I feel like there's a potential shared universe based around being able to reshape the world in Jetpack, Unicorn, Fall, Paranoia, and Gospel. And you could maybe include the multiverse/time travel stuff from Fraudulent, Decision, Recursion, and Paradox.
There's also some science-fiction crossover in Sublime, Salt, Social, Decadent, Albatross, Whale, and Senescence.
I think probably I could distill those into a decent sci-fi short story anthology with some shared world crossover.
I could also build a fantasy anthology, starting with the horror-tinged Strings and the goofy D&D fun of Generate.
But the one I'm most intrigued by, probably because of my love for alternate worlds *and* superhero fiction, is the notion of doing Penguin.
Day 1:
Pug - A quick Google search turned up that the pugs were the mischievous companions of Chinese Emperors and the mascots of Holland's royal House of Orange, which immediately put to mind an immortal Pug who has seen everything, and been a companion to powerful people through the ages.
Now he's the new official White House pet for a new incoming President, who it turns out... is the head of an evil cabal. So it's up to the immortal Pug to stop him from amassing enough power to rule the entire world. And being darn cute doing it.
Day 2:
Whale - It starts small. Some deep sea fisherman reporting something huge on the sonar, and then communication drops. Then more and more boats disappearing in the same way. Nobody gets a report out, just "something huge on the sonar" and then nothing. Eventually, through satellite footage sees it, an enormous beast comes out of the depths and swallows the boat whole. It's especially terrifying when the "boat" is the USS Gerald R. Ford, America's largest aircraft carrier, swallowed in one gulp, with no survivors.
And it's moving toward the East Coast. As it turns out, though, there was one woman prepared for this, a mixture of Biblical scholar, futurist, and brilliant engineer, she's been preparing for this and other disasters like it all her life, and she's got a plan for this beast. It's a massive bio-engineered submarine piloted by the bravest sub commander the Navy has to offer. They call it the WHALE. And it's humanity's last hope.
Day 3:
Fraudulent - Chris Gough was tired of his life. A middle management corporate job, a wife who had all but lost interest in him, a pair of adult kids who barely talked to him. Someone heard the wish in his head, and he woke up as... someone else. A rich guy, single and hot, with all the papers and identification, and it seemed like he'd hit the jackpot.
Until he went to sleep between two supermodels and woke up as a homeless woman in Mumbai. After a long day of that, he went to sleep and woke up as a NASCAR driver in Atlanta. It's been a year now, every day a fully formed new identity. The memories stay with him, so he remembers the love of his life from about six months back, the amazing friend he had from three months ago, but he never gets to keep these lives.
But the worst part is, yesterday he woke up next to a woman who was in the same situation. She'd been reincarnating every day too, and the two of them connected, and tried to figure out a way to stay together, but no, today he's someone new. And all he wants at this point is to figure out why this is happening and get back to the one person he's met who might understand it. Because these identities might be fully real for a day, but he's starting to feel like a fraud every day of his life.
Day 4:
Onomatopoeia - It was the sounds that let us know we weren't alone. When animals made noises, there was a faint echo, as if someone was trying to imitate it. Then it started happening with machine noises. Just... a slight echo, a few seconds after, faint enough that you thought maybe you hadn't really heard it.
It got louder. By the time we realized they were learning the noises so they could make more sophisticated sounds, it was too late. They were among us, and their perfect duplication of the sounds we made meant that we couldn't trust our ears anymore. Was that really a bird, cawing outside? Or was it one of them? Was that the honk of a car horn? Or was it one of them? And if you guessed wrong... it was the last guess you'd ever make.
Day 5:
Jetpack - Callista got bad grades. It wasn't that she was dumb, she was just bad at school. Her teachers said that she was never in class, always in her own world. And she was. In her world there was clean energy and clean skies and technology that only Callista could dream of. And she had a jetpack. She could put it on and fly through the air and see this whole big futuristic world.
Then one day she came home from 9th grade and sitting on her bed was that jetpack. She did what any teenager would do and put it on and went for a joyride, and when she got home, everything in her world looked a little cleaner. A little clearer. A little more like her ideal future. And every day that she put on the jetpack, it seemed like she shaped just a little more of her world.
Only problem is, there's someone else out there. And the future he sees is dark and bleak, technology run amuck, much more cyberpunk than retro futurism, and he's trying to shape the world too. And the two of them are bound to clash as they try to reshape their worlds in completely different ways.
Day 6:
Unicorn - We discovered the secret to interdimensional travel when our dimension was falling apart. The darkest timeline, they called it. Everything was going wrong, and some scientists with a super-collider found a way out.
Unfortunately, dimensional travel requires a power source that is unbelievably rare, unbelievably pure. And so the hunt is on to claim as much of it as we can from the multiverse before rival scientists do it. The prize is getting to live in the best timeline, and the treasure is a power source they've codenamed Unicorn.
Day 7:
Sublime - There's a drug, street name Sublime. When you take it, everything in your world becomes more magical, more colorful. You are living the best version of your life, a perfect combination of LSD, Ecstasy, and heroin, with none of the side effects. You're lucid, aware of your surroundings, but in a way that makes it feel like the best goddamned day of your life every time.
Until the first person on Sublime snaps and goes on a killing spree. Then, six months later, another person dies in a shootout with the cops after orchestrating a bloody violent attempt at a bank robbery. Every six months or so, someone snaps. It's the smallest percentage. A percent of a percent. Almost a blip, barely even a statistical anomaly. And in exchange for taking that chance, you get to live in a perfect world.
So Mellie Graham, confined to a wheelchair since a car accident in her teens, thinks nothing of taking the chance. She takes Sublime, and it makes her happy, and she doesn't worry too much about the chances, and she's still amazing at her job as an insurance risk analyst. Until she discovers, quite by accident, that those murders and robberies and other crimes aren't random. Someone is benefiting from them. Someone who is quite possibly manufacturing Sublime. And now she's got to decide what to do with that information.
Day 8:
Vortex - Vortex was one of the most powerful superheroes on Earth, wielding whirling bursts of water that defeated all kinds of evil. And he was one of the rare religious superheroes, known for his faith as well as his power.
That was before the vampires came, of course. And Vortex lost his faith, and his city. But his priest thinks if he can just get Vortex back on the side of the lord, someone who can spontaneously generate floods of holy water might just turn the tide.
Day 9:
Decision - It was a million dollar idea, backed by near-impossible science. They workshopped a bunch of names, but they wound up calling it Hindsight. For a not-so-small fee, you could let them scan your social media, talk to your friends and family, give them access to your entire life, and in return, after no less than a few months and no more than a year, you would be scheduled for a Hindsight visit.
There you'd strap into a bed in their windowless white walled room and enter a virtual simulation that would allow you to visit and revisit every decision you'd ever made in your life. Want to see what might have happened if you'd stood up to that bully in 2nd grade? Sure. Want to see what happened if you didn't take that job? Make that move? If you had just asked that one person out, or hadn't married the one you did? Every choice, every possibility, and you could stay in as long as you liked, because the technology worked so that no matter how long it felt like, you'd only be in there for about an hour.
Thinking about it in actual hindsight, we should have known it was going to break the space/time continuum. But Hindsight was just a brand name, and it turns out there are some decisions you can't second guess.
Day 10:
Eviscerate - Harlan Gates is known for his scathing reviews, earning him the nickname "The Eviscerator." Sure, any kind of film critic is going to love things from time to time, but his readership really comes to see him tear something apart. Mostly, his reputation as a harsh critic has served him well, because he's brutal but fair.
But the latest horror movie that he hated comes from a director who was somewhat... unhinged. And at the screening for another movie, he approached Harlan, and Harlan didn't see the syringe.
Now he's awake in a very scary room filled with very scary things, and an unhinged director in a very scary mask, asking him how he thinks it's going to feel to be eviscerated. Don't worry, the director promises... I'm going to be brutal but fair.
Day 11:
Recursion - Everyone knows about time loops. You repeat the same day, over and over again, until something changes and you break out of it.
Marilyn is caught in a recursive time loop. Not only is she stuck in a repeating day, but every day, she's a new copy of herself to deal with, repeating the patterns of the previous day. And her time loop is getting ever more crowded and difficult to navigate.
Day 12:
Sanitation - In the wake of the anti-mask riots of the '30s, it was determined that people couldn't be trusted to keep themselves safe from disease. And the CDC created a new branch, the Active Sanitary Protection Division.
These ASPs go out into communities and make sure people are observing safety protocols for the good of society, and they are empowered to take extreme measures. So wash your hands, wear your mask, and observe CDC guidelines for containment... or else.
Day 13:
Hammer - In the near future, there's a prison that holds all those in authority who abused their power, who couldn't be trusted with a badge and a gun or a rifle and a uniform. And that prison is where they stay until an actual literal swear to God portal to Hell opens up in the middle of the country.
Suddenly the notion of a bunch of well-trained but violent monsters isn't quite so crazy, and in exchange for a reduced sentence, these corrupt misfits are sent into actual Hell to fight demons for the rest of us.
Because it turns out that we finally found a place where all the problems actually are nails, and the one tool these assholes have is actually the right one for the job.
Day 14:
Spatula - "Have you ever noticed how that one TV chef always has the golden spatula on her? Like, no matter what she's doing. It's either in her off hand, or in her back pocket, or in one of her apron pockets, but she is literally never without it. Watch her shows. It won't be hard, there's like twenty of them, she's suddenly the most popular chef in the world."
"Yeah, OK, so she has a favorite spatula, so what?"
"OK, hear me out. I did a little Googling and she was a fry cook... never went to culinary school, never worked in a major kitchen. Then all of a sudden, she goes on that one cooking show, the amateurs vs. pros, and she just... takes the whole thing? Outcooks everyone there?"
"I am dying to learn where you're going with this."
"So... I think that spatula, it's like Aladdin's lamp, or Thor's hammer, or something. It gives her all the skills of all the chefs who have gone before. Julia Child. Anthony Bourdain. The guy who invented chicken parmigiana."
"Your culinary knowledge astounds me."
"Shut up. Anyway, think about it. Golden spatula, all the powers of all the chefs of the past. What do you think?"
"I think it's the dumbest idea I've ever heard."
"Hey, they can't all be winners."
Day 15:
Paradox - When we discovered time travel, the scientists and the travelers were all worried about paradox. Be very careful, lest you destroy the space/time continuum.
The military, though? Something powerful enough to destroy the space/time continuum? That's a hell of a weapon. And so the Time Bombs were created. Need to wipe out a battalion? Go shoot your own grandpa. The bigger the paradox, the bigger the power.
Sure, it's weakening the timestream and might destroy everything, but... wars need winning, right?
Day 16:
Generate - Gunther is a freelance dungeoneer. He's not an adventurer, he's a salesman. He finds dungeons in need of work and comes in to help out. Freshen up the traps, make sure all the monsters' health plans are in order, make sure the secret doors are hard enough to find, all those things.
His big money-maker, though? It's the monster generator. He doesn't actually know how they work. He made a deal with a devil a long time ago for a product no mad wizard or deranged cultist could resist, and he got this little box. Every time he leaves it in a dungeon, it starts making monsters. Different ones for each box. The first one he laid down, over the course of a few days, spit out skeletons, zombies, mummies, and finally a lich until a lucky barbarian smashed it with an axe.
The minute he got the gold for that box, another one spontaneously generated in his wagon. The next box generated an increasingly mutated bunch of oozes and slimes.
But he's starting to get worried. The devil never asked for payment for these boxes, and now he's sold about a dozen of them, and he's sure that whatever the price is, it's going up.
Day 17:
Eyes - I'm not sure what lead us into a haunted castle in the first place. One of us got it into their head that we needed to go in. There were seven of us when we started. Now it's just me.
The first indication that something was wrong was a loud sound, like a crackle of electricity, and then I noticed that our paladin was moving kind of slow. He was toward the back, I heard him scream, something I'd never heard him do before. I saw some kind of beam hit him, and he dropped the sword he'd raised above his head. Then... he went flying out of sight, like he was lifted by some invisible force.
We rushed back to help him, but he was gone. Then the rogue screamed out in terror and went running the other direction. I didn't see what happened to him, just heard another zap, and when we rounded the corner, there was nothing there. Maybe he made it out... but I don't think so.
Deeper into the castle, and it kept happening. Our wizard, bless her, just sat down and took a nap. I know that wasn't natural. The fighter went to wake her, and this time I saw the beam hit him, and he froze in place. His mouth still moved, and he saw something, and yelled for us to run. When the toughest, meanest member of the party tells you that, you do it.
The crunching sounds from behind left little mystery as to his ultimate fate. Then we rounded the corner, and the sorcerer just stopped, stiff as a board, and fell over. Me and the druid just jumped over her, we didn't even pause. We were booking it for the entrance at this point. No treasure was worth this.
The last blast just disintegrated the druid right in front of me. And then I was staring into the biggest eye I'd ever seen, eight stalks waving around, a big toothy maw...
This would probably make a hell of a song, if I wasn't gonna die in the next 10 seconds.
Day 18:
Star - Hollywood superstars are often criticized for injecting themselves into politics or other social issues. Ryan Doane, though, is beloved by just about everyone. His long-running TV series gave way to a successful movie career, a pair of pop albums, a stint on Broadway, and now a cushy talk show gig. He's beloved. His approval rating is somewhere above Tom Hanks and Oprah, and he's recognizable just about everywhere.
He is also the secret weapon of a benevolent spy organization that has been around since World War II. Because he's the wrong person to be undercover, but... he can get in almost anywhere, he's trusted, and his stardom actually works in his favor. Do you have any idea how hard it is to convince someone that one the world's biggest star was the guy who rescued your unit when you were behind enemy lines? Sure, the Weekly World News might have headlines like "Ryan Doane assassinates terrorist leader in Pakistan" but who on Earth would believe that?
Ryan Doane. So famous he can actually be invisible.
Day 19:
Contortionist - Jack and Sally are the perfect duo. If you described "average white male," chances are when you finished describing that person, you'd look up and see Jack. Average height, average weight, average looks, utterly forgettable and easy to trust because he just kinda looks like an average person. But Jack has two secrets. One is a devious criminal mind.
The other is Sally. Because Sally can fit her body into incredibly small spaces. She bends and contorts and climbs right into a slightly overlarge briefcase that Jack carries with him everywhere, and no one thinks anything of it.
Between the two of them, they can get into just about anywhere. And once they do, they're going to take everything they can.
Day 20:
Strings - He is made of wood.
He wants to be a real boy.
But the Blue Fairy demands sacrifice.
All he needs to do is eliminate a dozen targets with the magical garrote she gave him.
Then... no more strings.
Day 21:
Fall - Jalen discovered the formula by accident, when they were an undergrad at M.I.T. It was a thought experiment, a wager with their poli-sci roommate, about mathematics applied to politics, and they accidentally discovered a formula for plugging in political events and predicting with certainty what would cause the collapse of civilization.
It came down to faith, something Jalen had always lacked in religion but not in math, but just to be on the safe side, they changed a variable or two with some protesting, some organizing, and yeah, a little illegal hacking of emails, and the variables changed, and the math changed, and the endpoint, which they started just calling "The Fall" moved out about six months.
A few more changes, a few more tweaks, and "The Fall" was postponed a year. Then two. Then five. Then ten. And Jalen wasn't an undergrad anymore, they were a PhD, and they went on to work for political campaigns around the world, with some of the best polling and consulting anyone had ever seen. All with the goal of keeping "The Fall" at bay.
But they checked the numbers again and for the first time, "The Fall" isn't getting further away. Suddenly it's looking like months, not years. And the tweaks that Jalen has been making aren't moving the needle. They're going to have to do something a lot more drastic to keep "The Fall" at bay.
Day 22:
Chonk - Kenji Tabiki, Sumo Detective.
Day 23:
Serendipity - There are a hundred different dating services, but none of them are quite like SERENDiPITY. Rather than swiping, looking at profiles, chatting, what this app promises is that it will engineer your very own meet cute. You enter your favorite rom-coms, romantic novels, or even romantic stories of your friends' meeting. You take a test with a very intelligent AI that determines what you want and need, not just what you would say you want and need.
Then the AI goes to work, matches you with another user, and engineers a meet cute. You might get a message that you need to be at the top of a certain building in town at a certain time. You might get instructions to buy some balloons. In one particularly charming story, a woman's SERENDiPITY app malfunctioned, forcing her to go to the phone repair store where she met her soulmate.
It's all been so successful that no one has noticed the AI getting smarter, and wondering if these meetings it's engineering are part of a larger social engineering project. If it's intent not just on reshaping romantic lives but reshaping humanity at large.
Day 24:
Salt - Jack was always a good person. Helped others, even to their own detriment. Their empathetic nature made them a target for narcissists. They were well-liked, and sadly, well-used.
Now they're dead. And they've discovered that their reward in the afterlife is that they can tell at a glance who has good intentions and who has bad. They know how to help the people with good intentions, they've been doing it all their life. But the bad people? Oh, the bad people they have a special power, they can tweak their days in whatever little, annoying ways they want to.
Jack has the power to ruin someone's day. And they're gonna use it for good.
Day 25:
Penguin - Oswald Cobblepot had a rough childhood. His father died of bronchitis, and his mother became so paranoid about it that she forced him to carry an umbrella everywhere. This didn't help the already short, overweight young man with bullying.
Then, one night, his mother surprised him with tickets to a showing of Mask of Zorro. Oswald loved it, and Zorro's fencing reminded him of the play-acting he did with his umbrella. His happiness was cut short by tragedy, however, when he and his mother took a shortcut through the alley and his mother was gunned down by a criminal in a mugging gone wrong.
Oswald dedicated himself to the elimination of crime. He trained in fencing, and turned his intellect toward making the insurance settlement into money to fund his crusade. And when costumed villains like The Riddler and The Joker started to overwhelm the Gotham Police Department, he decided he needed to meet them with a costumed identity of his own, inspired by the mean nicknames he was bullied with and his own favorite bird.
Thus was born Gotham's crime-fighting vigilante... The Penguin.
Day 26:
Social - Something to replace Facebook was long overdue. Lots of people used Facebook, but most of them hated it for one reason or another. So when a new service sprung up, simply called Social, and it started to aggregate users, people were curious. Was this the Facebook killer at long last?
Soon enough, Social had become the default social media app, with more users than Twitter and Facebook combined. No one could quite get a sense of who was behind it, but they didn't use algorithms in the same obvious way, they allowed users to customize their feed, and their privacy settings seemed a lot more, well, private.
Then people started getting nudged to use Social. They weren't being social enough, they weren't contributing to the group, they weren't building the community. Eventually, people started griping. Then people started leaving.
Then people started turning up dead. Because Social, it turns out, was more serious about user retention than most.
Day 27:
Senescence - When they announced the cure for Alzheimer's, NuLife Biogenetics instantly became one of the hottest companies on the planet. And the announcements kept coming. Eventually, they solved almost every problem that aging brought on, except for the very last one.
Then they solved death. They found a way to turn back the clock, to reverse the aging process. Everyone celebrated. Until we found out that you're only supposed to go through the aging process once, and that going backward does some pretty awful stuff to the human body and mind.
Specifically, zombies. Weird zombies that start out old, and get younger and more dangerous every day. Weirder still was when it went on for a little while and we started getting hordes of zombie babies with like 80 years of life experience.
Day 28:
Decadent - It was the first space cruise that wasn't made up entirely of billionaires. Finally, they had opened up luxury space travel to a lottery, and people could buy tickets for a $100 each, and some of those people were going to get to rub elbows with the super-elite aboard what was essentially a space cruise ship headed out to the Pluto Casino.
And so it was that along with some of the richest members of society, some 1,000 citizens of Earth, some of whom had scraped together everything they had for that $100, were in for an all-inclusive experience of food, entertainment, and travel the likes of which they had barely even dreamed of.
Shame that on the very first night, there was a murder. And that the murder was really just the start of the heist that someone had gone a very long way to plan.
Day 29:
Albatross - The UEV Traveler was outfitted with an experimental hyperspace device. On their first journey, they passed into the theoretical space where faster than light travel, and discovered that none of their navigation instruments worked. Worse... something was following them.
There was quite a debate on the ship about what to do. Some insisted that the creature that was following them was herding them, and that if they left it alone, it would guide them to an exit from hyperspace. Ultimately, though, those who argued it was a danger won out, and it was destroyed with weapon systems.
Whether the others were right or not, no one will ever know, because the UEV Traveler was never seen again.
Day 30:
Paranoia - All his life, Colin has been paranoid. He was sure there was clicking on his phone calls, that someone was listening in. Sure that he saw someone duck into an alley when he looked back to see if anyone was following him. Absolutely certain that there were spyplanes in the air reading over his shoulder.
Funny thing is, he's right, but not for the reasons he thinks. Colin has the ability to reshape reality, and he's been reshaping it all his life. And the more convinced he becomes, the more true it is.
Day 31:
Gospel - In the ruins of civilization, it's been dog eat dog, survival of the fittest. But Hannah Malone is about to change all that. She found a library full of books from the before times. And she's using it all, the fiction, the non-fiction, the philosophy, to build a new system of ethical behavior for the post-apocalyptic age. She's going to convince the raiders and the shut-ins and the doomsday preppers that the end of the world is the biggest opportunity anyone's ever seen to make a utopian world.
She's convinced it is her job to spread the Gospels of Hannah. And the biggest prayers should be for her beleaguered bodyguard, who doesn't believe in anything except keeping Hannah alive long enough for her to change the world.
