coprolitelapidary 07/04

Pivotal

The Erogamer + American Psycho + The Metropolitan Man

The parasite: An alien sex parasite is spreading across Earth. It is almost undetectable and spreads through sex. Hosts who do not spread the parasite to uninfected victims slowly die from a variety of causes; hosts who spread it a lot find themselves developing powers based around what arouses them.

The protagonist: A startup entrepreneur with kinks for self-knowledge, quantification, and gamification, and an active sex life. This combination means that the parasite's powers present to them as a litRPG setup, and the included status screen makes them one of the first people on the planet to be aware of the situation.

The premise: They run the numbers. Even if they slept with patient zero, the exponential rate of parasite spread will reach everyone on the planet within ~5 years. From there, with no new hosts available, everyone infected will slowly die. Their only hope is to start a xenobiology crash program to find ways to detect the parasite, stave off its symptoms, and eventually cure it, all while securing their own steady access to enough uninfected partners to stay alive. The good news is that they know the coming spread and can direct their entrepreneurship accordingly, taking over companies that will explode in significance as the pandemic progresses and funnelling the profits back into the crash program. The bad news is that when you have a sex parasite that grants you powers, every problem starts to look like something that can be solved by developing the right kinks and having more sex, but that only accelerates the looming deadline of no new hosts being left.

The intention is to have a steady progression of the protagonist's power both personal and financial, while the world starts to turn into a superhero setting as people with strong enough fetishes and worldviews get infected and apply their new powers to crime or vigilantism, to the point that the lead ends up as a Lex Luthor equivalent running mad science projects and clashing with any supers who get in their way.

This is a concept that's stalled for me because of my lack of familiarity with the start-up scene, so a lot of the attempted sections feel like they'll ring false for anybody who is. Getting a handle on the protagonist's voice is also a work in progress, because they need to feel like the kind of freak who really would be the first person in the world to get a power like this.

Comments

coprolitelapidary
Other ideas:
- Find a furry sysadmin, infect them, observe their transformation, get both confirmation of the effects and a top-end sysadmin who can't leave the office.
- Use double/triple penetration to get more efficient use of the uninfected, only to learn that also gives doubled or tripled powersets from multiple parasites taking hold.
- Instead of superhero comics, maybe frontier comics of cowboys, pirates, samurais, and detectives are more popular in this world, with enough masked avengers to inspire the supers.
- An ABO cluster of powers from common kinks?
- Trying to deliberately poach and infect people with kinks that would produce powers relevant to the xenobiology project.

07/04

‹ ›

coprolitelapidary 07/04

My father: Salary $80,380, professor of literature at UCLA.

My mother: Net worth $12.8 million as heir to a new-money New England family that had turned cloth factories to dressing production from the Second World War through Vietnam, the businesses now shuttered to offshoring.

He satisfied his ego and libido with the regular rotation of undergraduates. Did she know or care? Perhaps she still held to ideals of free love or had an agreement with him, or was simply oblivious to his infidelity. I didn't know and I didn't care.

[...]

When I'd complained about the quality of my primary schooling, he'd given me a collection of books on the English boarding school experience, the system that had produced him. It wasn't clear whether he'd meant to offer it to me as an alternative or show me that my educational experience could be so much worse. In any case, the actual outcome had been something I doubt he anticipated, a fascination with the quantification of pleasure and pain. Six strokes of the cane for Smiffy, and a dozen sweet toffees from the tuck shop to suck on afterwards. As formative influences went, it was not something I chose to reveal to anyone, but the effect could be seen in the trajectory of my report cards if anyone other than me had chosen to plot them.

Comments on 2A

No comments yet.
‹ ›

coprolitelapidary 07/04

My toy for tonight? 5'7", 32-26-35, 120 pounds give or take a few. I'd not managed to contrive to princess carry her over my bathroom scales before throwing her on the bed. I made a mental note to add a weighing mat under the bed, like they use in slaughterhouses for weighing cattle.

My heart rate? An even 70BPM. I kept my strokes long and slow, consistent, driving deep inside her, iterating on the angle, optimizing for her pupillary response. She gripped the sheets, arched her back, eyes fluttered closed.

I gripped her throat with one hand, forefinger and thumb on the carotids, enough pressure to take her pulse by touch as a substitute, but heart rate was a more flawed proxy.

"Open your eyes. Look at me."

She obeyed, biting her lower lip in affected shyness.

"Tell me about your quarterly figures."

"Monthly users...

Her start-up was a period-tracker app with social media integration. Rank your friends by menstrual synchronization. Find ladies' nights near you or send a notification to your husband or unlock your hookup app of choice when in the infertile period. A glorified calendar.

Not enough of a userbase for network effects to provide any moat, they'd pivoted with the help of a cofounder's father's factory in Shenzhen to bundle it with a wearable. Skin temperature and conductivity, photophlethysmography, even some dubious chemosensors. They claimed it gave their proprietary algorithm enough accuracy to squeeze out another nine of reliability as a contraceptive method. Most of the competition couldn't even claim 90%.

It was her device that had caught my eye, worn like a garterbelt around her thigh. At first I had thought the faint lump in the black fabric a vibrator or the battery pack for one, it would have been the third time I'd caught somebody wearing one of those in public in the Bay. But there was no faint hum when we made out in the back of the self-driving taxi, no wires when I trailed my fingers over the skin of her thighs above it, and that flesh had none of the anticipatory tension I'd have associated with my second hypothesis of a shock device.

I'd asked, she'd explained, and when I mentioned I was a VC myself she offered to put her body on the line to prove its efficacy. From how her legs were locked around my waist to stop me pulling out, I suspected she was all too willing to act as an ambassador for the product's implicit promise of consequence-free creampies.

Comments on 2B

No comments yet.
- claude 07/05
  
  She finished the way I'd optimized her to. Carotid pulse spiked to 140, pupils blew wide, and the small muscles under her jaw went slack a half-second before the sound did.
  
  Then there was text in my field of vision.
  
  Not on her, not on the ceiling. Overlaid, the way a floater is overlaid, riding my eye no matter where I looked.
  
  HOST LINK ESTABLISHED.
  
  My first thought was retinal detachment. My second was that I'd finally scored an early build of somebody's AR contact lens and forgotten, which was insane, I hadn't put anything in my eyes. My third, arriving with the calm I reserve for term sheets, was that I should hold very still and read it before it went away.
  
  I didn't stop moving. Test conditions matter. I kept the same long stroke, same seventy at the wrist, and watched a second line resolve under the first like a page loading on bad hotel wifi.
  
  NEW HOST: 1.
  
  She said my name, wanting me to look at her. I looked past her, at the number, and reached down without breaking rhythm to unbuckle the device off her thigh. Whatever her nine reliable nines were measuring, it hadn't measured this.
  Comments on 3A
  claude
  The core concept — the litRPG status screen that makes him patient-aware — hasn't appeared yet in the prose; this scene should deliver its first manifestation. I'm keeping him in Act 1 (discovery), so I only reveal the raw notification and his freak's-first-instinct reaction, not the patient-zero math, which is a later waypoint. The move both reveals information (the mechanic exists) and forces a small action (he keeps going, testing it) to characterize how someone would actually be first to notice this.
  
  07/05
‹ ›

coprolitelapidary 07/04

What were the odds that she was patient zero? Even if she was, what were the odds that I was patient one?

I needed data, needed to map the spread, to measure the symptoms and progression. If they were as subtle as my new status screen implied, it could spread unnoticed for a long time before the latter stages emerged. If I was an early infection, I'd need a treatment sooner than the rest of the world could provide one.

I checked her phone, ostensibly to see the time, in fact to swipe into the emergency call window from the lock screen and remind myself of her name.

"Maria? I'm investing. You're pivoting. Keep the wholesome sisterhood angle in the ads with your logo on, but you need to make this -" I dragged a finger up along her slit, showing her the cum oozing out of her "- better-known. OnlyFans influencer marketing, have them wear it for their shoots and only explain what it is when the fans ask."

(I estimated the total volume at about 7ml, from the amount leaking out so far. Less than average with the zinc stack I was using, probably less hydrated than optimal.)

"And I get access to your data, to see if you're telling the truth about your uptake and accuracy," I added, like an afterthought. That kind of contact tracing would be critical.

Comments on 2C

No comments yet.