SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #27 — COSMIC HORROR
(× Chaos or Virtual Reality or Virus)

TITLE:  Welcome to the Disease

PREMISE:  In da Future, we are all jacked in, on that virtual reality tip (Virtual Reality).  It’s 100% secure, like, internet security is no longer an issue for some reason.  Come inside, we’ve got a paradise to help you forget your incipient decrepitude.  Enjoy the pleasuredomes.

But how was this achieved?  The quantum woo is real.  Quantum computers managed to access the platonic realm of Forms, the for-real real, to which all of our teacups and pink flamingos and biological existences are pale imitations.  But humans were not meant to intrude into that heady air, representing an incursion of entropy (Chaos) into that previously inviolate realm of perfection.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The condition is spread by some unknown means, like The Ring (Virus), but everybody is racing to figure out what the rules are.  When you’ve caught it, some Joel Cairo-looking emeff appears to you and says, “Welcome to the Disease” (roll credits), and then your VR experience is corrupted.  You behold what it looks like when perfect order meets perfect chaos (Cosmic Horror), and like, lose all your sanity points or something.

–