What if the thing at issue, at least in the background of the thriller, were immortality? (Kirstin’s world idea follows along similar lines too… but there are also elements of Gary’s and others’ ideas in the mix here with mine as well).
Imagine the ruling culture has mastered life and death; the human lifespan has been increased to where you can nearly be immortal. Did some reading up. A few weeks back researchers from UCSF published a paper that says disabling the capability of worms to reproduce was the key to increasing their lifespan in the lab. Hmmm…
World – general. So people can live practically forever, just not if they keep their sex drives… if they have sex or keep their sex drive they have a limited lifespan. In our fictional future history, we live forever. Of course we can be killed by accident or malice, but if they get to us in time, EMTs (e.g., paramedics not aliens) can put our minds in black boxes and take us to a corporate hospital where we’re grown a new clone of ourselves to hold it. But sexual activity is forbidden… in fact illegal because to have sex is to eventually bring about your death; attemped suicide. People are not sterilized, every morning everyone takes a pill that safely neutralizes their sex hormones and renders them infertile. It can wear off if the drug is not taken every day.
To make more people, which doesn’t have to happen anywhere near as much because the world will fill up quickly after forty years of people not dying. But in case more people are needed, companies that handle mixing the genetic material to create new human cocktails. Children when created this way are practically flawless. To make sure nobody breaks the law, everyone has to be tested regularly for sex hormones. If they any are detected, they are arrested and tried – for attempted suicide. There are a few convictions a year. As a replacement for sex, couples take new, physically harmless drugs and sit together. Gradually over the centuries you start to dry out a bit… your mind flattens out, you lose your ability to feel things. Now, there’s a growing underground of people that have found a way to keep their sexuality and who have also learned how to get around the test… perhaps through some sort of payoff scheme, or they can fake it.
This has a potentially interesting world for a play. Talking black boxes. A character can die and then walk in again a scene or two later. A sex scene that gives a possible If people couldn’t have children, perhaps – possibly – they wouldn’t worry about gender as much – wouldn’t the stigma against homosexuality be irrelevant? Would there still be marriage – between homosexual or hetero-sexual couples indiscriminately (you just find the mind you love, and don’t worry about their sex)? Would people still have affairs? Would having affairs be an institution (think the French). What about prostitutes? (No, I am *not* obsessed, but I had a few years driving them, never wrote about them yet, and I recall a really interesting assortment of characters!).
World – personal. OK, so what if the heroine were a famous news/human interest reporter, very successful (or a similar career that communicates a certain bland vacuity, while simultaneously placing her at the center of the popular culture). Now, in the past, she wasn’t so superficial… she was a great investigative reporter in her youth… but that was 70-80 years ago. She long ago realized that if she is ever going to get anywhere, she must ruffle fewer feathers, and so now HI is her specialty. At this point, her career has grown to the point where she is about to make the big deal that will make her a household name and wealthy beyond dreams of avarice. The deal involves some kind of sellout.
She’s married to another successful man, (maybe a politician – she makes the money). And there’s something interesting and twisty about her – maybe she’s having an affair with a woman (the husband knows and puts up with it as long as the relationship between he and she is still good). To really add extra twists to the story, at two chokepoints both the husband and the lower must become suspects and/or victims later.
Four years ago, she and her husband had a factory-made daughter who was killed by someone in the reproductive underground, and neither she nor her husband could get to her in time to save her mind for reproduction. Or perhaps even more pointedly, she herself made a serious error and caused the daughter’s genetic material to be lost, so it was her fault? The couple has, after four years of paperwork, applied for and gotten permits to have a child made to replace their child. But this would require them to go back and do the whole painful process again; since losing her last daughter, she’s been torn and distracted from doing it. The service calls her regularly and nags her to come in and pick out her new child’s characteristics.
Change of fortune. She attends a convention where the political power brokers of the press regularly attend; something of a big bash. It’s here she’s planning to cut the final deals that will make her career dreams finally come to full fruition. She’s sworn to herself that after this she will slow down and order that kid and spend more time with her designated family.
During this party, she is slipped a mickey – a hormonal cocktail designed to reinitiate her reproductive system. She never sees who does it to her. Meanwhile, the deal goes down. She is going to get it all… her dreams are going to come true. She goes to bed and wakes up feeling a bit weird. She ascribes the feeling to the heavy partying the night before, and gets ready for work. We see inklings – subtle ones – of what’s happened to her, but she doesn’t suspect a thing.
Crisis. When she goes into work, her newly activated reproductive system sets off the alarms. She’s sent home and told to go to the doctor. They run tests. She gets the bad news… she’s been found to be a reproductive criminal. What’s more, the way her system was reactivated requires her to find the exact set of hormonal compounds that were used… the compounds have passed out of her body now, and can’t be detected. Whoever did this had access to the best biochemists money could buy. She calls in some favors to powerful and influential people keep the news out of the press. But they can’t do it forever. Within forty-eight hours, the story will break and her career will be over. What’s more, at that point her condition will be irreversible. She’s got no choice. She must find whomever did this to her, and fast.
I am still working on a lot of the details of the interim journey, and perhaps you are also getting ideas on the steps she can take to uncover each of the clues. Suffice it to say that her old talents as an investigative reporter are being revived even as the effects of the dosage she swallowed starts to compromise her. Yes, this is an aspect from a previous idea… that whatever has happened to her is starting to erode her effectiveness at the very sleuthing that made her such a great reporter all those years ago. She’s losing it even as she needs it.
Her journey needs to take her to lots of weird and cool places, these are places in our future, some of which we can only dream today. She needs to meet a really bizarre group of characters… these are people of our future world, with disturbing and/or fascinating similarities to people in today’s world. At some point, she will discover who it is that’s done this to her… members of the reproductive underground. And after spending time with them, she starts to be swayed to join them… and to rebel against the comfortable life she’s built all these years. She changes sides. And then things start to get really interesting…
To be continued…
