Saturday, January 7, 2012

Story Idea - Cell Phone Attackers (or Married to the Mob)

This is more in the Jaws meets Sixth Sense genre. The story starts with a lot of mischief going on in people with their mobiles playing a lot of mischief. SMSs, calls, MMS clips going from the wrong person to the wrong persons all over the place and sending the world into a tizzy. The leaders of nations find themselves caught in compromising talks, quotes and acts and there is a threat of a global war with all this going on. At every level there is disharmony, banking getting busted, economies going crashing, private info out in public space, discontent as marriages are breaking up, business alliances busting up, education going topsy turvy.

Puzzled by the fact that almost everyone has been affected a mobile phone software expert (our hero) starts wondering why the mobiles could suddenly go so awry. He comes up with the answer soon enough, the mobile space has been taken over by aliens and they are using the mobiles to start controlling us. They are using mobiles as a drug and getting us addicted to them so much that we cannot live our lives without them, and once they have captured almost everyone in their net, they plan to use the mobiles to zap us out of existence. Humans versus mobiles, the race begins. How can we save ourselves? Or rather as most people of this generation would be more worried about this question - how can we save our mobiles? From identifying races that have been entirely untouched by mobiles, to understanding the depth to which we have committed our lives to mobiles, the story can keep us teetering on the edge of world war, a humans versus aliens story, a humans versus technology story and finally, a human understanding of overdependence on gadgets that seem to take over our lives.

I can think of many wonderful ways in which my mobile or anyone's mobile can play mischief if it starts thinking diabolically. I can think of many apps as well that will make this more interesting. Then the mobile can actually cause physical harm later on - imagine it slapping the user, of tweaking the ear, or making screechy sounds. Juicy stuff for someone like me who is rather tech challenged and who looks at mobiles as if they are little monsters anyway. But it would be great if it could get some of these kids who are stuck on their mobile phones all the time off it for a while, just as Jaws kept many of us away from water those days.

PS. Got a better idea (this is added as an afterthought). What if all the networks and all get corrupted and go haywire, before just slamming shut. We won't remember a single number, most names, have no one to sms, call. I mean that mobile could just drive you nuts by sending wrong messages, giving missed calls, redirecting calls. Man, it could be a scary movie.

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