It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.
Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
Exposure Therapy
The Virtual Experience Technology was designed by neuroscientists and psychologists, manipulating magnetic fields at the brain surface without all of that messy wiring directly into the neural tissue. It could not only generate incredibly detailed sensory inputs, but could also modify the subject’s sensation of time passing. Coming from the sphere of brain science, it’s only natural that it would find its first use as a therapeutic tool.
No, of course it couldn’t modify memory. Not directly. But it could simulate real experiences, so real that they were nearly indistinguishable from life. Even better, these waking dreams could distill hours or days into seconds and minutes. Patients suffering from traumas and phobias could be walked through dozens of carefully designed scenarios in a single treatment session, physically safe at a clinic.
Corporations and militaries noted how effective the V.E.T. was for training. A few used it for interviews, condensing weeks of on-the-job observation into a few hours. And why not apply the same standards to those who were already hired? Why not condense more work into less physical time?
Advocates for justice reform suggested that prison sentences could be effectively commuted by living them out under V.E.T., completing them in a tiny fraction of the real-world time. Advocates for harsher sentencing suggested using similar techniques to stretch sentences into hundreds or thousands of experiential years. If a depraved serial killer was sentenced to a dozen life sentences, why shouldn’t they experience all of them?
Intelligence services quietly adopted the technology to trick subjects into revealing key information. And when the tricks didn’t work, there were whole suites of horrific torture designed to make people talk. No more messy real-world war crimes. These were invisible and undetectable, leaving only mental scars.
It was only reasonable and right that international tribunals put a stop to those horrible practices. Thank goodness they did. The CIA and FSB, MI6 and Mossad, and the Chinese MSS all pledged to shut down those divisions. Notoriously transparent organizations. Happy to let the inspectors double-check their work. They always followed the rules.
Words Deferred 