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Author Topic: fiction ideas
dreadlord
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Now, here we just brainstorm on random fiction ideas and hope we get something usefull out of It.
we shall start with this "Prompt"

terrorist group infects yeast headed to the U.S with a lethal, undiscovered (by the Americans) virus. Hero works from the inside of the group to find the vaccine to the virus.


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Survivor
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Um...why yeast?
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hoptoad
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I hear natural yoghurt is good for that sort of thing.
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Leigh
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Yoghurt is pretty good eating as well, remember that.
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Robert Nowall
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If it's coming in through yogurt, maybe it's a French terrorist group...
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Alethea Kontis
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Beer!

And the hero works undercover at the Coors brewery.


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pixydust
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We'd just have Passover early.
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Dead_Poet
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Yeast is an interesting choice. It would infect the bread, the yogurt, the beer... and those three items take out most consumer groups in the word... Brilliant!
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Survivor
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The reason I ask is because yeast doesn't need to be imported. It is a very simple organism that can be easily cultured domestically, generally the only reason you'd import it is so that you can put "imported yeast" on the side of the package. A further complication arises because viruses (with rare, benign exceptions) reproduce by killing the host cells, but human and yeast cells are quite different and it would be very difficult to make a virus capable of using both to reproduce. Another difficulty arises from the fact that generally yeast is used in fermented products which are either baked or contain significant quantities of alchohol, neither of which is good for the viability of a virus.

In other words, it would make a lot more sense to "infect" imported oil, steel, or perhaps furniture.


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franc li
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I saw Strange Brew in the theater.

I remember thinking it was a shame they ruined it with that gratuitous urination gag.

P.S. We own a packet of fancy champagne yeast. Also, San Francisco sourdough starter apparently has to be imported regularly. After about 6 weeks, the local yeast overwhelms it.

[This message has been edited by franc li (edited December 07, 2006).]


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Survivor
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It doesn't have to be imported, they just want to import it. They could easily culture it locally in a sealed environment.
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Survivor
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Does this strike anyone else as being extremely dangerous and unnecessary?

quote:
The virus was reconstructed from tissues of victims from 1918. Besides the Public Health Agency of Canada’s lab in Winnipeg, it exists only at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

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kings_falcon
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Yes. Why anyone thought it was a good idea to revive a flu that killed so many escapes me.

Why humans do some of the things we do is really remarkable. I never had a plausabilty problem with Jurassic Park . If we could clone and reproduce Dinosaurs some idiot WOULD and then scratch his head and wonder why they were trying to feed on humans.

What I found more troubling was the report a few days ago about genetic engineering for "defects." The case at hand was a couple with dwarfism who wanted to ensure that any offspring would be physically simliar to them. While it raises an interesting discussion about "normal" the whole genetic enginerring concept makes my skin crawl. Sure, we'd lose serious birth defects but we'd also lose Einstein, Mozart and quite possibly what makes us human.

Global warming, if you believe the threory, isn't going to kill us. We are.

Oops, ranting. Never mind. . .

Yes, and the implictions of it would make a great story.


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Survivor
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Well, the Russians did some research that makes even my skin crawl. That thing with the flu engineered to provoke an auto-immune disorder that would mimic multiple sclerosis was particularly horrible... ...um, I mean

Yeah.


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EricJamesStone
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> Why anyone thought it was a good idea to revive a flu that
> killed so many escapes me.

Because nobody knew WHY that flu killed so many. Understanding the virus could help in preventing a future flue pandemic.


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Survivor
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I knew why it killed so many, it's obvious from the death statistics. It primarily killed young, healthy individuals with robust immune systems. The primary mechanism of death was the victims drowning in their own mucus. No need to kill a bunch of monkeys to find out that this is, indeed, how the virus kills.

I think that some scientists just like the rush of handling something that could wipe out millions of people. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Science is cool


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Arveliot
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I had an odd project I wanted to bounce off a few people.

The story would start with a convention, in which a group of people who have no direct connection with each other are brought together by a guy who hired them all, individually, to do various things. Some people were software designers, others were data records collectors, programmers, hackers, communications specialists and others.

The guy who hired all of them had brought them together to announce that the project was finished. What he showed them was a program that displayed and contained every transaction over a thousand US dollars being made at that very moment. It also contained the records of every transaction made in the last six years. With it, someone could see every detail of where any individual, institution or government was spending money. The whole story should revolve around the implications of that kind of knowledge, where corporate and government morality is made crystal clear, and how dirty they all actually look.

Well?


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Survivor
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What's the point of the story?

I mean, obviously the people gathered together are hardly some kind of blushing innocents, right? So are they planning to release this data somehow? How are they going to give it credibility without simply handing themselves over to the authorities for the commission of the crimes involved in getting this info? And so what? How many people in this world are unaware of the nature of money?

Or are you going to paint an entirely fictional accusation against a specific group? It's easy enough to write a story in which all your political enemies are funded by satanist diamond tycoons or whatever, which is the entire reason for the fourth question I asked.

My thought is that if you were to really trace every transaction of over a thousand dollars, you'd very rapidly discover that the data is so complex as to be meaningless in it's raw form.


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InarticulateBabbler
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LMAO ...A deadly Yeast Infection??!!

No insult intended, it just struck me funny as I read down through the posts.

[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited January 30, 2007).]


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franc li
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quote:
it's obvious from the death statistics
I thought it was the in that book written by the woman whose name was almost but not quite Pina Colada.

I'm not sure if the virus is that safe in the two labs when the book described exactly how and where to get your own sample. Maybe Global Warming will save us from all the frozen corpses carrying the 1918 flu in the arctic.


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Survivor
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No, they had to reconstitute the virus from RNA data, it took considerable technical effort. None of the bodies they dug up contained any live virus.

Of course, it's possible that the virus they managed to synthesize is actually more deadly than the original. The 1918 flu didn't kill a lot of people with less robust immune systems, but apparently the synthetic version can kill even without the overactive immune response. Using a mild immunosuppressant only delays death and shifts the cause from immune response to out of control viral levels.


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Arveliot
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It has to do with true idealism, the concept that a group, corporation, bank or even a country can best identify its priorities, ideals and morality by how where and for what it spends its money. If such a program can exist, the wealth of information may be overwhelming, but much like google earth, it would be easy to see the micro in the macro.

The premise is that of all the people who have had some involvement in the project, only a few people are aware of how many people have contributed, what they contributed, and what kind of scale this project encompasses.

It allows for a genuine, clear look on motivation, without any filters besides what a human mind brings to it.

The point comes from the implications of being able to quantitatively surmise the motives of an organization or a country based on its spending. What it truly is, and the moral implications of knowing it.

Do they make it public? Does the knowledge alter their perception of the world they live in? Do they act on that knowledge, is this knowledge that countries or organizations want to be known? Is there a dramatic difference between presented ideals and spending habits?


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Survivor
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The problem is that the devil is in the details. It's very easy to blow a giant chunk of your budget on "humanitarian assistance" if you're willing to throw a lot of things that benefit someone into that pot.

quote:
"Like Robin Hood, we steal from the rich and give to the poor."

"Who were you going to give that money too?"

"Us. We're poor."


Most governments, bureaucracies, and corporations already know how to make their large scale spending look like it's on the up and up. You have to dig out specific instances of abuse, like the money for "fundraising efforts" that has been used to buy an enormous mansion with a ballroom for the CEO. Even huge abuses like that are difficult to spot just from looking at financial records. After all, if the CEO has the property in the name of the foundation, and the only connection on paper (or in the database) is that the property manager happens to be hired at the discretion of that CEO's administrative assistant, then what have you got?

Bubcus, that's what. Er, "Bubcus" is the nick of one of the demons that works "outre gluttony and deceit", in case you don't know

The IRS is regularly checking the returns of these people for any hint that they've screwed up enough to be prosecuted. Sure, they're shifty bureaucrats themselves, but they're also pros and they look like heroes if they can bust someone for this kind of thing. But the accountants and management on the other side are also pros.


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