The best-laid plans, and three dystopian tales

I'm taking tomorrow off to get my car inspected. Now, once upon a time when I was on salary, this would have been no big deal: I would take the car to the dealership, get a ride to work from them, stroll in whenevah (after having first alerted everyone to my plan). Many hours later I would hitch a ride to the dealership with anyone heading that way, then I would drive myself back down to the office and round out my nine-and-a-half hours in splendid isolation: just me, my clients on the west coast, and their projects.

Those days are over. Now I punch a clock, and hours are not so flexible. But I roll with these things. I had a plan. I would take the day off, head up to the dealership with my car and my mom in her car, then drive my mom to go grocery shopping (since Tuesday is the day she gets a senior citizen's discount at the supermarket.) We would get lunch, maybe even do some other shopping. It would be fun, and she wouldn't have to worry about doing any driving. Until it was time to come home, of course.

Then an out-of-state emergency called my mom away. She won't be back until Wednesday.

I couldn't reschedule the inspection. It needs to be done by the end of the month, and there's a chance that I will need to get some work done before I can pass. Work that may require a follow-up visit. Or maybe I'll just need to get a new car. Who knows? We'll find out tomorrow.

I'll find out tomorrow, I mean. 'Cause I'll be spending the whole day sitting in the waiting room. I'd better take several good books...

***

I've had a few ideas for dystopian science-fiction stories kicking around my head. I hate mentioning them for fear that they may escape into the wild. But at the rate I'm going, I may never write them myself. So consider these jotted notes from my mental notebook.

Scenario 1: I've seen images of Afghan fighters missing eyes, hands, arms, legs - and still fighting. I remember once seeing a guy hopping on one leg and firing a machine gun. At some point, we may decide that simply being without one or more limbs does not disqualify a soldier from service - especially if our need for soldiers becomes dire.

Ergot has always fascinated me. A fungus that grows on Rye, causes a burning in the extremities - and then gangrene. Whoops, no more extremities. Now, what if such a thing were to be accidentally or intentionally introduced into the food supply? It seemed like a far-fetched idea until pets started to die everywhere last year thanks to melamine-contaminated food.

So: you have advanced military prosthetic technologies for limb replacement combined with a devastated civilian population where the survivors are largely limbless. How does society deal with this? And what does the resulting society look like? And what happens when someone who managed to escape the horrors of the outbreak tries to re-enter society?

Scenario 2: A society where suicide is not simply encouraged, it is expected. You create your masterpiece and then you die at the peak of your glory, never to become a burden, never to have your light dim. But choose to die too soon and you have wasted your talent; wait too long and you are pressured to achieve more, and more, always trying to reascend to the pinnacle of your life's work - so that you may then die without shame.

Scenario 3: Overconsumption of limited resources by an ever-growing population is the greatest crisis facing humanity, whether we know it or not. Some sections of society - the wealthier, the better-educated - self-limit their participation in the population by not having very many children. So what if someone - or a group of someones - offered "scholarships" for population control to those segments of the world population with the greatest growth? What promises could entice a third-world farmer and his wife to be sterilized, never to have children to support them and carry on their work? And how aggressive would the proponents of this idea get? I think I cribbed this from a summary of an issue of Concrete that I read in Wizard a while back.

So there you go. Three stories I may flesh out sometime. Please don't steal these ideas, unless you're a really good writer and are going to send me copies of the published works.