Eight Characters In Search Of A Plot

These are little biographies of characters who tried to inveigle their way into stories that were inappropriate for them. Perhaps they'll graduate to full stories one day. For now, regretfully, they are stuck in the Writer's Waiting Room leafing through dusty magazines until inspiration strikes. Who knows, maybe one will become your new favourite.

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I first started breastfeeding cats when I was 27.

mRNA vaccines were the miracle of the 21st Century. Every disease eventually found itself crushed under their scientific weight. COVID? Eliminated! Zika? Zapped! Rabies? A distant memory! There was nothing that wonderstuff couldn't achieve. If your body wasn't producing insulin, mRNA could reprogram your organs. The world changed. Mostly for good, but sometimes for the strange. When you no longer need to worry about getting food poisoning, your dining habits change and it becomes socially acceptable to rummage in bins like a fox. No more STDs meant a new summer (and autumn, winter, spring, and summer again) of love. You could be as risky as you like while exploring the world and never catch so much as a cold.

And if, due to some unanticipated 3rd or 4th order effect of a seemingly benign social change, there was a surfeit of kittens and a shortage of cats… well, science offered me a way to help those poor little animals. How could I refuse?

The neovaccine rewrote my code for the betterment of stray cats everywhere. Rather than let them starve, the shelter paid me to suckle them. Not directly, of course! Sharp claws and pointed teeth were incompatible with tender human flesh. So a few times a day, I discreetly went to the nursing room and pumped out a few litres of the white-stuff. My genetically enhanced body produced the perfect mix of nutrients for a growing kitten. I was the nursemaid to a legion of pretty-kitties! What I hadn't realised was how addictive my lactations were…

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David's parents wanted only the best for him, they said, that's why they had him fitted with cochlear implants a week shy of his 7th birthday. He wasn't deaf, sadly, but they didn't want him to fall behind all the other children. The world is increasingly competitive, they reasoned. Why not give him all the advantages that deaf kids got? After all, hearing children deserve support too!

Perfect pitch would help if he ever decided to be a professional musician. High frequency detection could prevent him from missing a distant fire alarm. There were rumours that some deaf kids had exam answers beamed to their implants from bribed school staff. Now David could hear the full spectrum of sound, and was able to selectively target his hearing, it would only be a matter of time before he would surpass the other children.

Unspoken between his parents was the knowledge that the implants looked deeply cool. Multicoloured patches, flashing LEDs, hair cut away in the same style as their favourite actor. David wasn't a fashion accessory to them, of course, he was a perfect little boy. But one who could do with a little improvement.

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Humans have always tried to conquer the Earth's most remote areas. The world had moved on from insulating people in whale blubber, or kitting them out with synthetic clothing. At the frozen extreme of the world was a research station which housed a lonely tribe of experimental humans. All of them had elected to undergo a series of procedures to allow them to thrive in perpetual winter. The mission, so it was hoped, would allow future humans to survive the inclement weather on Mars and beyond. What nobler cause was there than to sacrifice your bodily autonomy for the future of humanity?

Alicia didn't mind the way she looked. Her body's endocrine systems had been totally upgraded and she was able to frolic naked in the ice-storm without feeling the cold. Ordinarily, she might have felt a little self-conscious, but the tight curls of thick brown hair covering her skin helped her to retain body-heat and preserve her modesty. Where once her flesh would have been frozen, now she was warm beneath her personal furry blanket. Bella was less happy. She'd opted for a different way to keep warm. She stood out in the blizzard wearing a puffy overall which clung tight to her body, on her lower-back sat a literal bum-bag. A gruesome tangle of pipes and mechanical valves plugged into her body. Her gut microbes had been replaced with a newer, more powerful strain. They diligently digested every morsel she ate and, with great efficiency, produced hundreds of litres of methane. The cyborg gizmo literally sucked the farts out of her and burned them for warmth.

Carla's mutant upgrade had not been the success the scientists had hoped for. While the others played in the snow, Carla slept. Her enormous bulk took three specially reinforced bunks to contain, and the air filtration system in her room had needed to be upgraded twice. Carla spent the months before the journey eating. She ate on the ship which took them up to the frozen north. After a team of a dozen Huskies had dragged her corpulent form to the research base, she ate them. Before she got a chance to munch down on the camp's extensive food stores, she slipped into a hibernating coma and needed to be fork-lifted onto the beds. That's how she'd spent the last few months; sleeping and dreaming. Her metabolism slowed to near death and energy reserves were drawn from the unending rolls of fat. The brainwave monitors on her head told the scientists that the hibernation was a success - but none of them knew that, when she awoke, she would still be ravenous.

Debbie - oh poor Debbie - was not having a good time at the research station. She was cold all the time. It was a chill deep in her bones that couldn't be cured. Every muscle in her body ached from incessant shivering. The coldness made the food taste so bland that her appetite had plummeted, which caused her to lose weight, which made her colder. A cruel joke of a negative reinforcement loop. The frostbite gnawed at her extremities, and the lack of vitamin D was causing her mood to downshift drastically. Debbie was beginning to suspect that her upgrades had been mere placebos, and that she was in the control group.

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Ellard was, he was sad to say, an Insurance Loss Adjuster. Total mood killer at parties and guaranteed 100% swipe lefts on the apps. The only time someone engaged him in conversation about his work was to berate him about how some bastard Loss Adjuster from their insurance company had completely screwed them over. Ellard got it, he really did, no one likes the guy who tells you that you aren't getting what you hoped for. What most people didn't understand was just how hard he fought for them. A large part of his work was determining just how much at fault each party was. Today's case was no different.

"And I'm saying, the car wouldn't have been destroyed if it had been parked properly!"

"Well, that may be true," said Ellard hesitantly, "but you must admit, even if it had been parked closer to the curb, the meteor may still have hit it."

"Oh! So now I'm supposed to check every street before saving the city from falling space debris?"

"That's not what I'm saying. But the insurance company would prefer it if you and the others would take more care with how you defend us."

"More care?! That's ridiculous. Give me one example of where I haven't had the utmost care for the citizens?"

"Well, for example, last week you were battling some Mutant Space Pirates. You picked up their leader's hover-cruiser and lobbed it into a newly built skyscraper, shattering every window on the building."

"That was necessary and proportionate to the mission."

"A crowd of witnesses heard you say 'have a smashing time' just before you threw it."

"So?"

"The insurance company feels that was premeditated and, therefore, not an accident. Similarly, Wonder-Girl's deposition states that you and MegaKid were skimming those meteors along 7th avenue."

"That sneaky… Even if we were letting off a little steam, that car was illegally parked. There was no justification for them to be in that handicapped bay! In many ways, I was doing the city a favour!"

Ellard sighed. The CCTV had shown the car wasn't displaying its blue badge, you didn't need super-vision to see that, but it didn't feel right to have insurance premiums being pushed up because of a few super-egos.

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Fiona's app knew she was in love before she had the chance to say it. She started upgrading herself after the heart attack on her 27th birthday. She inoculated herself against alcohol first of all. A couple of injections in the thigh each month and she no longer got any satisfaction from being drunk. She'd always pretended those fancy beers were delicious but, shorn of their psychoactive compounds, they tasted as bitter and disgusting as the first time she'd snuck a Budwiser from her step-father's stash.

Cocktails with the girls was still fun, even though the alcohol-free versions were just as expensive, but she noticed a few of her friends coming back from the bathroom with post-nasal drip. They seemed quite excited and chatty, but Fiona felt a rising dred. The next day she had a bout of hypnotherapy and a nasal filter installed. It caught germs, dust, and anything that wasn't designed to be inhaled. Her sense of smell was slightly dulled, but her moral superiority was given a massive boost.

The doctors were still concerned about her heart, so they installed a monitoring device. It came with a little app which joined a cluster of other little apps in a remote folder on Fiona's phone. She turned her hearing down when she was in a club, increased the filtration rate if she was talking to a smoker, and clicked the appetite suppression button when she walked past the dirty kebab van. A dozen apps to control her mood, metabolism, and various mucous levels.

No one reads the update notes on apps, do they? Fiona's heart app silently opted her into a data collection programme. It monitored her heart for unusual signs and - ooops! - sold the data on to advertisers. The first time she laid eyes on Sally, her heart-rate beat a tango that swapped her advertising preferences from "party gal" to "romantic fool".

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on this story. Did you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me 😃

Hungry for more? You can read:

• 2024's "Revenge Of The Mutant Algorithms"
• 2023's "Tales of the Algorithm"