Short story ideas
From December 2013
1. A man buys a very cheap 56 inch TV from his mate. It works perfectly, until one day idly surfing he notices that channel 56 is locked. However, gradually this non-access to that channel does his head in. He goes online and looks for any help – there is none. He eventually manages to do a factory re-set. Channel 56 is revealed. It is his own conscience.
2. “At the end, he spurted out seemingly unconnected phrases which I recorded in a last desperate grasp to try and understand him. Only now am I realizing, in fits and starts, in different languages, metaphors and nibbles, in spurts and tangents, that it is his life story….”
3. I am the keeper of the bridge. Britannia is ruined and Menai Bridge is destroyed. 100,000 people live in high rise hell, a Hong Kong-esque post-nuclear-like hinterland. A new, Krokodil-type drug is eating the inhabitants from within. Walls surround Bangor; there is a no-fly zone over Anglesey due to a terrible nuclear accident. Half the island is under water. Bangor is cut off and quarantined. Actually this is a bit like The Book of Dave isn’t it. Balls.
4. A commune which people think is a weirdo/hippy hotel. A girl is sent there by desperate skint parents (single dad?). There is a high street, with shops but everything is free. People start trying to get in through two sets of doors. There are panthers amongst the cats.
5. The Bangor smugglers’ tunnels under Waterloo and Paddy’s.
6. A man finds out his friends are dying. He can save them if he swaps them with already-dying elderly Africans. So he does. But then his friends’ friends and families catch the same disease. Still the elderly can cover. But then they start to run out. He has to use other countries’ weak and ill. Then whole countries; then the UK elderly, ill, other religions. Then adults; then kids; then all who are left are him and women he has to impregnate. Ones who are prepared to let him. But that doesn’t work either; he tells them to kill him and use his seed to clone him back to life. Kill him again and again til the world is replenished. He says he is prepared to die for their sins.
7. There is one copy of a 3D reality computer game (sort of like Doom) which changes players into solid avatars. It is passed around at random and is immune to copying. The game requires only participants and a venue. A man gets hold of the game but is mugged. He has to track down the game party to a deserted warehouse. He tries to hack into the game but is not successful. Eventually he manages to force a shut down. On the walk home he thinks he sees a giant TV screen with one flickering corner that seems to be showing part of the game, which has spread onto the network due to his trying to hack it. The virus will turn the whole world into a giant game. But did he see it?
8. Everyone fancies that girl but it’s a boy and it is the narrator.
9. The world is paused. A team goes back in time to Bangor as it was. Different shops etc. Really fascinating. Tiny bugs – nanobots but a size that you can see – sort something out to snap reality back into place. The traffic jams come back and the airport reopens.
