Story idea

Holden LaPadula · Mar 9, 2016

Wow have you seen the movie "Defending Your Life"? If not you definitely should! It's about reincarnation as well. It follows a man who lives a greedy, cowardly life, dies, and goes to this court room that every dead person must have a trial in before continuing to heaven. In order to be released into heaven, one must have lived a courageous and generous life. If too cowardly and stingy, they must reincarnate and live life all over again without knowledge of their past lives and continue this cycle until they live a life deemed courageous and worthwhile. The protagonist meets a woman in the place before heaven who dies in a fire after saving her daughters and pets. In past lives she was a whaler, an adventurer... She is definitely going to heaven and the man must prove his courage in order to go on with her.

I love your story idea. It also reminds me of "Every Day" by David Levithan. Using a fantastical plot device in "regular" human societies can lead to very powerful themes and messages. Just try your best to avoid clichés, especially with the romance!

WriterMMS · Mar 15, 2016

i love the raw concept of this story.

WriterMMS · Mar 15, 2016

DanielLanex said: ↑

I had a similar idea and I came to post about it but I saw this thread so I thought I would just share directly with you instead. I wrote a sort of rough plot sketch out last weekend. I started with just the idea and expanded to a tentative three part story with kind of a world building and character introduction phase, a rising action phase, an interlude of character development and emotional climax accompanied by the characters going on a physical journey, and then a concluding climax in the action of the plot itself.

Its different from your idea because it isn't about spiritual incarnation, its coming from a dystopia perspective.

Futuristic world where people can clone their own dna and relive their lives from a very young age in the exact same body but retain all of the knowledge of their previous lifetime through a super expensive brain transplant procedure. However, the procedure is so expensive that not everyone can do it unless they spend their whole lives making money, which leads to a dystopian society where people are forced to go to ever greater and greater lengths to secure their next life. Celebrities are people who have lived more than two or three lives and can make enough money to not only clone their bodies but also to upgrade them.

Moral issues arise from the "disposal" of the original cloned brain, and the developing child of age 3 who is basically killed to give his/her body to the owner of the dna, (or so everyone thinks.) With an exceeding automation of most of the menial tasks of society the most prized commodity becomes the idealized "most ideal" dna strand, which people seek to inhabit for the stability it would provide, since the fewer flaws there are in the dna the more times it can be replicated before it breaks down; but, buying your way into someone else's dna is an even more expensive process, and this allure of upgrading your body leads to highly competitive and dark side of the high end of society who spend their lives plotting to get insane amounts of money and secure genetically superior bodies.

All the while the government is secretly covering up a mass sterilization plan for the population, ending the human ability to reproduce its own kind without the use of the cloning process. This will allow the government to control who is allowed to continue living, and who is not. The cloning process itself, as well as the short lived lives of the clones, who only survive as sentient beings before the brain transplant at age 3, is mostly automated and highly concealed from to the public. Some things go without saying but it remains a highly taboo topic of discussion since conformity is extremely important alla 1984. In the underground world hidden from most of the population who are stuffed into massive cities lies a massive network of child labour; clones whose owners were unable to make their payments are used to fill roles of farm labour, gas mining, anything too brutal to be seen by the people who are still "on the upside" but just a bit too complex or awkward for machines to do. These two worlds are kept so firmly separate that almost everyone is completely unaware of what is really going on and everyone believes in the utopian ideal society where all can live forever as long as they remain productive members of society; but since the society is largely cut off from the reality of how it's needs are met it becomes a society which is fraught with opulence: drugs, alternate reality simulations, prostitution, ect. The primary struggle of the people becomes to resist temptation that could lead them off track into their next body. This is contrasted with the struggle of the under-race which is one of physicality, hard labour, poor living conditions, ect. Traditional marriage is frowned upon as well as trying to pro-create naturally. While having natural babies isn't illegal, it is built into the system to cause a quite significant financial strain on the parents almost ensuring their failure to make it into their "next" bodies, since clones are wards of the state and are thus supported through early childhood by the government, but naturally conceived children are not. There is a polarizing view among society that sacrificing one's own consciousness and set of knowledge and expertise and experience for the creation of new dna, (ie: a child who is a unique combination that hasn’t existed before,) is a highly honorable choice, since it helps to retain a more diverse gene pool in the species. However, some people believe that it is more beneficial to retain the knowledge and experience of the old, and that throwing it away by having new children is a waste of intellectual progress.

All of the goods arrive underground, there are no trucks. Robots handle shipping. Seriously no one knows or cares where any of the crazy nice shit they have comes from.

Secretly the government is creating propaganda to reinforce this second view, (that is that cloning one's body instead of having children is a better choice,) as they try to gain complete control of the human reproductive process by sterilizing newly cloned bodies; and at the same time making it a social faux-pas to even have your own children to begin with. So, while the government plays a game of mass manipulation to create an eternally loyal lower class of slaves who have known no better life, an eternally motivated middle class of creators and thinkers who advance the technological abundance of the society, and a very small "elite" upper class of near super humans who compete on a public stage for the chance to make it into genetically engineered "super-bodies," there arises a sub culture of people whose devotion to remaining true to the organic reproduction of human life evolves into almost a religious cult. This happens against the backdrop of what should be a perfect society; hard lined for eternal progress, which is in fact a sick society where almost everyone is cheating to get ahead, or to push their competition back. A whole host of entirely non-life essential careers has arisen in a chase for an endless pursuit of hedonism, which has become the only thing left to motivate the already well fed and housed population. It is seen as a sign of higher social standing to be able to waste money on the enjoyment of life, and a lot of people make a living from this industry.

On the other hand, crime is punished by a forced procedure of reincarnation into a "servant" class. This is a secondary class to the creators, not doing the forced manual labour of the clones in the unseen world, but serving the daily needs of the creators in the cities. This class serves as a deterrent to crime since they are always there to serve as a reminder of what happens when a creator misbehaves. This class is motivated by the slim chance that they may earn the chance to inhabit their original body and take back their place, but this is in most cases impossible because of the minimal wage that they earn.

So. 6 levels of society. The government. The super humans. The creators. Their offshoot the religious sect of organically reproducing humans who give their lives to have children. The servants. The unseen clones of the unseen industrial complex.

Two major plot points arise. One: the people who are having kids don’t retain their knowledge and their children are severely disadvantaged when coming against peers who have 1 or 2 lifetimes already in them. This often forces them down into the servant class since they are unable to compete in an ever more competitive job market of creators. Maybe we can have one such character who is conflicted over whether or not she will have her own children, knowing the struggles she is facing, but trying to stick to her religious views. So these people become disadvantaged by design.

The second plot point is that this mass repression of one of our basest biological urges, to reproduce, leads to a mass production of a wide variety of mood altering drugs to distract people from their own state of denial to their biology. Having your eggs taken out and supplementing with hormone therapy is seen as a responsible way to deal with the problem, as is the chemical castration of men. The government supplements cost of these procedures as a way to encourage them, and undertaking them is seen as a way to commit yourself to the path to a new body. However, other sorts of drugs, alternate reality simulations, massively popular virtual reality sports and an endless pursuit of hedonism, drag people away from their goal of making it into their next life. But since everyone knows that falling too far off track will result in their permanent death, there is a constant struggle to stay the course.

An off shoot of this is people who purposefully commit crimes so they can make it into "servant" bodies, just for another shot at life. This often leads to intense regret and suicide since the servant class is offered no respect and a vastly lower quality of life than that of the creators.

At the critical juncture where the government about to begin creating clones who do not have an organic reproduction capability to begin with, the ever disadvantaged but determined group of "religious fanatics," (who have been having kids regardless of the over-arching societal view,) stage a mass revolt. This is triggered by a data leak that makes its way to one of our main characters who discovers a memo describing the government’s plan. I know the whole "data leak," "hactavism," thing is probably corny as heck, and it might be better to have it happen another way but then again maybe not. It needs a really nerdy, nerdy computer person's mind to make that sort of idea live and I don't have that mind.

Much to everyone's surprise a massive clone army, (not even known to exists by the reader,) is brought in by the government seemingly from nowhere to quell the rebellion when it reaches a critical stage of overpowering traditional law-enforcement. The government enacts a state of martial law during the ensuing chaos, enforced by the ever loyal clones who have not even been taught the same language as that of the populace, but who so eerily look just the same as everyone else, but for their uniforms and menacing firearms.

[Bring out points about how the increasing genetic instability of a repetitive cloning process is leaving more and more clones non-functional, meaning one person might have to clone his own dna several times to come up with a suitable new body. The other bodies are either discarded or used as clone slaves. This ever increasing price of re-insertion into a new body creates an artificial hand of natural selection that kills off people who can't make enough money to pay for their potential new bodies as the dna continually degrades with each generation and the price of a new body increases.]

The government's plan, after the complete sterilization of the populace, is to take all of the people who can make it alive to the "cut-off," some 75 years in the future, and combine their dna to create new combinations. This freshly created diversity is expected refresh the dna pool and propel evolution forward lightyears ahead of where it would be naturally. This cycle is to be repeated every 200 years, growing the population to a certain size and then shrinking it again, to create a diverse gene pool and then select the best out of it for the next stage.]

Days after the quelling of the rebellion the government announces that the natural reproduction of offspring is now illegal and that members of the religious cult are now enemies of the state. Cue the future holocaust. As this happens we begin to see how the majority of the population is becoming polarized: having lived easy and supervised lives for centuries, some of the people cling even tighter to their belief in the system, even as it's pure corruption is revealed. Another portion of the population is appalled by the revelations and takes the side of the religious cult. War within the city ensues.

The war quickly degenerates into a slaughter as the vastly superior weaponry and organization of the clone army shuts down any direct opposition. People who are first generation clones or better are quickly transported into a safe zone. People who are original are sent to a processing center. Our characters find their way into a safe zone and meet with a group of surviving cultists. They find a way to get out of the city and into the uninhabited zone.

This brings us to the second act.

Now the group of fleeing “refugees” comes upon the barren wilderness of the outer world, and they are greeted with a stunning revelation. Farms that are run by machines and clone slaves, vast mineral mines, vast fishing operations, the building of vehicles, airplanes, spaceships, weaponry, computers, factory after factory, seemingly endless. The clone slave population speaks a strange dialect which seems simple and barbaric. Shockingly, any attempt to free the slaves is met with violence from the slaves themselves, and there does not seem to be any violent force acting upon the slaves as they work. Stockholm Syndrome. But something else is also observed. The slaves freely express a kindness and love to one another which is foreign to the creators. At night they have sex in groups, although they are all sterile. They sing songs and play primitive musical instruments fashioned from basic tools. This shows how despite their proximity to high technology they remain primitive because of their relationship to that technology: as the ones being controlled, not the ones in control. We can see that they have some sort of implant in their heads which is like a small box over the left temple, with some wires running just underneath the skin to another small box at the base of the spine. It seems unclear what function this serves.

So here we can go into more than a few sub plots. How the group is able to survive by scavenging from factory to factory. Slowly amassing a collection of high technology and weapons. How the leaders plan an eventual return to the city to rescue their comrades, but over time begin to see how running away might be a safer option. A need to preserve their own safety is contrasted with the guilt of leaving their compatriots behind.

As they mingle with the slave clones they begin to exchange culture with them, they initiate trade with the slaves of one factory to another, helping to get them more food, clothing where needed, things like this. The slaves readily except their help but will openly resist the action of stealing from a factory if they see it take place. But when the refugees collect goods from the factories away from the view of the slaves and then bring them back at night as gifts the slaves seem to lose understanding of any wrong doing having occurred, and they except the gifts with gratitude. Our refugees begin to learn the slave language a little. One slave girl falls in love with the main character. He and the prostitute will perform a surgical operation on her to remove the implants in her brain, but she almost dies. The main character does this secret away from the rest of the people and we see that he is greedy to have what he wants and that is more a motivation for him than the actual freeing of a slave. He offers the prostitute a massive payout to help him with the procedure since she has had some experience with medical procedures somehow, like in an underworld situation where she had to stitch up some criminal guy who couldn’t go into see a real doctor for fear of his own capture, so he paid her to sow his wounds back together. The slave girl will depart with the group when they leave and will become totally attached to the main character. Some of the others are shocked that Marcus took a potentially fatal risk in performing surgery on this person, but he fends off their accusations by saying that it had to be found out it if the removal of the implants would result in the death of the host. It is clear to the reader that his only real motivation was a sexual conquest.

Despite how the refugees have been welcomed into the slave culture it is continually seen that there is no way that the slaves will ever leave their duties behind. They are utterly and completely conditioned to fulfill their tasks on a daily basis. What little they need is provided for them and despite their hard lives they find strength in a togetherness that the higher society of the creators completely lacks in its total competition.

So basically we get to contrast one society in which the people have an extremely low standard of living but enjoy sexual freedom and a lack of hierarchical leadership, (since the only thing they are submitting to is their implants,) with another society with an extremely high standard of living but with extreme sexual repression and a rigid social hierarchy, that has led to sexual predation, the selling of sex, the abuse of power, ect.

I was thinking of making the younger original girl character fall into prositituion because she can't compete with her clone peers in the job market. That's the prostitute I was talking about, she is someone who has been with the group since the city.

We see also how despite the fact that the group has rebelled completely from the control of the government, they are still almost completely dependent upon the industry that government created: fishing out of massive spawning tanks and cooking on fires in the isles of the assembly line with the cuttings of the lumber factory. The machinery of the factories and fields rolls forward completely ignoring the presence of the refugees. It is like a great empty soul that is lost in giant, perpetual motion.

Maybe at first we can have them stealing food directly from the slaves, who receive rations out of some sort of automated food dispensary machine into which the slaves scan their implants to receive a daily ration, but this action is met with violent opposition and it is seen that despite their technological advantage the refugees cannot take advantage of the slave population because they are hopelessly outnumbered. Instead, they collect food directly from the farms and factories themselves under cover of darkness, and use primitive methods to prepare it for themselves.

Some slaves are trained to fix certain robots, to fix certain machines. These slaves have higher social status, they are responsible for ensuring that maintenance checks are carried out daily, and they become very angry when anyone tries to interrupt the function of any robotic task or piece of equipment.

The refugees stay hidden and on alert at all times, sleeping in shifts, keeping watch from the top of the factory buildings, ect.

After a time, (maybe a few days… not long enough for the government to realistically have completed the stabilization of the city but long enough for the leaders of the group to be nervous of what might be coming after them and what might be happening to their companions who were left behind,) there arises a debate over what the course of action should be. Some of the cultists seem dead set on arming themselves with weaponry from the weapons factory and going back inside to fight the clone army in a straight war, but Marcus persuades them to reconsider since the clone army has been seen to be very efficient at its task and vastly outnumbers the refugees He suggests that they take what tools they need for survival and make off into the deeper wilderness to avoid contact with the government forever, essentially becoming a rogue state of people living solely off the land. This is seen as cowardly since it would leave the fate of the vast majority of the cult members left inside the city up to the government, which almost surely means they will end up dead. Another group of cultists/refugees argues that staying with the slave population might be the best choice, in other words, if nothing has gone wrong yet, why not stay here and keep waiting? They decide to run further away. Any foray back into the city would almost certainly result in immediate capture due to the intense surveillance around it and the massive military presence. Staying put isn’t an option because the government will eventually come to tie up their loose ends. After much deliberation everyone agrees. All of the while we are left to wonder what is happening in the city, and why the government still hasn’t come chasing after our group of cultists.

They take what they need from the factories in the dead of night to avoid any confrontations with the slaves, and set out. After a day of travel by road (in vehicles,) they crest a ridge and see something entirely different: the massive cloning facility. This is something that none of our characters have ever seen before. No image of it is in any school book, no word is spoken of it in the city. The cloning process is largely kept a secret and those few who become experts in its industry are seen almost as the priests of the culture: ones who are close to god and keep secrets of a higher power. They live in a separated portion of the city and speak little of their work.

[Important to note how the utter lack of security on the outer world speaks to the complete unpreparedness of the government to handle any kind of escape. The utopian city is so perfect at serving the needs of its population that no one has ever fled before, and it has been so long since it was considered a risk that there exist nearly zero security measures beyond the gates of the city itself.]

It is such that our group of refugees finds themselves walking into the cloning facility. The first thing that becomes apparent is that it is completely nonfunctional, or at least that it is stopped completely. “Why is nothing happening?” Someone says. They walk through halls of incubation pods, stacked five up in endless rows, but they all seem empty. We come through various halls which contain different things that would seem to indicate areas that are used to care for very young clones in different stages of development: nursing machines, cradles, diaper changing stations, ect. Wistful music pipes through a PA system, something that hits Marcus in his deepest memories, safety and unconditional love. “I’ve been here before.”

“Of course you have. Do you find it odd that you remember the sound of the music?”

“Odd?”

“The brain that was here in your body isn’t in your body anymore.”

“Somehow I remember the music.”

“Funny.”

Suddenly he was on his knees, tightly clenched fists pressing into the linoleum floor while unhindered tears shook him.

No one seemed to know what to do but they all stopped, except the slave girl who was clutching him from behind and humming a song into his ear.

“This is his third life?” He tried to keep his voice low.

“I think so.”

Somewhere deep inside of him he felt a relief he hadn’t known before. He felt a disgust that penetrated him so deeply he couldn’t breathe, he felt as if his skin had betrayed him, as if his body knew that he had lost humanity. It was something about the music. And the way the slave girl had him in a consuming bear grip, harmonizing. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. Was it in a past life?

Anyways so that was random. We pick up from there and they keep walking until they find a massive hallway with a bunch of doors. They go inside and they find all of the surgery rooms, with a bunch of technology that no one recognizes, and big robots with 12 arms stooped overtop of 5-foot-long operating tables. Nothing is moving, nothing is working, there are no children. The party continues on.

They then find a long hallway which leads to a room with a long row of conveyor belts. They look down them to see each one drop off down an incline about 30 yards from the entrance to the room. Someone begins to walk forward but Marcus stops him. The room smells very sterile, a bleachy overtone hiding something else entirely.

“Walk out of here.” He said

The slave girl started to whimper. It was a very strange sound in the otherwise quiet room.

“You mean we aren’t going to see what’s down there?”

Marcus turned sharply. “Walk out of here now.”

No one spoke for a moment but they were all frozen. Something inside Marcus snapped.

“Go!” He screamed. He pushed everyone aside to get back to the door. He levelled his shoulder into it and it burst open. Then he started running. After four paces the rest of the world was gone. His breathing was perfectly regulated, his legs were perfectly balanced in motion, his arms pumped in alternation like the pistons of a steam engine. All that existed was full, powerful breath and exhilarating speed. He was far away from the thing had sensed him in that room. The thing that had reached out to his soul and touched him with its thin decaying hands. That thing was far, far away. It would never catch him.

Here we explore something that I want to keep touching on which is the leader who has more capabilities than anyone else in the group but who is actually more frightened than anyone else because despite being in on the cause of the cult he is the only one among them who has lived more than two lifetimes and the lure of never dying is to him very strong. He struggles with the temptation of this, knowing where his current path will eventually lead him.

After this experience they decide to go back and find out what happened in the city. Marcus decides that there is no way he can leave his old reality behind and all of the people who are doomed within it.

Which brings us to the third act.

They go back in and find that a completely separate revolutionary movement that never left the city found a way to defeat the clone army and have taken over as the rulers, and now they are trying to perform a genocide on the clone population, rather than the cultists.

Now they re-enter the city to find it completely under control of the cultist movement. This is a massive surprise. Marcus discovers that cultists now in power are methodically murdering all of the clones of the creator class and have decreed that only natural birth is legal. This also involves the mass murder or the entire remnant of the clone army. Pockets of clone resistance exist but the situation is largely under control. This leaves a huge dilemma for Marcus, for since he has been working on the side of the cultists for his entire life and in his past life he cannot go against their rule but he is also now condemned to death by law. Moreover, the public opinion has swayed so far to the support of the cultists that being in that extreme view has become the only way to ensure one’s own survival. Most of the people do not know what Marcus has done to spur the revolutionary movement and only know him as the gladiator he once was. He is asked to keep quiet while the decided upon course of action is carried out by the remaining cultists. They hide him in a prison cell.

Marcus tries to reason with the people who have taken charge but he finds that they are of the more extreme end of the religious spectrum and they believe that every clone is an abomination to the purity of God’s creation, and that all clones must be wiped off the earth to purify the will of God upon the human race. We found out that the slave girl is pregnant with his child at some point here. He is to be spared in secret by the religious institution but he and the others cannot be seen by the public since the decree of all clones must die has been deemed law and unchangeable. He tries to convince them that they would be in great error to carry out a mass holocaust of the clone slave population which they are not even yet aware of under the same law, but they do not listen. He remains in the prison cell. He starts doing a shit ton of drugs which the cultists provide him with.

This is the total collapse of the main character. Now, separated from his group and all hope of unity between the clones and the natural people, he falls in defeat at the hands of the drugs which are readily supplied to him by the religious leadership who wish to keep him docile and hidden. Someone who isn’t in the know about what he did to start the revolution in the first place finds out about his presence and that person spreads the word that one of the “super clones,” is still alive, and then the population as a whole riot for his execution. We can intersperse scenes of the slave girl giving birth to his child with him getting killed. That’s probably the best way to end it. It doesnt have to be a tragedy but since we're writing about life and death to begin with as a subject it would seem pretty silly to come out on a fairy tale ending.
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this is really good, the kind of stuff id keep on the down low before publishing.

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Story idea

Holden LaPadula Member

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