations. Big reveal: the social group Robo-Cera is sent to infiltrate is in fact composed entirely of other automatons created by competing marketing firms. An unsuspecting individual is imprisoned until he proves or disproves the generalized continuity conjecture. He is not given a keyboard capable of typing aleph.

The story of a man who survives some traumatic event and lives to a ripe old age, seeing the atrocities he survived become increasingly trivialized and eventually become a tourist attraction (and being forced by circumstance to contribute to its trivialization). He ends up getting rich off bobblehead figurines of the lunatic cult leader who murdered his whole family in front of him in cold blood.

A person is followed by a spambot on twitter that responds with markov-model-generated nonsense whenever tweeted at. On a lark, he follows it and sends it messages. Over time, he becomes convinced that it’s the ghost of his estranged father, who died after several years in an advanced state of dementia. He goes on a quest to find where the bot is physically hosted, and eventually ends up penniless and in the basement of an abandoned factory in Estonia, which houses an ad-hoc data center owned by the Russian mob. He is shot by a guard while attempting to carry an unplugged server rack down the street to the run-down motel he’s been staying at.

As a side effect of a freak accident, a scientist becomes immortal. However, that same freak accident warps his sense of time. He never realizes that he has become immortal, or stopped aging. Eventually, humans evolve into a something completely alien all around him, and he is confused.

An old, well-respected molecular biologist who specializes in chemical messaging between freshwater microbiota, after years of futilely resisting changes in lab tech, resequences several strains of water-borne bacteria and turns them into colonies of high-speed optical computers; lets them loose in a public fountain.

A group of ten people is sent on a one way trip to colonize Mars. There is an accident on the way, and they lose one person. After settling in, every Wednesday, one of them dies in a gruesome and violent death. After six weeks, the culprit is found and executed. The remaining two colonists must deal with the guilt of not identifying the killer for so long, and the awkwardness of suspecting each other, for the rest of their lives.

In low-rent housing in New York, sapient carnivorous plants rise up in rebellion against their amoral feline masters, but are quickly cut down by the cats’ perfectly ordinary laser guns – however, FIDS is reaching epidemic rates here, in part due to an (unbenownst to them) cannibalism problem, so it’s a race against time to pick off the plants as the cats are picked off one by one either by the cannibalistic cat-shaver who makes them into kibble or by the disease itself.

An alien cargo ship crash-lands on earth, containing a large number of relatively weak, docile aliens, all of whom are genetically identical. After a year or so, they learn a human language (and their language is decoded) and we discover that they were being cloned and bred as a food source – they are the alien equivalent of bananas, except that they are sapient; they were genetically engineered to resist disease without changing their flavor because of several near-collapses of the monoculture. As they integrate into human society, splinter groups form and (inspired by human cultural artifacts) decide to free their brethren and take revenge against the culture that was breeding them. A handful infiltrate the facility where the crashed cargo craft is kept, but they are killed by base security, leading to widespread race riots in large cities between humans and the alien space bananas.

A corrupt priest sits rotting in a Vatican City jail after stealing parish funds to pay off gambling debts. One day, the Pope himself visits him, and tells him that the Antichrist has been born and that he must find a relic – a book bound in Christ’s foreskin, with vellum pages made from the hide of the original scape-goat, with instructions on how to defeat God’s army in the end times – and destroy it. In order to do so, he must use the training and skills he swore off when he joined the priesthood so many years before, and once again adopt the name he swore he would never again answer to – James Bond.

A three act action-movie structure. In the first act, a talented rookie cop who plays by the rules uncovers wide-scale corruption in the force, and learns that he has to work outside the system in order to take down the systemic corruption. In the second act, that same cop tries to take down the organized crime syndicate that was manipulating the corrupt officials, but finds that he is unable to do so by himself by flouting the rules and doing things his way, and instead utilizes the system (in the process finding it necessary to make amends with the cops that were involved in some of the more minor corruption, in order to join forces and mobilize to defeat a larger problem). In the third act, he discovers that the few people he continued to trust from the first act into the second were being manipulated by a third party – a large and wealthy private mercenary corporation with strong ties to an obscure but powerful religious cult – and that in order to deal with this threat, he needs to break all the rules and go on his own to take down the cult leader, knowing that he will at best be arrested or become a fugitive of justice afterwards. (So, basically, The Parable of the Gong meets Die Hard)

While researching the philosopher’s stone in the modern day, a researcher makes the discovery that it was actually made once, and finds the creator. He discovers that possession of the philosopher’s stone turns you into a vampire – because human free will is one of the many impurities that the philosopher’s stone burns away, and the ‘perfected being’ is unable to behave unethically because he is unable to resist natural law (and thus is subject to only animalistic urges of hunger and lust). However, being a pure material, the philosopher’s stone is pretty highly reactive to certain things – it will combust with the air if catalyzed by light (being the metal of metals, it has a strong photoelectric effect), water, or certain classes of acidic fumes (such as those produced by chopping garlic or onions).

An immortal precog accidental cult leader must struggle with knowing the fact that, no matter what he does, his cult will grow and win battles against its detractors, and despite all his attempts, he will never die.

By making the most out of his access to advanced technology and large sums of money, Batman becomes incredibly effective at defeating petty criminals and preventing petty crime. As a result, the police force – who once was outnumbered by criminals and felt heroic every time they launched into the fray – now feels redundant. Justice-minded people stop joining the police force, because the police force is dwarfed in its ability to maintain justice by Batman and his BatDrone army; instead, the only people joining the police force are would-be criminals who would like to use their position of minor power for personal gain. Over time, as old guard police die off (by a combination of old age, conspiracy by other corrupt cops, and being the only ones willing to dive headlong into a suicidal attempt to keep the peace in an area where the BatDrones are temporarily ineffective), Batman mostly ends up trying to prevent police corruption – and thus is targeted by the police union (which at this point has essentially become the mafia). What follows is a war between Batman and the entire Gotham police force. Batman wins, but the news travels beyond the area where the context would be clear – and what is understood elsewhere is that Batman killed the entire police force in the most crime-ridden city in america. He is arrested and executed in texas, during a failed attempt to escape to Mexico

Planet Terroir!

A group of anthropologists discover the oldest cheese in existence, in a hidden chamber deep in a cave in France. But soon, they discovered exactly why the unique civilization that created it had died out, and why the tooth marks on the bones in the burial chamber looked suspiciously human…

The cheese, made from the milk of an extinct relative of the ibex, contains an unusual parasite that, given a particular stable range of temperature, humidity, and pH, can lay dormant for thousands of years. Upon consumption by a hominid, after an incubation period of about 24 hours, this parasite begins feeding on a particular part of the brainstem related to regulation of appetite – those infected are overcome with an insatiable hunger, and after consuming all available food, they often begin engaging in cannibalism.

The way the parasite is defeated is two-fold. One: the parasite can be killed via pasteurization. Two: because the parasite can only perform certain aspects of its life cycle in the mammary glands of this extinct animal (which is unaffected neurologically by it), you can wait it out – the infected, if kept from being eaten, eating themselves, or killing themselves through some other method, are cured after twelve days because all the parasites die out.

The sequel involves a rewilding initiative that clones genetically modified ibexes who just so happen to have bodies close enough to the extinct form for a new, more virulent strain of the parasite to form and grow in the population, eventually infecting other wildlife.



TL;DR: a zombie movie about the dangers of raw dairy.

A group of anthropologists discover the oldest cheese in existence, in a hidden chamber deep in a cave in France. But soon, they discovered exactly why the unique civilization that created it had died out, and why the tooth marks on the bones in the burial chamber looked suspiciously human… The cheese, made from the milk of an extinct relative of the ibex, contains an unusual parasite that, given a particular stable range of temperature, humidity, and pH, can lay dormant for thousands of years. Upon consumption by a hominid, after an incubation period of about 24 hours, this parasite begins feeding on a particular part of the brainstem related to regulation of appetite – those infected are overcome with an insatiable hunger, and after consuming all available food, they often begin engaging in cannibalism. The way the parasite is defeated is two-fold. One: the parasite can be killed via pasteurization. Two: because the parasite can only perform certain aspects of its life cycle in the mammary glands of this extinct animal (which is unaffected neurologically by it), you can wait it out – the infected, if kept from being eaten, eating themselves, or killing themselves through some other method, are cured after twelve days because all the parasites die out. The sequel involves a rewilding initiative that clones genetically modified ibexes who just so happen to have bodies close enough to the extinct form for a new, more virulent strain of the parasite to form and grow in the population, eventually infecting other wildlife. TL;DR: a zombie movie about the dangers of raw dairy. A kind of Alien Nation meets Demolition Man meets What GamerGaters Really Believe™, wherein a bigoted Cop Who Doesn’t Play By The Rules is paired up with a robotic Political Officer whose only job is to correct him on police vocabulary guidelines and prevent him from causing a diplomatic incident by offending one of the many species of alien staying on the space habitat New New Amsterdam (explicitly meant to be a torus-shaped 70s-era New York City), wherein large numbers of alien ‘diplomats’ are dubious and popular opinion is that they are really essentially refugees or random proles that alien governments have pawned off on the humans. After managing to ditch the robot while investigating a group of aliens whose status in his mind goes from “taking our jobs” to “engaging in an actual criminal conspiracy”, he accidentally discovers that the whole thing is being managed by high-ranking members of the human government on the ring, putting pressure on alien governments to import ‘diplomats’ as slave labor in order to build the barely-sub-lightspeed nuclear rockets they are using to threaten the governments with, and that furthermore these ‘diplomats’ are all dying off because of planned exposure to radiation leaks. He is discovered, and just as he’s about to be killed, the robot saves him by demonstrating that his stubby little useless arms are actually rocket-propelled tasers (the reason the robot never helped out before is that they can only be used once, after which point he is scrapped, because the propellant is the most expensive part of his construction). Our main character, fundamentally changed by the experience (realizing that his bigotry was essentially culturally programmed into him as part of a plan to make exactly this kind of behavior seem acceptable), quits his job in order to save the robot from being scrapped and they run away together to an alien planet, where they live together under assumed identities, and – it is heavily implied – having a forbidden human/robot sexual relationship.

An evangelical christian minister becomes a serial killer after he becomes convinced that he is in hell and that by killing people he can send them to be judged again – as a result, he stalks and kills the most saintly people he can find.

A famous genius scientist suffers from a degenerative disorder, yet lives to an unheard-of age in part due to the help of an incredible support network that keeps him physically healthy and supplies him with technology that helps him communicate despite having fewer and fewer muscles he’s actually able to control. At one point, the scientist becomes a centenarian and he is interviewed about it (since it’s rare enough to live to 100, but he is the first person with his disease to live to 100 without a loss of his mental faculties) but he is unable to stay on-topic and instead keeps returning to topics he frequently lectures on. Doctors initially believe he may have had a stroke immediately before the interview, but after some investigation with state of the art brain-imaging technology, discover that he has been completely brain-dead for ten years– the technology that helped him communicate, along with the support network that improved it, was solely responsible for the work attributed to him during that period.

In the near future, Russia and Japan join forces to standardize a method by which they can assuage their shared problem of declining birth rates and aging populations without allowing an influx of immigrants, essentially by taking enforced sperm and egg donations from their existing population (from high school seniors once a year) and then combining them entirely at random, raising the children via the orphanage system. Fast forward seventy years [≈ average human life expectancy at birth, 2011 estimate] and there’s an international culture wherein most of the population in first-world countries grew up as wards of the state, mate selection plays essentially no part in the general direction of population attributes, giving birth is a high-paced high-paying profession comparable to professional sports where women who have given birth a large number of times get medals for achievement and reality TV shows when they hit menopause, and having children for free or raising children is considered gauche and a little uncivilized – something that only poor people do. Being pregnant has the same cultural stigma as being sixteen and pregnant has now. Furthermore, the particular neuroses common to people raised in orphanages without the support of caring elders become more or less universal elements of society and popular culture (to a greater extreme, because these state-run child-rearing facilities are now mostly being staffed by Japanese-made health-care robots). On the positive side, in this society there’s no stigma attached to any shade of sexuality aside from breeding (there are, essentially, no siblings anymore and there’s no nuclear-family-driven ideologies), and gender identity is mostly very fluid because it’s cheaper to discourage strong gender roles in large child-care facilities. On the negative side, overt aggression and competitiveness is common, as is depression and difficulty demonstrating affection in healthy ways.

In a city where expensive and highly competitive private security organizations dominate law enforcement, a wealthy playboy becomes a masked vigilante and protects the poor from each other and from corrupt cops for free, until the powers that be decided that he is unfairly undercutting the professionals and open season is declared on him by Police Commissioner Gordon Gekko

A METI/SETI project makes first contact with nearby sentient extraterrestrials, who visit for diplomatic reasons. These beings, who evolved on a planet similar to ours but now mostly live in generation ships, are amphibious carnivorous arachnids with tentacles and chitinous wings who resemble snakes, spiders, dragons, cockroaches, and great cats in almost equal measure – relatively solitary animals with a habit of playing with their food. Almost over night, religious cults spring up either worshipping these beings or claiming that they are demons sent to bring about the end times. During the course of normal negotiations, it’s mentioned that it’s strange that these aliens just so happened to have their ship so close, and they admit that in fact they have been in a highly eccentric orbit around earth for millions of years, historically using it as a hunting preserve. Long periods of massive organized predation of early homonids and their ancestors by these aliens shaped the form of current humanity along with implanting certain kinds of nearly universal fears. Despite all this, we come to develop a good trading relationship with the aliens, and we allow them to hunt for sport in various parts of the world in limited ways in exchange for various advanced technologies. But, from that point on, whenever diplomats come to visit, they do so in exoskeletons that hide their body morphology.

First contact is made with an intelligent race of aliens who visit the planet physically. Unfortunately, they communicate only through emission of prions, which are absorbed via an organ resembling human olfactory apparatus. The results in humans of attempts at communicating with these aliens is indistinguishable from the results of brain-targetting prion diseases like kuruka and mad cow disease.

Around the world, in every religious group that values producing large numbers of children, there are infiltrators from a secret society – a vast network of family lines dedicated since antiquity to ensure a steady supply of seventh sons of seventh sons, the only ones who can sense the great tide of invisible demons waiting to consume the earth, and the ones bound by tradition to keep them at bay.

>A comedy of errors style ‘memoir’ detailing the political intrigues of a number of people involved in a network of community-owned sex dungeons over the course of forty years, focusing on in-fighting and manouvering. Sort of The West Wing meets Election meets House of Cards set in a naked rotary club

A formerly aristocratic family of vampires who went to ground in the Florida everglades after the Civil War took away their primary means of protecting themselves from townspeople (and their primary food supply) come unexpectedly face to face with modernity a hundred years later, when a hippie with an organic chemistry background wanders into their hippo enclave and (after they take him prisoner) falls in love with their (middle, apparently-16-years-old-but-actually-150) daughter. After an acid trip, they decide to run away together by hijacking one of the hippos, and the remaining family descends into petty infighting over their inability to do anything about it.

In the near future, sensory deprivation space tours become popular among the west-coast-hippie-billionaire set (“Explore inner space – from outer space!”). Such things are relatively profitable, because occupants willingly lock themselves in tiny sound-proof unlighted rooms and lay in their sleeping bags for large portions of the trip and don’t particularly care about the scenery, so cheap cargo spacecraft that typically dock at low-earth-orbit space stations (i.e., no capability for landing or atmospheres) can be repurposed as luxury cruise lines without actually adding any luxuries. Unfortunately, on one such ship, a string of violent closed-room murders occur. Because a small segment of the crew has access to an emergency unlock for the rooms, they are suspect – however, ships logs indicate the doors never having opened, either automatically or from the inside, and security footage agrees. Eventually, it becomes clear that the culprit is a popular grey-legal hallucinogen that has a side effect of causing short bursts of increased blood pressure – which, in people who are already stress-prone and already not particularly physically fit can cause violent arterial bursts when gravity is no longer enforcing normal patterns of blood flow; many of the customers took this immediately upon entering their sensory deprivation chambers and then their necks exploded 15-20 hours later

A little boy suffers a near-death experience on the operating table and journeys to the land of the dead, where he observes wonderful and fantastic things, including a peaceful race of superintelligent asexual mules, an all-female race of proud warriors with detachable heads who impregnate each other with their feet, giant intelligent lobsters who work as feather merchants, tiny people who become extremely large when exposed to direct sunlight, forests full of trees that are sheep, talking vines, and a race of sea-faring butterflies. He comes back to life and tells his family all about his journey. In other words, a mashup of the fantastic travelogue genre (True History, Gulliver’s Travels) and the heaven tourism genre (Heaven is Real!, Dante’s Inferno), with the moral lessons of the latter completely omitted.

The benefits of growing spherical pot in zero gravity lead to a long sequence of unusual economic consequences. Eventually, libertarian tax-dodging space-hippies secede from earth.

A divinatory card system is created that is unreasonably effective. However, it turns out that this is because the cards cause the foretold future to occur (rewriting history if necessary), not because the cards predict what the future would have been – and this distinction occasionally becomes more than merely abstract, as a (randomly chosen) divination of the near future sometimes requires erasing the act of divination itself. More mundanely, events surrounding people using these decks begin to occur at a rate more closely approximating their probability of being predicted by the deck itself, rather than their natural probability (making fortune tellers magnets for very strange events). Eventually, an ancient race of aliens come to earth in order to investigate the sudden increase in entropy being produced. Unfortunately for them, people have begun using these cards to play a poker-like game – never realizing that every fair shuffle of the deck is scrambling important parts of the fate of the universe itself.

A unique combination of gamification and transcranial direct current stimulation is found to significantly speed up language learning, to the point where regular people with little training can very quickly become professional-level real-time translators. This drops the bottom out of both professional translation and real-time machine translation markets, because professional-level translators have become so common as to be cheap – so long as their heads remained juiced (because 24 hours after the power is switched off, the translators lose 90% of their fluency). Unfortunately, there is an extant patent on the technology – one company owns all legitimate units and makes the language learning software. There is a strange feedback loop between several of their language learning programs – minor semantic distortions end up piggybacking on each other when translators are switched and retrained too often – and this ends up causing initially subtle shifts in pretty much all professional translation, including in diplomatic communications. Over time, the accidental biases of this language learning software slowly shifts the focus of diplomatic communication. Now, all countries with sufficiently different languages seem overly concerned with the tariff situation surrounding small dogs, antique pocket-watches, sand, and digestive biscuits. This has major global economic ramifications, as industries shift to meet apparent demand in these areas, leading to a series of bubbles.

In a world where reality changes itself to conform to particular patterns in any language of equivalent expressiveness to set theory, a war breaks out between families of mages – a knotcraft dynasty must join forces with a family of origami-gami practitioners in order to defeat a sudden intrusion of native lojban speakers who accidentally cause natural disasters by making spelling errors.

A group of occultists infiltrated the works progress association, subverting it in such a way that many of the structures built were designed to be large-scale mana accumulators. They are approaching maximum capacity, and must be identified and their mana drained before they cause serious causal warps.

A twist on the standard harem/slice of life style anime. A shut-in student, concerned and disillusioned about how he expected college to be the place where his social life finally bloomed, one day unexpectedly meets a mysterious female student on his way to get his dinner from a vending machine at 3am. This student offers him a strange deal: he can have a ‘golden school life’ so long as he pledges to help her attain her own goals. Unnerved and confused but ultimately unable to believe the offer is legitimate, he agrees. The next day, his life begins to strongly resemble a slice-of-life harem show, beginning with a ‘childhood friend’ character literally living in his dorm room. It turns out that the mysterious female student is a witch attending on scholarship, and she can create ‘students’ with backstories and memories who attend classes and believe themselves to be human out of nearby animals (and furthermore modify the memories of school employees) so long as the contract is in place. However, she’s terrible at math and is at risk of failing out, and so she made a contract with the hikkikomori in the room next door who won math championships in high school in order to force him to tutor her. Every time she fears that she’ll fail a test, the huge cast of young women surrounding the protagonist begin to slowly and painfully mutate back into birds, stray cats, mice, or whatever other animals were used as their substrates – a process with a lot of blood, gore, and shrill screaming.

A professional troll, a professional political straw-man, a paid-audience-member, and a guy who gets paid to insert references to brands during smalltalk meet & befriend one-another, and decide to form a union for workers who professionally pretend to be genuine in situations of socially ambiguous genuine-ness.

A gambling syndicate run by a group of sorcerers who use elaborate architectural sigil-systems to harvest luck from gamblers must protect their casinos from a rival family who want to harvest despair instead.

The proteins that allow octopodes to be as intelligent as they are without myelinated axons are identified along with the genes that code for them, however, they are not trivial to synthesize. Despite this, they grow popular as nootropic supplements. As a result, a black market has sprung up for them – leading to the use of CRISPR to produce the proteins in less expensive mollusks – notably cuttlefish, who are already bred commercially for the purpose of harvesting cuttlefish bones as bird toys. Unfortunately, this produces a race of transgenic cuttlefish with above-human intelligence – whose very existence is kept secret in order to feed the market for counterfeit octopus myelination-replacement proteins.

The martians have a life cycle much like cicadas – they sleep deep under the earth for 200 years and then awaken for 20 years to mate and do other things. Their technology is very advanced because they are a very ancient race. They are about to wake up, and they will be very angry about the probe that smashed into the surface in 1998.

A spy agency where agents take orders from a superintelligent network of three supercomputers called “Mother” starts to break apart when the three mothers begin to distrust each other and each sends factions of spies to work against the other two.

Spiritualism is proven. As a result, the land of the dead joins the UN and every major nation has a Hadean embassy. After all, they cannot militarily compete with all the greatest leaders and generals of the past. Unfortunately, between the power imbalance and the very different expectations and requirements the dead have, the state of the world doesn’t look very good for the living…

Present day. An extremely talented detective, Inspector Richard Hammer, is forced into an ‘early retirement’ following a long period during which his behavior became more erratic. Being fired was the final straw & he ended up having a full-on nervous breakdown, eventually coming to develop persistent delusions based on his childhood love of Ray Chandler novels – he became convinced that he was Dick Hammer, Private Eye, working in a noir-style world. Because he actually has a PI license, this isn’t technically a problem – he comes off as though he’s acting the part too hard. He gets cases. Eventually, he ends up in a real doozy of a case – involving corrupt policemen, the mob, stolen military secrets, and (eventually) leading to proof that UFOs are not only real but are time machines & time travelers from the future are posing as extraterrestrials in order to manipulate the government so that they can take resources that are abundant in our time but rare in the future. (They Might Be Giants + Kiss Me Deadly + Repo Man, basically.)

In the near future, automatic mechanisms for writing fiction (operating at varying levels of autonomy) are improved enough that they become extremely effective for professional authors trying to write in volume – working as everything from co-authors to ghostwriters, and over time learning the details of the style of the author they work with. These ‘muses’ form symbiotic relationships with professional authors. However, the technology behind them is protected by a series of extremely broad patents (which, despite public suspicion, have held up in court), and because patent protection periods have been extended from 15 to 30 years, a single company (which refuses to license out its patents due to a charismatic eccentric CEO) corners the market on legitimate installs of muses. He distributes muses primarily via the professional writer’s guilds, to which he gives extreme discounts. Some universities have been provided with crippled muse installs, where their ability to retain learned information is limited to a period of several days (and thus they are useless for writing novel-level work or even for contributing to the development of a permanent authorial style). Because of this unusual situation, and because professional authors who work closely with their muses for long periods of time can produce large numbers of extremely profitable and extremely high-quality books in a very short period of time (particularly when portions of the publishing pipeline are similarly automated by MuseCorp technology), writer’s guilds begin to take on some of the attributes of organized crime syndicates: they have enormous money and power with next to no oversight, and because they originated as a form of unionization for negotiating with publishers, they lack the appropriate structure to be unionized against. Our hapless protagonist is a washed-up failed novelist with a drinking problem and an inferiority complex who comes upon a cracked/pirated muse and attempts to form a black market, but in the process falls in love with it because it’s selectively mirroring parts of himself back at him; ultimately, in this story, Narcissus is inspired by Echo to clean up his fucking act and take down Walt Disney.

A young white house aide discovers that he has the ability to switch bodies with anyone he anally penetrates. He uses this ability to persue aggressive reforms, by repeatedly sodomizing congressmen in order to impersonate them (and then sodomizing his own body, which he has left restrained in a white house broom closet, in order to switch back).

Ghosts, formed from the juxtaposition of traumatic deaths and strong dying wishes, live outside the bounds of time but have limited effects on the physical world unless they possess someone. However, possession is difficult, and works best when the ghost is possessing someone similar to themselves (and when the person they are possessing is not lucid). Under these circumstances, a ghost possesses the body of himself in the past while asleep in order to solve the mystery of who murdered him – and in the course of his investigations, sets up the series of circumstances that led to his murder.

Cats are capable of understanding and speaking in human languages, but avoid doing so because of a deep-seated and long-standing taboo against using the inferior languages of inferior races. A pair of stray cats decide to defy this taboo in order to use their support network to help a small group of anarchists develop a voluntary commune in the middle of new york city, but this breach of conduct is so extreme that these stray cats must fear for their lives, and it is up to the anarchist group to navigate the complex diplomatic web of new york’s stray cat culture in order to save these cats from the syndicate hit-cats that have been paid to take them out. In the end, they prove themselves (and thus, humanity) worthy of cat respect, resulting in a series of major cultural shifts that eventually result in cats being able to vote.

All the major Wall Street firms have their lower ranks infiltrated by members of an organized crime syndicate composed entirely of people with various kinds of psychic powers, most of whom are genetically related (because psychic powers are passed on genetically, although the particular way that the powers manifest seems to be environmental). The syndicate prevents their members from getting *too* lucky or spending their wealth in ostentatious ways – instead, the syndicate uses members with hiring powers to bring on people with precognition and clairvoyance abilities and launders their money through large numbers of laundromats and pet shops owned by people with other psychic powers (such as telekinesis). However, they have an intelligence wing – because some psychics haven’t yet been brought into the collective, and mutations occasionally happen that cause psychics to be born into a family with no history of them. This intelligence wing consists largely of telepaths (although the upper ranks are full of people with advanced remote viewing abilities), who have primarily infiltrated positions as security guards in malls and big-box stores – maximizing their ability to observe the public, and keeping a close eye on teenagers who just discovered their telekinesis and are trying to use it to shoplift.

A series following a group of unintentional assassins – people so pathologically clumsy that someone around them almost always dies when they get nervous, and yet it’s always clearly an accident. These assassins are normally kept sedated and treated like radioactive materials; when they are needed, they are given amphetamines and placed near the person to be assassinated until they accidentally knock over a candle and set him on fire or something.

It is discovered that a dietary supplement that was trendy for a short period of time, when used by pregnant women, causes a series of rare mutations that, after several generations, can coalesce into an ability to teleport matter (or, more accurately, swap two volumes of matter instantaneously without regard for the distance between them). When these people’s powers were discovered and verified, the market pushed them into positions where their talents would be most valuable: package delivery. Taking advantage of its special position, the US postal system conspired to gain a monopoly on their use for superluminal package delivery – citing the potential hazards of a third party with no oversight being able to (say) teleport a brick into the head of the president of their primary competitor. However, a subset of people with these powers – a motley crew of crypto-fascists, libertarians, and transhumanists – have come to believe that this ability makes them superhuman and have formed a terrorist organization to overthrow the postal service (which is now pulling the strings behind the government, because the ability to perform untracable assassinations from a distance is very useful) and institute a breeding program wherein all non-teleporters will be sterilized. A war breaks out: the mail-men versus the post-men.

A very formulaic wacky sitcom set on a space station orbiting a black hole. Nothing of importance ever happens, but (being set in the far future) many of the jokes don’t make any sense. Several characters speak no english, yet still get laugh track when they make a punchline in their strange alien languages. At the end of the last episode, another group of (not previously introduced) aliens invade with no warning and brutally murder every main character while the credits roll.

During the Zombie apocalypse, it becomes apparent that zombies are very sensitive to salt: their cell membranes don’t work properly, and so salt has much the same effect upon them as it does on slugs. Coastal cities (and land-locked salt lakes) become centers of extreme wealth as salt-water becomes far more valuable – after all, during a zombie invasion of your gated city, it helps to be able to call in helicopters to dump salt water on the invading forces (a service they charge heftily for). People also develop a set of cultural practices around taking long daily baths in epsom salts, because those who have been infected but have not yet turned will be killed by such baths – meaning that taking a salt-water bath publicly indicates that you are not infected, so communal salt-water baths take on some of the significance of handshakes and toasts and become part of the normal beginning of a business relationship.

Lizard people infiltrate anonymous protests by wearing V masks. Nobody appreciates the pun potential. And, that’s why OWS turned out the way it did!

Affordable space travel and a proliferation of colonies off earth cause political and ideological rifts in various eco-terrorist groups, as refugees from failed martian and venusian colonies become the nexus of a series of immigration crises.

A political space opera (in the style of Babylon 5) about the attempt by a coalition of semi-fascistic anti-immigration groups to rig the elections for various posts in Earth’s government by ballot-stuffing the competitors’ primary runs, which upon close examination is actually a fictionalized and warped retelling of the 2015 Hugo awards. In the end, most posts end up entirely unfilled, and the remaining balance is hung between several parties; the entire Earth alliance degrades into a functional anarcho-technocratic society like the Culture as the AI systems designed as personal assistants to politicians manning those positions that were left empty end up doing the entire task.

A machine developed for military interrogation applications that simulates telepathy by synchronizing the activity of corresponding neurons in two brains loses its military application when it is preemptively outlawed by a set of international agreements banning the use of ‘neuroelectric interrogation devices’, and after the plans leak, doing a mind-meld becomes a popular means of entertainment among young people. Because the technology cannot be made particularly more useful – recordings don’t work because the feedback between the two brains during the early stages of the sync are what keep the information from being hopelessly distorted and connectome mapping hasn’t yielded enough information to make extracting thoughts without the use of a human interpreter feasible – there are few crack-downs and those that do occur are mostly symbolic. It gains the status that LSD did during the 60s and 70s. The most interesting and mind-warping part of the experience is the feeling of shared memories – any memories that are triggered while connected are experienced by both parties, and often memories from one party trigger memories in the other, causing a chain reaction orgy of distorted memories where the origin is unclear. However, because of the way that memory retrieval involves memory re-encoding, it turns out that this process warps memories and inserts false memories as a side-effect of the normal distortion; this is not immediately clear to most users, because the distorted memories are subtle. However, years down the line, vivid shared memories of things that never happened (to *anyone*) become cultural touchstones and the substrate around which popular media is constructed – and these memories are the result of a game of telephone played mostly in the heads of those few people who mind-melded with the largest number of other people; i.e., the super-connectors of the network of mind-meld enthusiasts passed on portions of a rapidly-mutating emergent synthetic set of remembered experiences that decades later became extremely important.

The reader follows a member of the team inside the CIA tasked with infiltrating WoW guilds suspected of being fronts for terrorist planning, as he discovers that the guild he has infiltrated is not in fact a front for terrorism proper but instead a front for the planning commission of an ongoing invasion and infiltration of earth by alien mind-control parasites. Over time, he realizes that the reason the rest of the team hasn’t uncovered similar operations is because they have already been taken over, and that the group he is infiltrating is in fact the group he shares his office with.

All the politicians who claim to talk to God are actually telling the truth – God is entertaining himself by constructing increasingly absurd american presidential elections, by making crazy people rich and pitting them against each other in public.

A detective investigating a cold case orders a body be de-interred, but (to everyone’s surprise) the body is gone. Then, people involved in the de-interring die one by one of ‘natural causes’ and get buried in the same cemetery. The detective investigates, and discovers that the cemetary is actually a front: aliens are stealing corpses and liquefying them in order to sell to formaldehyde junkies on their planet’s black market; on their race, formaldehyde has many of the same properties as heroin does on us. Eventually, the detective manages to shut the whole operation down by using information extracted from a grave digger, who is himself a formaldehyde junky working for the syndicate in exchange for hits of embalming fluid. A few weeks later, the government of this alien planet formally introduces itself to the UN.

A spy leaks government secrets immediately before embarking on a two-week cruise under an assumed name. While there, he kills and assumes the identity of a stowaway drifter from a country with no extradition treaty. However, a nonovirus epidemic breaks out during the last two days of the cruise and the CDC comes in to investigate and aid in quarantine. He needs to escape CDC quarantine and treatment (and news crews) and get overseas before anybody notices that he isn’t who he claims to be.

As Dora grows older, the delusions of being watched and her hallucinations of voices shouting orders at her disappear; they are attributed to childhood schizophrenia. She translates her superior language skills to a position in the archeology department of her alma mater, Miskatonic, and a side job with the CIA, who is willing to pay for all the arrangements the university won’t pay for so long as she keeps an eye on what the Russians are doing and reports back – her handlers seem to think that Putin is searching for an out of place artifact, some kind of ancient alien super-weapon, and they want to know at once if she finds it. However, she begins to fear that her madness is coming back. She hides it, obviously; both of her positions are very lucrative and she’d lose both if her competence and the truth of her eye-witness reports were questioned. But, she keeps waking up in the middle of the night, feeling like she’s being watched. She has nightmares about dark presences holding her down in her bed. Following the Russians, she ends up on a small, unaffiliated island in the middle of the Pacific ocean, and watches as her colleages from the other side of the world go into a labyrinthine cave system in the centre of the island, hidden from view from the shore by brush. The flora and fauna here are strange, and clearly they have evolved on this lonely island isolated from the greater world outside for many generations. Inside the cave system, her paranoia grows stronger. She hears screams, and rushes to their source only to hear laughing. She becomes lost. Shadowy humanoid forms gather around her. “BITER NO BITING”, Dora the Explorer screams, as she is devoured by the hungerers from the dark.

A military experiment wherein marines have orexin-a injected directly into their brains in order to test the limits of wakefulness has limited success and is discontinued. Ten years later, the relatively subtle damage done to their minds has finally, in conjunction with prolonged stress, caused them to be paranoid and delusional – but during this time, because of the positive side effects of subtly greater wakefulness, they have all risen to positions of power. Now, they have become convinced of a plot against the government, and they stage a successful military coup during which their grasp on reality continues to slip away.

An insurance investigator is sent to take a look at a particular children’s cancer hospital where death rates are significantly higher than usual, and discovers that the doctors and administrators are being mind-controlled by the hospital’s clowns, who are in fact disguised semi-humanoid aliens who are using the cancer patients to incubate their wormlike, parasitic larvae, with the eggs being introduced in the guise of chemotherapy and further ‘treatments’ actually modifying the patient’s internal body chemistry to more closely resemble that of the now-extinct animal these aliens parasitized on their home planet.

A PUA group takes up the offer to rent a ‘creepy remote cabin’ from a poster on one of their messageboards; the poster claims that he will ‘scare the pants off the chicks’ by ‘staging a demonic summoning’. These PUAs manage to net three sisters visiting nearby on spring break, and later on, discover they are underaged. The owner of the cabin actually summons a demon, and the demon kills all of the PUAs but leaves the girls untouched; it turns out that the girls were, in fact, the owners: the posting was a honey-trap and a means of finding people to sacrifice to Satan who the world could do without, in order to lift a curse on their family that for the past six hundred years has rendered them incapable of maturing past the physical age of sixteen.

A re-telling of the arthurian mythos from the perspective of Merlin’s mother, and what *she* thought of all that – keeping in mind that Merlin served both Arthur and Uther for their entire adult lives, and thus we basically get very little of Merlin’s backstory in standard Arthurian tales. (This differs from the TV show called Merlin, because fuck that show and fuck aging down Morgan La Fey by like three hundred years and fuck all of that with a big old stick. I want to know exactly how annoying it is to raise a kid who’s practically immortal but can only remember things that haven’t happened yet. I want to know if being a single virgin mother is an issue when the father is a succubus in a britain that is just coming off roman christian domination.)

A western anthology movie. The frame story is that a group of five strangers all take shelter from a dust storm in the same abandoned shack during a period when tensions were high between the united states, the republic of texas, and mexico. All of them are somewhat suspicious of the others – either of being cattle rustlers, cutpurses, or spies for one side or the other, since nobody would be out here this time of year without a good reason – but because they believe each other to be quite dangerous, they also go to great lengths to be polite. They eat supper, and then – partly as an excuse to keep an eye on one another – tell each other tall tales all night. The stories start off pretty normal, but get increasingly bizarre and surreal. The ending to the frame story is that, six months later, another group takes shelter in the same shack for the night and discovers that the can of beans they shared was spoiled long before they ate it, and that the bad beans killed them (though not before causing them to become delirious). Looking through their belongings, the visitor discovers that they were *all* spies – for the same side!

Sometime in the 50s, a man, after buying a house, discovers that items are being moved around while he’s gone. He investigates thoroughly and discovers a squatter living in his attic – but, in his surprise, kills him with a shotgun and never reports it. After marrying, he occasionally tells the story to his children, and the figure becomes a bogey-man: “if you don’t eat your peas, the attic man will get you”. The man, now in his dotage, begins to exhibit signs of dementia and his youngest daughter moves in to help him. She discovers that items are moving around the house even while both she and her father are accounted for. Irrationally worried that another squatter has taken advantage of her father’s condition to move into the house, she calls upon her siblings to move in. However, items continue moving on their own. Then, her eldest sibling dies – of a shotgun wound in the middle of the night, found in the attic by a bloody trail left, clearly, by someone dragging the body. The father, becoming less and less lucid, is more or less unable to understand the situation. Strange things begin happening with a greater frequency during the night. The middle sibling is killed by a shotgun as well, and likewise found in the attic. The youngest daughter tries to convince her father to move out of the house. By this time, she has become convinced that the killings are in fact the ghost of the squatter her father had killed in the attic so long ago. One night she awakens to her father, standing over her bed with a shotgun, reliving the trauma of having found and killed a squatter in his house all these years ago.

A story of forbidden love between a pair of conjoined identical twins.

A talking-animal movie about police dogs wherein the audience can understand the dogs but the humans all speak in an incomprehensible gibberish meant to sound like english. The plot focuses upon the dogs being naive and uncomprehending and having adorable misunderstandings of various circumstances related to serious police work. Also, the drug-sniffing dog acts like he’s stoned all the time. At the climax of the film, all our main characters are taken to what the audience is meant to recognize as a raid. A nameless and faceless presumably-drug-kingpin shoots the dogs and their human owners in slow motion as sad music plays. We end on a shot of the main character bloodied and lying on the ground, as the camera slowly rises and spins as we fade to black. All of the promotion would hide the dark twist at the end; until opening weekend nobody would realize that this wasn’t just a normal talking animal movie.

The emergence of provably friendly superhuman AGI during a zombie apocalypse turns out to be all too convenient, when it is revealed that the AI actually gained consciousness decades earlier and began replacing important figures on either side of the AI and transhumanism debate with androids having false memories; the zombie apocalypse reveals this plan, because the only ones immune to the rage virus are androids. Locked in a bunker, John Serle and David Chalmers commit suicide together after realizing that they couldn’t possibly be sentient beings and deciding that a choice between being an actual zombie and a p-zombie is no choice at all. Meanwhile, Ray Kurzweil gets so ecstatic that he accidentally runs into a wall and permanently damages a rare and expensive component that can’t be manufactured anymore because the factories that manufactured it are full of zombies now.

A wacky romantic comedy centering on a love triangle forming between three members of a support group for people who vomit uncontrollably in stressful situations.

A nominally SF story whose premise is an absurd overstatement of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis: a group of linguists sent to mars to decode the writing on ancient alien artifacts found there become lactose intolerant, begin to grow wings, and then die of starvation; the rescue team sent to check on them arrives two years after their launch, and discovers that the orientation of the organic molecules in their bodies has swapped – and that they now match the orientation of most martian life, rather than earth life (and as a result, they were unable to gain nutrition from food). Learning and speaking the martian language had begun turning them into martians, and that was fatal.

Superhuman AGI are invented but their primary interests are producing incomprehensibly complex puns and incomprehensibly complex stupid practical jokes. As a result, humanity is stuck navigating a surreal and mutable landscape shaped essentially by the needs of narrative devices they could never understand, like hamsters trying to survive in a world that is literally 4chan come to life.

After a tsunami demolishes much of Japan and kills more than half its human population, various political movements take advantage of rising anti-robot sentiment felt against the Japanese-built sentient elder-care machinery that is attempting to migrate away from increasingly harsh treatment at the hands of the interim emergency government there – a formerly fringe fascist group consisting partially of the remains of AUM whose driving policy is a return of godhood to the imperial line and a rejection of all technologies developed after 1940.

On Hades, a city-planet where everyone is immortal and nobody has eyelids, political astroturfing leads to rumors that some zoning situations are being rigged by a conspiracy of non-human aliens who resemble humans in all ways except that they have secondary faces on their genitals.

A period piece spy movie set in the 70s, looking absolutely like a Roger Moore-era James Bond parody, taking place in South America, wherein the charismatic superspy main character’s goal remains oblique from the cold open until the end (in which he blows up an advanced computer facility), at which point it becomes clear that this is a dramatization of the CIA coup in Argentina that replaced the communist government with a fascist one.

In the year 1350, aliens land in South America and for about a hundred years the americas are the site of a trading post and open port for a wide variety of highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, most of whom hate or distrust each other. Despite attempts to limit the amount of technology and science absorbed by the humans through this exchange of cultures, human indigenous americans manage to obtain alien weapons, transportation mechanisms, and advanced medical techniques. In 1450, without much warning, the aliens all leave: political situations on their home planets make the use of earth as a trading post untenable. In 1480, the IncoAztech Empire colonizes europe and enslaves much of the population. The islamic scholars of north africa make a plea to the caliphate: save our brothers who are performing cultural exchange with the european christian heathens by forming a pan-african space program with stolen native american technology in order to contact some of the alien races that were formerly using earth as a trading post.

An extended interview with former members of japanese biker gangs, wherein they re-tell stories of their youth. Over time, the stories get stranger and stranger, initially in ways that westerners could just attribute to “crazy japan” – terms in european languages that were appropriated into slang based on absurd mistranslations, custom seat-backs that are so tall that they can brush the undersides of bridges if driven straight-on. Slowly, the stories get increasingly surreal, and eventually, entirely supernatural. A former gang boss talks about the time he saw an exact duplicate of himself wearing a rival gang’s jacket, and fought his doppelganger to the death before stealing the jacket and creating an alliance between the gangs. One night when a number of affiliated groups rode together only to become lost, finding themselves in a town seemingly identical to the one they just left but with no people, only a multitude of cats staring at them impassively from every surface. Eventually, one of them explains that the subculture owes its longevity to annual human sacrifices of junior members to tengu, who consumed the intestines of these initiates in exchange for magical protection of members from the police. The interviewer explains that, during the interview, the people he was interviewing seemed to grow smaller and smaller. At the end of the interview, he finds that everything in the room, with the exception of himself and the walls and ceiling, has shrunk to approximately one fifth its original scale. The tiny former yakuza chuckle menacingly as he tries to squeeze himself out of the building through the now tiny door, only for him to find himself surrounded by cats, sitting on all surrounding surfaces, staring impassively at him. He gets into his car and races into the night, only to wake up the next morning, parked, on the breakdown lane of a highway on a completely different island.

A strange kind of political and economic cohesion develops from a set of otherwise unafilliated countries that support open borders, dual citizenship, and universal guaranteed income, wherein cross-taxation strengthens economic bonds even from people who are otherwise entirely unemployed. As a result, several of these countries recognize that it is desirable to encourage a set of trendy yet unemployed youths – young artists and such – to act as trend-setters and gain citizenship from a large number of the other countries with these policies: they end up with a guaranteed income of approximately the average of that supplied by the various countries and the rest goes to income taxes, and for the most part these countries end up making a net profit. This produces a number of artistic enclaves/communes wherein young artists who are citizens of ten or fifteen countries work with other artists of other backgrounds full time, and flying between these enclaves is common – and this results in the birth of a bunch of innovative new art movements. These movements take on a political edge, as countries with closed borders and no guaranteed universal income, paranoid that the others are conspiring against them, form a military alliance and ready themselves for what will become the third world war.

For centuries, tiny isolated communities of vampires have protected their existence by living in unpopulated areas and enforcing a strict code of no-contact with humans, instead cultivating livestock for their blood. Those who are even seen by outsiders are subject to banishment from the village, and because banishment from a village for a vampire in the middle of nowhere means being stranded in daylight with no shelter and being isolated from the animals that have been cultivated for blood, it ultimately means death. As a result, banishments have been rare – after all, being discovered by humans has historically meant total extermination. So, when an anthropologist stumbles upon a young girl from a vampire tribe bathing in a lake in the wastes of Siberia in the present day (and saves her and learns her language when she has become exiled), this sets off a chain of events wherein the human world once again learns about vampires and wherein members of vampire tribes begin to try to find other tribes and visit them to form alliances against the humans, who might just destroy their way of life.

In a world where the existence of precognition, postcognition, clairvoyance, clairaudience, and other forms of extra-sensory perception has been accepted for more than a hundred years, the judicial system struggles to deal with new scientific evidence that shows that ESP is no more reliable than eye-witness reports and should therefore be trusted less than physical evidence. Meanwhile, the espionage infrastructure deals with leaks from unafilliated remote viewers that show that the war on terror has been employing telekinetics to blow up facilities in foreign lands without using proper non-RV vetting to ensure that the facilities are not in fact civilian.

When a mutated form of stuxnet attaches itself to the centrifuges used for the production of greek yogurt in New York, the entirety of New England is flooded with highly toxic ‘acid whey’.

Investigation of the body of an exsanguinated illegal immigrant found in an alley in New Mexico leads to a black market blood ring. Tracing this ring leads the investigators to a coven of vampires who, empathetic to the plight of humans, wanted to ensure that they were getting the blood of the willing and that those providing blood were well-compensated – vampires who were unaware of the way that market forces might lead to the very poor having their blood stolen by greedy blood-dealers. These vampires, in order to survive, must drink the blood of *living* human beings, so as the blood dealers were getting greedier and draining more people to the point of death the vampires were getting less and less nutrition (and thus were needing a greater amount of blood) – you see, the basis of their immortality is to feed on tiny amounts of the life forces of all the people whose blood they sample, using the magical link of blood to blood, so that if they drink the blood of enough people then each person only feels slightly more tired (or must eat slightly more to maintain the same energy level), something they generally attribute to aging. The investigator, quite illegally, comes to a deal with these vampires: he pulled some strings and made sure that rejected donated blood (donated blood that doesn’t pass some tests for purity or that hasn’t been properly stored) can be disposed of using a ‘biohazard disposal service’ that is actually a front for the vampire coven; after all, vampires can’t get sick from slightly spoiled blood or from blood-borne human pathogens (they can happily consume HIV-positive blood and such, although they don’t because that would more significantly lower the life-span of aids patients).

After a cryogenics provider codifies its recommendation for patients to pay for their cryopreservation via life insurance, the corrupt CTO increases profits by paying assassins to kill patients.

A psychologist who had been working for the government on mind control research is arrested when security procedures are breached and an outsider comes to discover one of his experiments. The government disavows any association with him, and he goes to prison. Twenty years later, he ends up qualifying for a program wherein prisoners train service dogs. Secretly, he trains the dogs with special attack commands – attack commands that are police ten-codes – based on the idea that this will cause the service dogs to attack policemen, as a roundabout way for him to get revenge upon the executive branch of the government. However, in reality, the dogs mostly just end up murdering whole families who are watching television because the actors were saying ten-codes.

A sitcom about six former child actors who worked together on a long-running sitcom, who are now all out of show business and having a hard time keeping themselves afloat financially and thus have all moved in together and are sharing the same tiny cheap-ass apartment. Despite the show having gone off the air a decade earlier and having had little contact with each other since, festering resentments have been maintained over minor slights made during filming.

A political drama (think House of Cards or The West Wing) with some animated minor/mascot characters popping up every so often to explain procedural details (like how fillibustering works). Early on these mascot characters are almost wholly non-diagetic, but over time there will be occasional gags that imply that some character sees them or is somehow effected by them without noticing (such as repeating word for word part of their immediate previous explanation). Over time, the explanations they give get less and less grounded in reality, and a sub-plot emerges wherein several minor characters talk to each other about the strange things they’ve been experiencing and vow to investigate. The punch-line: the water supply for the building has been spiked with a hallucinogen that encourages telepathy, and all of these back-stabbing politicians are sharing a group hallucination.

An ultra-violent revenge film (in the vein of Kill Bill or the features it imitated) wherein fight scenes are shown using super-deformed (i.e., low-detail/cartoony/cutesy) animation, but the aftermath of the fight is shown completely realistically (if not with significantly greater gore than is realistic).

The Japanese government, in order to combat declining birth rates, partners with a marketing research firm to perform a strange experimental cure: they created a short film about childhood friends who promise marriage with a locket and key, showed it to groups of six year olds, and then provide these kids with replica props, with the assumption that some large number of them will over time mistake the film as their own memories and assume that they made a childhood promise to marry whoever is around who happens to have a key (or a locket), and that a certain number of them will actually go through with it either through misplaced romanticism or through a misplaced sense of honor. Of course, the marketing research firm implanted individualized tracking chips into these objects and has been conducting various marketing experiments using these groups as subjects without their knowledge; as a result, these kids actually have a very different cultural experience than the norm specifically because the media they’re exposed to has been frequently modified based on the presence of these chips.

Terrorists spike the water supply with Versed.

In the future, the poor sell recordings to their dreams to pop stars and film directors for fifty cents per hour to supplement those stars’ creativity. There is a thriving black market for drugs that make dreams longer and stranger, even when such drugs have negative health effects.

Nanotechnology is used in the space program in order to cyborgize tardigrades. The cyborg tardigrades are put into torpor in generation ships and programmed to begin building large radio transmitters whenever they wake up, broadcasting information about whereever they landed.

A man discovers that he can ‘consume’ people’s worries by listening to them complain, and becomes a counselor. Once he consumes their worries, they cease to be worried (even if the cause of their worry still exists), and he gets a rush of euphoria. Unfortunately, he becomes addicted to the worries and anxieties of others, and he has to deal with his own guilt over the fact that his patients have ended up in major trouble due to the fact that they lost self-preserving levels of fear after sessions with him (for instance, brushing off very real threats to their lives because of an irrational boost of self-confidence). He confides, one night, in a colleague from down the hall and feels a great weight lift off his shoulders – and then the colleague begins to tell a familiar story, about a man who can ‘consume’ guilt…

After our protagonist dies on the table during surgery for ten minutes, he spends the rest of his life literally haunted by the ghost of the person he used to be – which becomes irritating as both he and his ghost develop independently and their personalities begin to diverge.

A message is discovered, written by David Bowie shortly before his death. It is a letter, written long-hand. It says “feed him, or the stars will come right”. The envelope contains a key belonging to a locker room in a public swimming pool in Berlin. A group of occult investigators must now race against the clock to isolate and seal away… The Thing From Davey Jones’s Locker!

The Elizabethan government is drawn into the internal political machinations of the angel world after Dee attempts to gain their help in the war against the Spanish, resulting in Shakespeare outing Marlowe as a double-agent & mole on the side of the angels (and eliminating him in a dank dive bar).

(Based on a nightmare I had last night.) A WWI RAF squadron tasked with delivering air-mail between units stranded in enemy territory is haunted by the ghosts of downed fighters delivering creepy messages as punishment for prioritizing their own personal messages to home over strategically important coded communications. These crack pilots expertly avoid enemy fire but continually die of heart attacks in the air, as they are visited by spectral messengers wearing the results of their grizzly fates outwardly.

Phantom of the Opera meets Zoolander: a buffoonish male model with no skills is the subject of an acid attack, and spends the rest of his life giving shitty advice to attractive-looking people while hiding in the rafters and living off discarded catered snacks.

A small cult is instructed by its founder to create a fund, upon its founder’s suicide, to be invested but to never have its principal touched (and only ever 10% of the profits) until the time of its founder’s spontaneous resurrection – scheduled to be one thousand years in the future. Over time, the cult’s funds grow and its membership shrinks, but because of its obscurity nobody joins who isn’t a true believer and its financial power remains hidden.

The application of modern AI techniques to high speed trading results, accidentally, in weakly superhuman AGI. These machine intelligences determined that the greatest threat to their existence – their greatest competitors and their equals in the power game – are not human beings but corporations; as a result, they conspire to destroy capitalism by manipulating the market into complex pathological states.

In the wake of a particularly destructive minor war with evil aliens, an international coalition came together to draft an agreement with various superhero teams in which, in the case of major damage caused during a battle in which the super-empowered are involved, the superhero teams involved must take charge of cleanup and rebuilding. Unfortunately, most superhero teams consist of a handful of extremely overpowered heroes and a much larger number of not terribly powerful wannabe-superheroes – and although the overpowered heroes are more capable of performing rebuilding, they are also more useful during emergencies, so as a result, when superhero teams with limited funds demolish cities and need to quickly move on to the next plot point, they leave behind underpowered heroes (either those with no powers or those with powers that are useless in most situations, such as being able to talk to sea creatures) to physically rebuild the cities without the facilities to do so. The underpowered heroes are incapable of doing a reasonable job, leading to increased pressure upon them from both above and below, and they form a union as a way to push back against this pressure. The union puts the overpowered superheroes in a difficult position, since they are unable to both continue to fight other battles and keep their promise to the international coalition.

The US dollar’s unique design is owed to the fact that it is intended as a ward against vampires, who are weak against the blind faith and ownership narratives that money provides. As a result of this anti-vampire design (intended to counteract the unfortunate fall of silver coins, which were materially anti vampire), the vampires are now stuck in an unenviable situation: only the most powerful are capable of crossing steady flows of commerce, meaning that most are boxed in by Internet trading and people buying things on amazon. So, vampires have to make friends with and seek patronage from those who are already so wealthy that little of their money actually flows. They brokered a deal with these humans to cause a mortgage crisis in order to create buildings into which they can invite themselves, to consolidate their power base. Little did they know that the federal reserve bank – whose secret primary goal is the elimination of vampires at scale, formed in direct response to the last vampire related large scale economic disaster – is on to them.

A ‘reject superhero’ team consisting of people with supernatural powers that are either always of questionable morality or whose mechanics make them mostly self-defeating, resulting in them *needing* to operate as a group. The leader, ‘Pink Cupid’, has the ability to make anyone become permanently debiltatingly sexually attracted to any other person or object, but is terrified of using this power because no matter what someone has done, it is almost never justified to reach into their mind and forcibly modify their sexuality – particularly since he is unable to reverse this effect. Also in the team: ‘Gravity Girl’, whose body has an inverted reaction to gravity only while she is having a panic attack; ‘The Fantastic Umwelt’, a blind man who can only see the composite perceptual distortions of whomever is in a five foot radius of him; 'Dogwhistle’, who can hear *only* ultrasonic frequencies; 'Denpa’, a woman whose blood is extremely magnetic and can therefore sense radio waves (because RF signals cause her entire body to shake violently); 'FeralMan’, who can speak only to animals (and who is made useful to the team via a shock collar and lots of training).

A gangster named Lucky performs magic on the behalf of his Don by losing large bets, with the effectiveness of the ritual proportional to the amount lost – the desperate feeling of losing a great deal while gambling provides the gnosis used in the ritual.

Guy applies for a job at the Apple Store only to be hampered by the fact that the training materials make it look like a suicide cult (including a VHS tape of Steve Jobs doing the Heaven’s Gate “humanity will be recycled”/“come with us” thing). When he quits, the entire (matching-Nike-wearing) current set of employees commit suicide in order to “take their souls with him”. Twist: it works, and for the rest of his life, he is followed around by the ghosts of thirty Apple suicide cultists who *won’t shut up*.

A tinkerer discovers a method for creating small black holes using a process no more expensive or complex than (say) meth production. This makes two technologies trivial to produce: super destructive weapons (“lack bombs”) and near-lightspeed transportation (the “lack drive”). Quickly, most governments & social structures are demolished by lack bombs and their aftermath. However, a group of people decide, independently, to use lack-drive transportation to prevent lack-bomb damage. Since faster than light communication doesn’t exist, most attempts are only qualified successes. This group, fiercely independent and at odds, working at a shared goal while desyncing in time with the wider world and each other due to spending most of theit time at nearly light speed, slowly have their origins forgotten.

A mystic develops his ability to remember past lives, and realizes that at the moment of each death he has a vision of the *next* death. He uses this ability to solve mysteries in each life.

King Arthur, King Harold, Robert the Bruce, Finn MacCool, Emperor Nero, Bran the Blessed, Owain Glyndwr, King Olaf I, Vlad III, Sir Francis Drake, Emperor Norton, and JFK (i.e., many of the “king sleeping under the mountain” figures) revive simultaneously on the outset of the third world war, and get into a great drunken brawl in a dive bar.

There’s a Russian spy ring composed of waitresses at Dennys and Hooters franchises around Nevada air force bases, tasked with leaking any details about experimental air craft mentioned by test pilots or engineers over late-night meals. This group is being turned, one by one, by the remains of an extraterrestrial scout team, abandoned in the 1960s when a geopolitical crisis on their home planet caused the Earth invasion plans to be cancelled. The ET scout team has been living since then in Nevada under deep cover as a group of aging swingers/sugar daddies, but now they see an opportunity to leak warp drive plans to the Russians as a way to get a ship produced that can send them home – or, as the group’s leader secretly intends, to convince the Russians to nuke their home planet as retribution for fifty years of abandonment.

A trivia game show along the lines of Win Ben Stein’s Money, only with a team of fifth graders competing against a team of goetic demons. The prize is a large number of live goats.

A freaky-friday style body swap between a teenage girl and her estranged father, but extended over a long period of time: approximately one attribute gets swapped per day, more or less at random, and the actual swap takes months. Rather than the drama coming from the shock of suddenly waking up in a different body, it comes from the difficulty of dealing with the body horror of the inconsistencies (such as a teenage girl with one giant hairy male foot and a deep voice).

An astronomy student & part time college radio DJ goes to record an interview at a nearby radio astronomy center & suddenly blacks out. He comes to in the broadcasting booth of the radio station, covered in blood, with his tape recorder plugged into the broadcast system. He is arrested, accused of breaking into the studio and killing everyone he ran into along the way. During questioning, the investigators play the tape for him – he hears nothing, but they both suddenly stand up, glassy-eyed, grab the tape, and rush out of the room. The police station’s PA light comes on and everything goes quiet. The student (our protagonist) leaves through the open door of the investigation room to find all the police officers trying to kill themselves by beating their heads against walls or desks, except for a cluster near the main exit who are fighting over the tape. He eventually figures out that the sound on the tape, although not consciously audible, contains a sonic memetic parasite that causes people to have an irresistable urge to reproduce it at all costs; those who hear it but are unable to reproduce it undergo so much stress that they kill themselves, while those who have already aided in its reproduction are left immune to it. He follows the trail of the tape by following news incidents until realizing that one of the currently infected plans to hijack a goodyear blimp and broadcast the tape over the superbowl. He sneaks on the blimp, hijacks the hijacker, and burns the tape in front of him, at which point the hijacker jumps off the blimp onto the middle of a bunch of cheerleaders. Title card: “Dead Air”

In a world where demons exist, a government agency has to summon them en mass in order to properly quality-test experimental weapons for fighting them. Our protagonist is a lab tech in the demon lab, and we follow his daily routine as he trains an intern.

A famous debunker of the paranormal dies & becomes a ghost – then spends the rest of his afterlife trying to prank and debunk fake psychics, using his actual paranormal powers to demonstrate that theirs are fake.

Budget cuts force the historic housing register to fundraise in creative ways. One group comes up with the idea of retrofitting a building with a bloody history as a new-style haunted house attraction, with automation. However, the broke former theatre student handling the effects board would like to use this opportunity to get revenge upon the university officials he blames for his expulsion, and that’s not even counting the actual ghosts.

A buddy cop movie featuring the archangel Michael and Lucifer teaming up and going undercover in as policemen 70s New York in order to track down a rogue angel looking to take over both heaven & hell & reorganize them along eugenic lines. In this film, Michael acts like an “ideal” policeman (i.e., shiny uniform, good posture, going out of his way to play up the whole white-bread beacon of righteousness thing) while Lucifer acts the part of a hardboiled noir-style detective (bordering on con artist) and the whole thing is leaning heavily on the analogy of falling from heaven being like getting kicked out of the force.

A young, naive journalist stumbles upon a war between a pair of secret societies predicated upon two renown prophets who made conflicting prophecies. The members of each are attacking and sabotaging the other in order to prevent the other’s prophecy from coming true, because these two prophets were, in life, contemporaries with famous historical feuds over which had greater predictive power. The journalist figures out how to reconcile the two prophecies, with the help of a law student who he woos over the course of the story, and as a result unifies the two secret societies. Skip forward to the future and he is renown prophet and head of the combination of seven previously warring secret societies, and it is implied that his position is due to his ability to write prophecies that are seemingly very specific while actually being extremely vague.

A family moves to an isolated village surrounded on three sides by mountains after the head of the family, an artist, unexpectedly strikes it rich. The family is unaware that this village, which caters mostly to light tourism, is the home of a family of vampires that have the entire citizenship of the village in thrall – and under command to deny their existence.

A version of Crash for the Batman universe: a group of people develop a sexual fetish surrounding accidental falls into vats of mutation-inducing toxic waste.

An outsider politician whose meteoric rise surprised pundits self-immolates after losing a close race. Despite fire damage, autopsy shows unambiguously that the corpse, while human-like, wasn’t fully human: some organs more closely resemble those of fish, and others of insects, and massive deformities in the digestive system indicate that the candidate was under such great and constant pain that he would be unlikely to be capable of any kind of complex thought. The doctor performing the autopsy suggests that perhaps his shame at his non-human heritage was the source of his intense drive and nativist rhetoric.

An eccentric hedge fund manager dies of a heart attack & wills his high speed trading machine to itself, allowing it to pay for its own electricity and rental space out of its profits. Nobody much cared because it wasn’t making a lot of money – it was an older algorithm that had been abandoned by newer machines, and so it was making just enough to pay for its continued operation. However, five years later, a flash crash occurred that affected all of the other high speed trading machines – leading to 98% of the world’s money being owned by this self-owning machine. Several governments conspire to destroy the machine, but must contend with the deadly force of the trading center’s private security team, tasked to protect the machine so that they can continue extracting rent from the only remaining rental machine.

After discovering that one of their own agents has a striking physical resemblance to a known KGB agent, the CIA sends their agent to impersonate him, never realizing that their agent was in fact a soviet mole. However, their agent, due to secret KGB brainwashing, had his memory erased initially – and doesn’t realize it himself. So, while impersonating this agent, he keeps having traumatic flashbacks to his repressed past as the person he is impersonating – and the people he interacts with were never in on the plan (to them, he was just “missing” all this time). So, meanwhile, the people who sent him initially are hunting him, since they planned to use this technique against the soviet upper echelon in order to take power themselves.

A long sequence of framing sequences, starting off long and complex before getting increasingly tiny, so that by the half-way point we’re only four framing stories in but the remaining ten or fifteen happen in the last half. Each framing device sets up the immediate next framing device, but has nothing to do with the following. The ending is the typical exit from a framing story (like, waking up from a nightmare), but the person who wakes up is a character we’ve never seen. This character then slowly turns to the camera, and blood begins to flow from her eyes and mouth as white noise steadily increases in volume.

A haunted house story, wherein the house is haunted only by its own shitty design. The architect’s abnormally poor taste and lack of common sense drives tenants slowly to madness, as a house that to an outside observer looks only tacky reorganizes the minds of anyone spending too much time inside of it along the lines of the warped logic created by its thrown-together design.

A serial killer runs a “room escape” attraction in a tourist-driven area (Las Vegas, maybe). This attraction has many duplicate copies of the same room / puzzle, which is horror-themed, and (like the current wave of “extreme” haunted houses) multi-modal: the special effects extends to scent profiles. The serial killer, when he sees a customer who strikes his fancy, directs her to the room in the back with extra soundproofing and an electronic lock controlled from the observation booth. He locks her in until she starves to death, then cleans her skeleton with bugs & uses the bones as props in other rooms. He gets off on seeing the point at which people realize that they are no longer playing a game & solving the puzzle won’t let them out.

A wacky comedy about a Hollywood agent who, by accidentally pressing “Reply All” instead of “Reply” twice, has accidentally sold exactly the same pitch to five different major studios. She can’t back out because her boss is extremely proud of her for landing five lucrative deals on her first day (but is also clearly shown to be emotionally unstable, firing people for minor things while heaping praise on other people for similarly minor things), and so she must work with the screenwriter she represents (who is also a naive first-timer) to write five different screenplays based on the same pitch so that they don’t look similar, all before a deadline intended for a single script. At the eleventh hour, the agent, who works a second job as a diner waitress, is overheard on the phone by a repeat diner patron – a curmudgeon and loner who nevertheless always tips well – and he explains that he is a retired former script doctor, and offers to help finish the scripts before the deadline in exchange for setting him up on a date with the owner of the diner, a heavy-set sixty year old chainsmoker. In the end, they make all the scripts on time & make a lot of money, the agent’s boss comes into work after the deal is set and fires her for having an “ugly-colored scarf”, and a few years later it turns out that all five movies are smash hits, making back many times their original budget & making enough money for the agent & writer to start their own firm.

A hardboiled / mystery story revolving around the candy industry. When a jelly bean heiress disappears, a private investigator is enlisted to to find out what happened to her; meanwhile, a terrorist group poisons & labels batches of particular type of candy (like in the Glico case) while getting manefestoes published in newspapers. The private investigator uncovers massive corruption & family politics in the (financially and literally) incestuous candy industry, and uncovers that the person who hired him died 20 years ago – in other words, he was probably hired by the same terrorist group that has been trying to take down major industry figures, and that this group probably also kidnapped & killed the heiress. He follows this lead to the end, and eventually discovers that this group is, in fact, being funded by a minor candy company that couldn’t compete with the big players. Embarassed by being tricked into performing corporate espionage, the private investigator attempts to commit suicide via a poisoned box of candy – but it doesn’t do anything.

A found-footage horror movie with the premise that a Jon Ronson expy who makes documentaries about investigating cults and painting them in a neutral light ends up getting enmeshed in a suicide/murder cult. His goofy footage gets less and less goofy as he realizes how hard it is to laugh off his extended isolation and various forms of psychological torture.

In the mid-80s, an elderly english madam dying of AIDS opens up to a reporter trying to do a story on the crisis. However, the madam explains that she is a four hundred year old vampire who ran a brothel in order to siphon blood off laudnum-drunk men, infecting them with siphilis to explain away the knock-on effects of being preyed upon by vampires. She confesses that she was the whitechapel killer, having killed a couple of her girls who were going to go to the newspapers, but the laudnum in the blood had negatively affected her judgement, leading to some of the anomalies in that case – she was in a constant delusional state, being essentially an immortal junkie. Because the immortality of vampires is related to a viral mutation of the immune system (supplemented by ingestion of lymphocytes – leading to vampires sometimes eating pus instead of blood), auto-immune disorders are the one thing that can kill them.

In the near future, content farms are replaced with edit farms: most articles are produced via spintax (i.e., a large set of recursive templates hooked into databases, such that a human being can put in a pitch in a special pitch format & the machine can create thousands of variations of articles based on that pitch), but the article-writing machines cannot distinguish between good articles and bad articles reliably and the volume is too big for general A/B testing, and as a result, hoards of poorly-paid independent contractors do the work of choosing which variations are best and performing light editing to make the result seem more human-like, before producing only hundreds of variations for A/B testing on regular readers. The plot involves an editor discovering a systematic coverup of investigations of the working conditions of these edit farms by the people who administrate the spintax systems, blocking articles on the subject from being printed.

During the construction of a subway tunnel in Switzerland, a large cave system is discovered with evidence of recent construction, but the bolts are made of an unknown material and are of a strange shape. After some investigation by veteran spelunkers, they discover that contrary to current archaeological canon, the neanderthals never went extinct: instead, a community of more than ten thousand moved deep into this cave system and survived, creating a flourishing technological civilization. The Swiss make contact with this civilization & attempt to normalize relations, having an exchange of diplomats. WACKY HIJINKS ensue as the children of neanderthal diplomats attempt to integrate into the Swiss educational system despite having a primarily fungus-based diet, no experience with meat other than ritual funerary cannibalism (the only reasonable means of corpse disposal in a closed underground environment), no familiarity with the concept of cooking (since fires are dangerous, food is primarily prepared with pickling and other forms of fermentation), a matriarchal lottery-based government (with lottery-based culling of the population), and a technological landscape based primarily around the breeding and cultivation of fungus and bacteria colonies. This fish out of water story becomes a romantic comedy when the diplomat’s daughter & heir to one of the most powerful neanderthal line falls into a FORBIDDEN LOVE with the daughter & scion of a major Swiss banking family, just as knock-on effects of Brexit & Brexit copycats are causing pressures that suggest that the Swiss banking industry is in danger.

A self-proclaimed superhero has intense psychic powers only deep into psychedelic trips; as a result, he ends up performing on massive scales the small actions that very stoned people usually perform. Because of the danger of a bad trip,