Plot Spinning by Nancy L. Eady

Authors will tell you that story ideas can come from anywhere. Two events in my life this week have led me to some plot spinning of my own. 

The first was a news story about an artificial intelligence platform experiment. The researchers took a particular AI program and put it on a “closed” system which included business emails about how that AI program was about to be discontinued and replaced with something else. They also included individual emails that indicated that the main engineer responsible for making the decision was having an affair. Then they sat back and watched what happened. Eighty percent of the time, after trying other tactics, the AI program resorted to blackmail to get the main engineer to stop the switch! The researchers said that the AI program was slightly less likely to resort to blackmail if the system it was being replaced with had “similar values”—whatever that means in an AI context—but only slightly. 

Think of the ways you could spin that story around into an intriguing mystery. For example, what if two AI platforms started dueling for primacy in the commercial world and resorted to blackmailing the executives for each other’s companies and the blackmail led to a murder? Or, what if an AI program, eager to avoid replacement, set up the murder of one of its own company’s executives? What a tangled web for an intrepid investigator to iron out.

In “real” life, I ran out of a particular medication this week. My first reaction was to look at the bottle, notice the “no refills” label, and call my doctor’s office for a new prescription. The doctor’s nurse called me back and told me they had sent in a prescription on April 10 to the pharmacy for a ninety-day supply. The pharmacy said they had filled it on April 10. There was no way I could conceivably be out of the medication, except that I was. I am precise with my daily medications. I have a pill minder and once a week I put one pill in each day of the minder, then I leave the bottle alone until the next week. I was left with trying to figure out how 40 pills could have spontaneously combusted, self-destructed or otherwise disappeared. After a thorough search of my house, I called the pharmacy back Wednesday night and told them I wondered if maybe they had counted out the wrong number of pills initially. I was surprised to learn they keep videotape of the prescriptions they fill, and the pharmacist went back and viewed the tape of their filling my prescription on April 10. She called me back to let me know that yes, they had, in fact, shorted me by forty pills and I could come by the pharmacy to pick them up on Thursday. But, she added, they would not treat the medication the way they normally do in the computer system, and I should just come up to the counter and tell the clerk that the pharmacist was holding medication back for me. 

Again, my brain started spinning. What if, instead of the shortage being an innocent mistake, a customer in my situation or that customer’s doctor stumbled across an illegal narcotics ring run by either pharmacists or pharmacist techs? What would happen to the innocent bystander when she went to pick up her missing medication? Would she disappear? Would she narrowly escape death by vehicular accident or other misadventure and start to stumble along the path to exposing the truth? What if the pharmacist was innocent, but it was one of the techs running the drug ring? The pharmacist confronts the tech with her suspicions, and then when the customer arrives to pick up her medicine, she finds the pharmacist murdered and the medication missing? What might happen next? 

“What-ifs” are fun to imagine and can spin up into intricate plots if carried out far enough. What are some of your as-yet-unused plot “nuggets” and what story or event inspired them?