#infinite monkey

I'm trying to write a weird mythopoeic short story with lot of this – I'm stuck on writing it so why don't I just tell you how the whole thing goes.

A minor character is the only adult survivor of a weird advanced civilization and had to raise ~10000 children in a time loop. They had to batch the kids in groups of ten and do that a thousand times. At the end of this, they are borderline insane. They live at the periphery of the civilization that arose from those 10000 people. They're called the Greatmother and they live at the source of a river of milk.

Every first gen kid raised by the Greatmother experiences their childhood as abusive and neglectful, but they wouldn't describe it in those terms because there's no other baseline. This sets the tone for their whole culture in ensuing generations.

The protagonist is a young woman whose family was cursed with infertility by a clan they're feuding with. (All the characters can be rounded off as Greek demigods, by the way.) She wants a baby.

The only authority powerful enough to override the curse is the Greatmother. The protagonist goes up the river of milk to find them – possibly meeting a series of increasingly powerful and dangerous mothers, each of whom says "I can't do it, but maybe my mother can, go upriver".

The Greatmother overrides the infertility curse, but one of the princes of the rival family catches wind of it and is like, you are NOT having a baby that you're happy with on our watch. I'm going to reincarnate myself as the baby and make you miserable.

The name of my text file is EVIL BABY.

Babies vary on a number of axes. The prince hits the worst-for-the-parent extreme on every single one of them. He won't sleep. He screams and will not be consoled. Or he pretends her latest attempt to make him stop crying worked, watches for when she thinks she's got it, and then starts up again. He bites during feeding, gets genuinely hungry, which makes him genuinely cranky, which makes being an evil baby even easier.

He's having a lot of fun with this.

After some time he's pretty sure he's got it. The woman is exhausted and depressed. Her family wants to boot the baby into the wilderness to be eaten by wolves. He's going to be abandoned now, he can change shape and go home to his old life.

She does not abandon him! She goes, this is insane, but I'm locked in now. This is my kid. If my family won't have us anymore, I'm going to leave home and make it work somehow.

The guy's like, oh shit. What's this feeling? Do I feel… bad? She has been awfully nice to me. It's kind of nice being sung to. Sometimes after a long hard day of being difficult, I do like to snuggle. I think... that this person... is my mom?? But not in the way my normal mom (who wasn't around much) is my mom? idk, all of this is weird.

But it's going to be Not Right to just swap myself out with a random baby. She likes this baby, the baby that I am. (Which is nuts.)

Also, being her baby is nicer than being home with my original family in a way I wasn't capable of imagining before… so… I'll wipe my memory and be a baby for real.

With the implication that the change he works on himself is not permanent – upon adulthood he'll regain his memories and titles. In this world, there is no permanent escape from himself or his clan.

After fifteen years or so, his family notices he's been gone for a while, but it's too late! He created an interfamilial bond deeper than adoption, maybe deeper than marriage. She gave birth to him! The feud ends. The more major gods preside over the reconciliation ritual.

Most people from the two families are confused and annoyed. They were sorta ready to catch Romeo and Juliet shenanigans but they weren't genre-savvy enough to nip whatever the fuck this was in the bud.

My brain: The infinite monkey theorem= monkeys hitting typewriter keys at random for an infinite amount of time will type the complete works of William Shakespeare. What’s funny is that this is what happened, and it didn’t take infinity. It took evolution. Monkey ancestor to Shakespeare: about 6 million years.

IN ANIMAL MAN 25 Published monthly by DC Comics Inc. 606 Fith Avenue, New York, NY 10100

SHE KNOWS

I'm sure I've gotten some facts wrong – but even if every single fact were technically correct, to narrativize the diffuse effect of trace amounts of hybridization is to depart from a true account of events.

One of the story seeds I've been thinking about on and off for years is about a lesbian who comes back to her hometown and finds that her homophobic high school rapist has become not just a better person, but a pillar of the local LGBTQ community. A discovery that pries open, and greatly expands the scope of, her original wound. Obviously this kicks off a psychological violent revenge quest, although my mind fails to conjure details.

What do you do when your tormentor completely rehabilitates herself? Do you destroy her life? Or do you let her be?* How could you let her be when she has everything you want – even in the social layer you thought you'd escaped to, away from her?

81k, whose shift it was NOT: "Should I change the baby?"

me, guiltily: "Uh, yes. I feel bad assenting, but I suppose you do benefit from this because you get to read the catgirl story earlier."

81k: "That's right."

me: "I'm writing about the space colony economics."

81k: "Have you written any of the porn yet?"

Possibly another poor relative (with a toddler who gets into everything, thereby making the cleaning urgent?) arrives on the scene, causing the hikkimori some stress: "but you're clearly angling for a slice of MY inheritance from a not-even-that-rich woman whom I don't like very much and who doesn't like me!" (although there may be love there, and a lot of it.)

The anime figurine, whom the hikkimori worshipped and sexualized, lives out on an isolated space outpost fighting aliens in a giant robot. She is not pleased to have her beloved mech replaced with a lumbering, blubbering, useless giant. Nonetheless, you know, they have sex and fall in love.

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This feels like the novel where all my thoughts about fictionalizing "adulting" and "maturation" quest towards to see if it has a place there. I do think there's a lot of drama in learning how to drive, learning how to cook, cleaning a disgusting house when there is suddenly a toddler. And obviously there's drama in expecting money you don't remotely "deserve", from a relative who has already done a lot for you, but in a way that leaves you angry rather than grateful.