Oct
20
2009
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*Rhae was eliminated at the end of Round 7
Read Rhae 7 here
“He is not dead who departs from life with a high and noble fame,” the 19th century German author Johann Ludwig Tieck once wrote. Leaving aside the suspect romanticism and inherent vagueness of words like “high” and “noble,” Tieck offers timely advice for an era in which we are given every opportunity to resign and outrage our better sensibilities in favor of that euphemism for self-imposed lobotomy known as positive thinking.
I’ll interpret “high and noble fame” as living by one’s conscience, one obeyed from within, not imposed from without. It may explain why I so resisted advice by readers to flesh out the characters. Perhaps I would still be in the running had I done so. However, I would have also betrayed the primary inner voice that each of us has but doesn’t always listen to. Even when others clamor for our attention, there is one voice that speaks more firmly, one that compels our attention when we look into the proverbial mirror, one to which we lose everything if we ignore it. Continue reading
Oct
9
2009
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Rhae’s Round 7 Challenge: Incorporate an Assassination Plot (taken from Tuck’s Story) – Word limit: 600.
Read RHAE 6 here (see “Similar Posts” at the bottom of this post for any earlier entries)
The Assassination of Marat - Weerts
6.
Melanie is dead. Her assassination at the May 1, 2037 anti-genetration protest outside CloneLife headquarters sparks nationwide riots. The conspirators at CloneLife and in the government who orchestrate the assassination expect riots. They know that dissidents as influential as Martin Luther King and Melanie Maxwell cannot be eliminated without domestic turbulence. But whereas with King, the riots had eventually fizzled out, with Melanie they flared up within weeks into civil war.
After her resignation at CloneLife, Melanie became an outspoken critic and, as an insider, the greatest threat to biotech’s latest research into parthenogenetic reproduction in DNA microchips. But Melanie’s high profile was a necessary but insufficient condition for the escalation of riots into revolutionary civil war. The main cause lay elsewhere. Although there was never official recognition that the kidnappings and murders of the 20s traced back to CloneLife, independent investigative journalists had holoblogged evidence of the connection. A significant minority of the population soon turned against CloneLife despite round-the-clock efforts by its PR Department, whose budget surpassed the total GDP of the poorest 30 nations. Continue reading
Sep
30
2009
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Read Rhae 5 here (see “Similar Posts” at the bottom of this post for any earlier entries)
Round 6 Challenge: Incorporate a White Russian and the words “over the line” into your next passage, which should be no more than 500 words.
5.
The binding and exigent lust for higher profit margins drove biotech firms into a DNA race to monopolize genome sequences. Although the August 28, 2005 kidnapping of a Harvard undergraduate’s golden retriever was conventionally referred to as the launch of the DNA race, the precursory scurry to patent genes had been as contentious.
Biotech lobbyists had fought for these patents, claiming that the funds required for therapeutic and diagnostic genome sequence research necessitated exclusivity guarantees on intellectual property. But as the technologies improved, practically anyone in a university laboratory could extract the extraneous sugars and proteins and render an isolated genome technologically and uniquely viable.
By late 2024, patents on manipulated gene sequences were irrelevant. More important was exclusive access to an individual’s genes. With its economic and political clout, the industry could have easily pushed through legislation to patent unmodified genes. But they knew legal protection was futile. Sampling a gene required only a quick and painless swab; an individual could easily hawk her or his sequence to any biotech company willing to pay.
Thus the kidnappings and murders began, first in Cambridge, then statewide, nationally, and finally internationally. Genomicide – the murder of an individual for exclusive access to her or his genes – replaced terrorism as the primary official U.S. threat to homeland security. Continue reading
Sep
18
2009
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Round 5 Challenge: Incorporate this image into your next passage of no more than 500 words. You can interpret this challenge as you see fit.
*click on thumbnail for a larger image
4.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith of 33 Banks St. are the first Cambridge couple to disappear. Melanie first met Mrs. Smith three years earlier at her weekly weaving hologroup. In what was her first holographic projection, Mrs. Smith spoke as a guest instructor on the near-extinct craft of Lavar Kerman carpet weaving. Mrs. Smith had studied under the Persian master Farshid Kiyanfar a year before he was killed during the Iran War in the 2013 atomic strike by the private contractor Shield, formerly Xe, formerly Blackwater. Mrs. Smith’s weaving virtuosity and collection of exquisite handwoven carpets awed the class. Most of them were still working on their first niqab.
(The veil-with-miniskirt combo entered the fashion mainstream when Iranian-French designer Aisha first unveiled her Niqab Series during the 2021 Milan Fashion Week. It offered over-privileged youth an outlet for undisruptive rebellious expression, making it popular on elite campuses like Harvard. Handwoven niqabs and skirts commanded even more respect). Continue reading
Read RHAE 1 here
Read RHAE 2 here
Read RHAE 3 here
Round 4 Challenge: Weave an element of Fyor’s story into your passage. It should be no more than 450 words.
3.
September 10, 2025 – Melanie has been working under the world’s top geneticists and scientists for three years. As a research associate at the Cambridge headquarters of CloneLife, which purchased Harvard during the depression of 2022, she holds one of the most coveted scientific research positions in the world. Only 28 years old, there is talk among her peers that she is a future contender for the Nobel. Her job, simply put, is to sort, arrange and store genome sequence information deposited daily at the CloneLife GenBank.
Melanie has a knack for sorting and arranging. Her peers joke it’s in her blood. Her grandfather, Lee Maxwell, holds the CloneLife World Record – what was then called the Guinness World Record – for the largest collection of washing machines in the world – 2,023 at the time of his death in 2019. Lee had a taste for the eclectic. His collection included a washing machine with an attached meat grinder and butter churner as well as the notorious front loader that first brought the Asphodel Fields gaming cult into the limelight when Bob Landers murdered his terrier in a wash cycle before a live online audience. Continue reading
Read RHAE 1 here
Read RHAE 2 here
Round 3 Challenge: Incorporate the death of a dog into your next passage. It should be no more than 400 words long.
Machina’s parthenogenesis reached critical mass in 2039, a decade after scientists created the first human being unreliant upon sexual reproduction for propagation. This new sexless human originated through the research of the biogeneticist Michel Djerzinski, who discovered that any genetic code could be rendered structurally intact and isolated from mutations, thereby allowing for the cloning of a species. In sexual reproduction, chromosomal separation could create haploid gametes, thereby introducing structural instability. But with asexual reproduction, perfect replication was possible.
When Frederic Hubczejak unveiled the new human on March 27, 2029 with the gnomic declaration that humanity had created the conditions for its successor, none of the 1.3 billion watching in teleportnet attendance realized just how prescient his statement would prove. The successor, however, would not be this new species of sexless human but a new species of reproductive machine, Homo Machina.
1.
August 28, 2025 – A college student is walking her golden retriever down Massachusetts Avenue. At the Harvard Yard CloneLife Café she turns down Dunster Street. An urge to urinate overwhelms her. Last Friday at her bimonthly STD check she tested positive for HIV. It is the second time in the last year that she has tested positive. The treatment is straightforward—one pill daily for a week—but the side effect, frequent urination, is an inconvenience. Unconstrained sex has its drawbacks. She ties off the leash outside John Harvard’s Brew Shop, one of the few remaining businesses in the neighborhood where one can urinate without subjection to a CloneLife commercial, and dashes in to the bathroom. When she returns, her dog is gone.
2.
The golden retriever, which was muzzled, swabbed, and then incinerated, was the first victim in a spate of dog kidnappings. Biotech had taken increased interest in canine DNA ever since the August 27, 2009 article published online in Science, which found that only three genes govern coat variation in the domestic dog. By isolating each dog’s genome, scientists could look for any single nucleotide polymorphisms that served as the signals of the DNA code mutations associated with particular characteristics.
The right mutation could generate billions in biotech profits. By killing the dog, the black market suppliers ensured that none of the competitors of the biotech firm they sold to would ever have access to that same genetic code. The DNA race had begun.
Read RHAE 1 here
ROUND 2: Write the opening paragraph of your novella. It should be no more than 300 words, not including your opening sentence, and should be about interactions that take place over the web.
Nobody foresaw that the findings first published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on August 16, 2009 — namely, that DNA shapes had been engineered to self-organize on silicon, thereby paving the way for the production of high-efficiency computer chips containing DNA origami — would set into motion a series of events that would ultimately lead to the displacement of the human race by its own creation. The DNA microchips, first mass produced in 2019, revolutionized web-based communications by shrinking computational structures to the point where they could be inserted into sunglasses and eventually contact lenses, thereby allowing individuals to browse the web, project images and video, and holograph-chat directly upon their field of vision. In 2025, around the same time the computer screen went out of production, researchers discovered that certain DNA sequences were more efficient for biotech uses, prompting a “DNA race” between companies to collect, patent and experiment with as many genomes as possible. Independent scientific bodies pointed out that the risks of mutation were extremely high with this unregulated experimentation, but the biotech industry drowned out their warnings with a campaign of vilification and distortion. As the production requirements expanded, and the stakes grew higher, an underground black market developed for abducted individuals whose ethnic and genetic qualities made their genomes especially coveted. It still remains unclear just when the first genetic mutation took place that led to the speciation of the hyper-computer, which married Artificial Intelligence to a self-generating, organic platform. But wherever it did happen, the parthenogenetic evolution of this new species, Homo Machina, occurred at a rate a thousand times faster than its biological counterparts. A.I. had found its body.
Round 1: Write the opening sentence of your novella
It was in the year of the monkey, a mordant omen for the impending eve of human life, when the mass failing of the human spirit, first known as World War III, and then simply as The Cataclysm, began.
I’ve compiled all of the writing of the 12 contestants (minus Fyor, who hasn’t posted yet) from the first 10 days on the Fourth Fiction Twitter page. Each contestant was allowed to write up to four posts, known as ‘tweets,’ per 24-hour period. Because there are several hundred tweets in total, I’ve divided them into 10 pages (the links are at the bottom of the post below the “Similar Posts” links). To add color and context, I’ve also included some Fourth Fiction-related tweets from other writers on Twitter, especially when the contestants responded to them. Any writing by non-contestants is [italicized and enclosed within brackets]. Unlike Twitter, which displays the most recent tweets first, I have listed these chronologically from oldest to most recent.
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