Throb

eccentric billionaire steven c. byrne

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Story Seeds, Part III

• A boy is born with an extra set of arms where his legs should be. He is an excellent pianist and a skilled typist. Beyond QWERTY, his keyboard contains heretofore unknown glyphs. Also, he can flip you off twice as much as the average person.
• You die. It becomes immediately apparent upon entering purgatory that the Greeks had the gods more right than the Christians did. You've been horribly negligent in your offerings to Aphrodite, among others, and she's pissed about it.
• The grass is literally greener on the other side of the fence. Your neighbor has a secret, and you're not about to let her get away with it. You WILL have the cooler lawn mower.
• NASA scientists discover hibernating fungal spores in the ice from a comet. When the spores infect our minds it becomes apparent that our entire universe exists solely in the brain of a dying old giant squid in the Indian Ocean. And that it must be stopped.
• It's 100 years in the future. Prostitution is the only human-based service industry that still exists. People are really innovative about it.
• You are in love with an idea about yourself and refuse to budge. Sometimes everything falls into place almost magically. It feels really good. Other times you get bored with the whole thing and get rid of yesterday with a cold and decisive wave of your magical little fingers. Poof.
• Public nudity comes into vogue. Fashion becomes about clips and cuts and scars and piercings.
• A man kills his multiple children by multiple wives to get out of child support. Because he is a mad genius, the murders all look like accidents and he gets away with it.
• It turns out your parents were lying to you in a deeper way than you ever imagined: There really is a Toothfairy, a Santa Claus, a God, and everybody knows it. It's easier to let people in their teens and twenties believe they were being duped as children. The Toothfairy demands you make a sacrifice or two. You really don't have any choice. Quarters are the only currency in this world.
• A gay man is surgically inseminated and becomes pregnant. Artificial hormones and caesarian section. The child is declared to be the next Dalai Lama. Gender wars.
• You are a failed artist. A famous photograph of the mix of blood and gray matter on your wall after you shotgun your head off becomes the best-selling thing you ever had anything to do with. You get to watch all this on the big screen from your padded cell in hell.
• Life on earth adapts to global warming with remarkable finesse. The ocean is steaming... but life continues. Things with fatty tissue die off, things with long skinny legs and feathers adapt and evolve and expand: The goddamned mutant ostriches get into your boiling trash all the goddamned time and you can't properly chase them off in your goddamed air-conditioned spacesuit.

Story Seeds, Part II

About 6 months later, some more:

• A couple of kids wander away from summer camp and discover a lake with a mysterious platform floating in its center. Overcome with curiosity, they try to swim out to it, but it keeps pulling itself away from them. Eventually they find themselves past the point of no return and drown, exhausted.
• The accelerating march of progress reaches a singularity point. The speed of ideas and their execution, no longer constrained by human intelligence or rates of physical manufacture, creates markets that explode and die in seconds. The development and death of entire economies occurs at the speed of whim. Humans are the seeds of vast crystalline and invisible interconnecting vibrating structures of energy, stretching to every expanse of the universe. Some dumb kid screws it up for everybody by dreaming something wrong.
• A cat coughs up a hairball that seems to be a new kind of life. Unfortunately, it preys on mites which live in cat hair. The hairball rolls around, voraciously vacuuming the hair off of kitties, occasionally pausing to bifurcate and reproduce itself.
• Human beings begin mining the moon after it becomes less expensive to do so than to recycle consumer goods. We develop highly sophisticated conduits to move mass from outside our atmosphere. Every day thousands of tons of material are deposted in the african desert, neatly sorted by gravity into component elements. Gradually, the moon changes shape, becomes misformed and starts spinning more slowly around the earth. Circadian rhythms of life start slipping into new patterns. Women have fewer periods.
• A new trend breaks when new, healthy vitamin and hormone loaded cigarettes are brought to market. People stop eating, relying on smoking for sustainence. Over a lifetime, smokers' digestive tracks shrivel, disused, and the alveoli in their lungs become the hungry mouths of yearning baby birds, absorbing air with unholy vigor. All forms of air pollution go away. We evolve into big bags with lips that suck and exhale.
• Everything evolves all at once, totally messing up a bunch of theories and creating a bunch of others in the new parts of our brains.
• Humanity descends back into the dark ages after ideologies currenly in vogue in Kansas thwart the best efforts of scientific progress. A wizard named Twiddletwat remasters the mysterious art of compost piles and is burned at the stake. His consorts, Bumblemuff and Glitterclit, discover lesbianism. All hell breaks loose.
• Hillary Clinton gets elected president. Being associated with liberal politics somehow becomes annoying.