falseficus:
everybody’s always on writing prompts like “what if there was a world where everyone had a timer ticking down to their death… but you met someone whose timer said infinity!” or “what if everyone had their cause of death tattooed across their forehead… but you met someone whose forehead said THE CREATURE!” Enough -
enough. stop with the shock value. there is no need to insert THE CREATURE; the benign concept of such a world is horrifying enough. not even in urgency, but just in banal, everyday interaction. imagine you meet someone and their timer says two years. not tomorrow, not urgently soon, but two years. enough to do quite a lot. they could fall in love in that time - could they get engaged? have a baby? you might otherwise get to know them, befriend them, but perhaps you opt not to, make a conscious choice not to invest in your own grief. what balancing act would every individual person have to participate in - I have ten years, is that long enough to be a good mother to children? is that long enough to secure a caretaker for my own mother? my wife will die a few months before me. my newborn’s timer reads nineteen years.
and cause of death. you interview for a job and emblazoned across the healthy, smiling face of the HR lady is MALNUTRITION. your country is prospering, safe, but every person you meet on the street from the babies to the old women read BOMB. BOMB. what kind of havoc would fate wreak on the world? what about the loss of privacy? how would that shape our notions of hope? idk man I think a lot of those ancient poems were right, and the fates are monsters. I’m interested by the framing of these ideas as trite horror tales when the premises themselves are so much more disturbing if simply taken to their logical ends
This is pretty much the plot of the numbers saga, but on a worldwide scale instead of one person.

This is what I love so much about the Machine of Death story collections.

They’re all based around the premise of a world where people know how they’re going to die, but almost all the stories focus on how people live with that knowledge.

Like: There’s a story about kids at school splitting up into cliques over their predicted cause-of-death. There’s a story about a couple who are trying to conceive, and the prenatal death-test keeps coming up “abortion” and if they ignore it, it still ends in a spontaneous abortion (miscarriage). There’s a story about an insurance salesman who keeps failing at his job because 1. everyone already knows how they’ll die and 2. he is so utterly bored with his life that he can’t stop telling everyone he meets how exciting his death is gonna be.

There are the wild apocalyptic scenarios too, but even those have a fascinating backdrop of how did this very premise change everyday life?