r/WritingPrompts • u/katpoker666 Moderator • 12d ago
Off Topic [OT] Fun Trope Friday: Soul-Eating Cybernetics & Body Horror!
Welcome to Fun Trope Friday, our feature that mashes up tropes and genres!
How’s it work? Glad you asked. :)
Every week we will have a new spotlight trope.
Each week, there will be a new genre assigned to write a story about the trope.
You can then either use or subvert the trope and/or genre in a 750-word max story or poem (unless otherwise specified).
To qualify for ranking, you will need to provide ONE actionable feedback. More are welcome of course!
Three winners will be selected each week based on votes, so remember to read your fellow authors’ works and DM me your votes for the top three.
Next up… IP
It’s October. The time of falling leaves, jack o’lanterns, and candy. And blood… so much blood. This month will be focusing on all things horror with maybe a treat or two to sweeten the pot. Please note this theme is only loosely applied.
"We are all our own graveyards, I believe..." — Clive Barker
Trope: Soul-Eating Cybernetics — In many popular cyberpunk settings, cybernetic implants cause "humanity loss", reducing your social traits and essentially making cyberware into a form of body horror. Too many implants may reduce you to catatonia or make you insane. If these settings also feature psychic powers or functional magic, cyberware often reduces your ability to use those as well. There is an interesting tension here between what makes us human and what transforms us. So, let’s explore that.
Genre: Body Horror — Body horror, or biological horror, is a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or a visceral experience of the human body or of another creature. In addition to common tropes used within the broader horror genre, some tropes specific to the body horror subgenre may include invasion, contagion, mutation, transformation, disease, mutilation, or other unnatural or violent distortions of the human body.
Skill / Constraint - optional: Something shorts out.
So, have at it. Lean into the trope heavily or spin it on its head. The choice is yours!
Have a great idea for a future topic to discuss or just want to give feedback? FTF is a fun feature, so it’s all about what you want—so please let me know! Please share in the comments or DM me on Discord or Reddit!
Last Week’s Winners
PLEASE remember to give feedback—this affects your ranking. PLEASE also remember to DM me your votes for the top five stories via Discord or Reddit—both katpoker666. This is a change from the top three of the past. In weeks where we get over 15 stories, we will do a top five ranking. Weeks with less than 15 stories will show only our top three winners. If you have any questions, please DM me as well.
Some fabulous stories this week and great crit at campfire and on the post! We had 18 stories, so we’re back to five winners. Congrats to:
Want to read your words aloud? Join the upcoming FTF Campfire
The next FTF campfire will be Thursday, October 8th from 6-8pm ET. It will be in the Discord Main Voice Lounge. Click on the events tab and mark ‘Interested’ to be kept up to date. No signup or prep needed and you don’t have to have written anything! So join in the fun—and shenanigans! 😊
Ground rules:
- Stories must incorporate both the trope and the genre
- Leave one story or poem between 100 and 750 words as a top-level comment unless otherwise specified. Use wordcounter.net to check your word count.
- Deadline: 11:59 PM EDT next Thursday. Please note stories submitted after the 6:00 PM EST campfire start may not be critted.
- No stories that have been written for another prompt or feature here on WP—please note after consultation with some of our delightful writers, new serials are now welcomed here
- No previously written content
- Any stories not meeting these rules will be disqualified from rankings
- Does your story not fit the Fun Trope Friday rules? You can post your story as a [PI] with your work when the FTF post is 3 days old!
- Please keep crit about the stories. Any crit deemed too distracting may be deleted. This is a time to focus on our wonderful authors.
- Vote by next Friday at 11:59 AM EDT to help your favorites rise to the top of the ranks (DM me at katpoker666 on Discord or Reddit)!
Thanks for joining in the fun!
9
u/IdyllForest 9d ago edited 7d ago
Unbearable
"Down on your knees."
"Kneel."
"...look, I know. I know. You want to live."
"So. How bad do you want to?"
My ears ring and I nearly fall over when a weight on my side is... gone.
"JESUS! Let me get out of the way first, asshole!"
"Holy shit, he just blew the guy's whole arm off!"
"Haha! Look at 'im go. He's trying to put it back on. Dumbass."
"Give me that. I want to see if it can do a leg in one shot."
"Nah. Start with his foot and work your way up. I want to see how bad he wants it..."
For a moment, just for a moment, I'd allowed myself to believe that they would actually let me live if I just wanted it enough. Even as they broke what I was, one part at a time.
And I hated myself for it. At least until I realized that was the punchline to this joke.
Stenfeld said they'd left just enough of me to salvage. I distinctly remember hearing him. "You're no use to me like this. I'll make it so that nothing and no one can ever break you again." Then I woke up on a table, screaming in a voice I didn't recognize, screaming longer than any human lung should be capable of.
Well. That's the memory, anyway. I'm just not sure how much of it belongs to me. I'm not sure how much any of this is what I'm supposed to be.
They had to replace thirty-nine percent of the body I was born with. At least that's what I was told. Think of your favorite story, your favorite book, your favorite movie. Cut forty percent of it. Damn near half, right? Now replace it with someone just guessing what parts are missing. Is it still the story you fell in love with? Because I wasn't the man she fell in love with, apparently. That's what the text said. She took our boy with her too.
I left it on read.
The damnedest thing is, I'm not entirely sure what I'm feeling right now. Or what I should feel. Whether I take this shot of whiskey or down the whole fucking bottle in one go, all I get back is millions of tiny legs crawling up and down what's supposed to be my spine, little messages flashing inside my head of elevated ethanol levels. The cigarette dangling off my synthetic lips, the acrid blue wisps wreathed around my head, nothing feels the way it should. The way it did.
Stenfeld was wrong.
There wasn't enough of me.
Huh.
Maybe nothing was left of me. Not in any way that mattered. Just scraps of tattered paper, with all these new, wrong words failing to mesh, breaking apart what once held meaning. What once held weight.
That's it. Isn't it?
It's this. This lack of weight. Of substance.
Titanium and aluminium. Ceramics and silicone.
I smash the bottle on the coffee table and run the shards up and down my arm. The glass breaks before I do.
"Malcolm, it's Stenfeld."
I get up, gripping my arm tight enough to sound warnings, and pull.
"It's been four days since you stopped taking the immunosuppressives—"
Immunosuppressives my ass.
"—you know what'll happen. Listen. Let's talk. Alright?"
Sure, Stenfeld. Hey. How's the family?
"Are Michelle and Aaron with you, Malcolm? We haven't heard—"
Catastrophic damage reports flash through my head as I begin pulling the joint apart.
It's light. It's all so fucking light.
I send the fake arm flying against the wall, where it smashes into a mirror panel. Good. I was getting tired of seeing...
...of seeing...
Reflected back to me a hundred times over in the shattered glass is why I screamed that day—what I saw in the operating room mirrors.
A dangling bundle of twitching nerves crucified upon a sensor array.
"For God's sake, say something."
It's okay, Stenfeld.
"Malcolm."
The data access spike emerging from my fist is thinly coated with tungsten-carbide. I tap it against the side of my head, then draw my arm back.
"Malcolm!"
It's just like you promised.
I'm unbreakable.
WC: 694 - Minor editing for clarity/aesthetics.