One of the myths about the virus behind the global pandemic is that it was produced by a scientist and escaped from a lab in Wuhan. This has turned out to be false.

The story question: what if it was created by humans, and did escape from a lab?

There are multiple ways a story with this premise could unfold. The easiest, and most obvious, would be a survival story. Pick a handful of average Joes and Jills, make them fend for themselves, and watch what happens. A good zombie story would be the obvious way to go, but a debilitating respiratory sickness might hit closer to home and sell more copies.

This could also be a 24 style thriller. The main character gets called out of retirement on a farm in the English countryside and has to save his country from the slow spread of the disease. An older guy, one who gets the job done despite stepping on a few toes. The first book in the series could be him saving a person or a few people, the second he saves his country, the third he saves the world from a mutated strain.

The last option for a series wouldn’t focus on the virus escaping from the lab as much as the hospital workers on the ground. A classic medical drama series, where the books deal with waves of the infected. The main character could discover a certain sickness has provided a level of immunity, like cowpox and smallpox. Over the course of the series they have to fight for the treatment to go mainstream, like Erin Brokovich, and the ultimate lesson from the discovery is the power nature has to cure what man has created.

Going back to the news story, there are two forms of evidence pointing to the Coronavirus’s natural development. First, the mutations found in the new virus doesn't bind well to human cells, according to computer simulations. So any scientists designing the new virus wouldn't have used this structure.

The second evidence comes from the similarity of the current outbreak virus with known viruses that affect pangolins and bats. 

Right now, there is the possibility that the virus came from animals with its current ability to spread quickly among humans. If so the virus would exist in the animal population in its current form and could cause future hotspots of outbreaks.

BUT, if the virus developed its ability to spread between humans after infecting the first human, the form in the animals would be separate from the one inside humans. There would be less risk of another spontaneous outbreak but the ability to transfer between humans would be more effective.

It works by one person or company owning a fleet of uber-ready cars which they allow drivers access to in exchange for a fee, either flat or as a percentage of their earnings.

What if this type of industry popped up for other services? With so many gig workers in the economy, would provide access to a car be enough of a draw to force delivery drivers to work for lower rates?

If this was applied to houses, could someone who cleans Airbnb rentals exchange their cleaning services for a place to sleep each night?

This seems like a race to the bottom, with drivers getting the worst deal.

There could be a story about a driver, lowest on the totem pole, who finds himself caught up in a bank robbery or other criminal activity. They prove their worth once, then are hired again, to do the same job. 

Over time, this getaway driver could start up his own fleet of getaway drivers, all devoted to criminal activity. Special access and all. 

The conflict could come from multiple places. A hotshot driver, law enforcement, the criminals themselves. Each of these could be fodder for a new book in a series.

Or safehouses. The person called in to clean, in exchange for a place to stay, becomes an expert at cleaning up after murders. Over time, they begin creating their own service specifically devoted to cleaning up after murders. 

A good source of conflict for both of these would be the original fleet owners, who feel their turf is being infringed upon.

An interesting twist in all of it could be if the same high-ranking gangster is in charge of both services, the legitimate fleet and the criminal one, and has watched the two battle it out for supremacy all along.

Access to vehicles in exchange for a cut of earnings already happens. Through something called a fleet partner program, Uber drivers are finding themselves taken advantage of, facing harsher conditions than typically associated with the gig drivers.

Most drivers do this because they don’t have access to Uber-worthy vehicles. So they work the hours dictated by the fleet partner, for the agreed-upon rates, and have access to the vehicle the rest of the time. It’s a way to work out a lease, instead of taking a lease beforehand then making money.

It’s not just basic Uber, there are fleets of black cars as well.

The owners of the car benefit because the cars are being used to generate income instead of sitting in a lot.

This news story has all the makings for a medical thriller. Suppose there’s a doctor who comes up with this treatment, it could be HIV in the story or some other invented disease, but a big pharmaceutical company tries to stop the doctor from releasing his work because they make money off of their own drugs to manage the symptoms.

This could be a lot of money, and the big pharma doesn’t want to lose on this source of revenue.

The stakes could increase throughout the story, going from simple legal battles to physical damage to the lab, and it could end with the doctor’s life being put at risk.

This could also be a series. Once this doctor becomes known for coming out on top against large corporations, other doctors come to him for help to get their own drugs out to the rest of the world at large.

Another book in the series could be another one of his own discoveries, where he’s put into the same situation against a more powerful opponent, maybe the government of his own country.

One of his motivations for curing the diseases could be that his own family member suffers from the illness.

A final book could have him risk his life to go against a government that wants to stop a cure, developed by another country, from getting out, and he sacrifices himself for the greater good. Maybe he dies, or maybe he gets thrown in jail, where he has to cure another outbreak behind bars. OR the government holding him gets him back out to solve a pandemic, believing in his reputation for developing cures.

The roots of this story come straight from recent headlines: A London man was cured of HIV after receiving an experimental stem cell transplant.

Scientists have assumed the absence of the virus for thirty months means the patient has been cured.

The patient underwent a bone marrow transplant to help treat his blood cancer. The donor was known to have a mutation that made them resistant to HIV and the hope was that the transplant would allow the recipient to also develop resistance for themselves. The trouble was that the patient already had HIV so they weren’t sure if the resistance would cure him. It did. Now scientists are looking at the experimental procedure to see if anything can be learned which would cure HIV for good.

The other two men who are supposed to run against Trump to be president from 2020-2024 are both also over seventy.

What if they all contracted the disease? What would the election look like if the three men who are supposed to run don’t make it to the election?

The two leading parties would have to scramble for candidates. There would be no time for the massive campaigns associated with US politics.

Writing this story would take a good bit of research on my part. Right now I don’t know enough about the election process to write this one but it would be interesting.

If the disease continued to spread, the new president would have a massive set of challenges ahead of them.

Does the country elect one of the youngest presidents ever, in hopes their youth keeps them alive?

Obama is a youthful 58. Does he come back with the country’s blessing?

There are many routes this story could take, but a political thriller, told from the point of a nobody, would be my go-to. Similar to House of Cards and how the main character rose through the ranks, gaining power over time, each book could outline how the main character climbed one rung of the ladder.

But I wouldn’t choose the politician who leads the country. It would be someone small, like the event coordinator for a local official, who helps their candidate rise through the ranks of the power vacuum left when those above the candidate left. For example, say the politician the hero of the story works for becomes governor when the governor becomes president. Then, in the second book, they get pegged to be the next vice president. In the third, the politician could become president, and all the while the story is about this young person thrust into a position of power and responsibility in a condensed timeframe because of the elimination of those at the top.

It would be fun to write, and a lot of former presidential biographies could be used to find the situations that led to this type of advancement.

This story idea came after reports the US president was in contact with two senators who have had contact with known victims of the coronavirus. The two senators are now in self-quarantine.

Coronavirus has increased lethality as the infected individual gets older. People over sixty are especially at risk. 

The problem? President Trump is over seventy.

This one is pretty easy to make into a story.

What if they were left at sea while the rest of the country dealt with an outbreak? Who would emerge as a leader? What would they do for food?

This could be lord of the flies on a cruise ship. 

Create similar characters and have them face challenges exclusive to a ship at sea.

Of course, those with the virus would have to be dealt with. In the beginning, there could be government aid. Then, once the government cut off support from the ship because of the requirements by its own citizens, the fate of those people would have to be dealt with. 

One faction could choose to leave them to their fate or even remove them from the population to save resources.

The other faction could decide to try and save them, succumbing to the disease themselves. 

The cruise ship could be large enough to allow for a complete separation of the two populations.

The theme could be the role community plays in any society.

Sequels could see the ship traveling the seas, stopping at islands to set up new living spaces, and the results of coming into contact with the island’s inhabitants.

Then, they could take to the seas once more like pirates, surviving on the supplies of other ships. The islands could provide new, healthy individuals. Or people with immunity.

Since kids aren’t as susceptible to the disease, this could be a story world where all the world’s elderly are eliminated, leaving kids to take up the responsibilities now required by young adults. The workforce would get younger, and they would be responsible for taking care of the sick because they aren’t as easily affected.

In fact, this could be the reason the faction on the first ship survived: they took all the children, not seeing them as resource drains, and used them to help provide healthcare.

The beginning of this story already happened because of the coronavirus spreading throughout the world. A ship outside the U.S. was placed under quarantine by U.S. officials and forced to stay at sea for six extra days. The order came after numerous people were found to be infected with the coronavirus. 

The quarantine ended when the ship was allowed to dock in Oakland. The passengers are required to be kept under federal quarantine for another two weeks.

There were reports of food shortages, with one passenger saying they have to “fight for rotten food.”

The new technology will work like Miles Morales’s spider web in the Spiderverse movie, once it’s developed enough to be used by scientists.

What would the world look like if this technology became popular?

If hovercrafts are ever created, they could be parked on the sides of buildings.

On a simple level, mounting pictures at home would be a breeze.

Climbing the sides of buildings could become the norm. 

Free-floating staircases could spiral the interiors of buildings.

Now, where does the story come in?

Well, in a nutshell, NASA’s copy works by using millions of ultrathin hairs to create more surface area which attaches to any surface. If there’s an entire society built upon this technology, what if there was a way to makes the hairs vibrate, causing their stickiness to disappear? It would be a noise bomb. If the gecko technology is common enough, all of society could be held at ransom. 

It would be really interesting if a young man found out he had the ability to vibrate the adhesive properties away. Like a mutant. Then the story could deal with his own trouble coming to terms with the power. Like a reverse Spider-man.

The copying of nature to produce new technology isn’t fiction. NASA scientists have created the gecko gripper because gecko feet are known for their extreme stickiness, allowing the lizard to traverse walls in any orientation. So far, the device has been able to lift up to fourteen pounds. Not only is it strong, but it’s also resistant to radiation, giving hope it could be used on spacewalks in the future.

What would happen if this type of pivot occurred in response to an even greater global threat? A common situation in science fiction is a first contact, the arrival of aliens. If extraterrestrials were to appear, threatening the entire planet, what other factories would be able to change what they manufacture?

An easy transition would be for car factories to switch to satellite and rocket technology. Another would be for pharmaceutical manufacturing plants to exclusively make drugs and compounds related to space travel.

An interesting story would be to come up with a small problem that symbolizes a larger issue faced by humanity. Think of a disease where everyone is infected with a disease that makes them allergic to meat (this is actually a possibility. Alpha-gal syndrome is transmitted by a tick and makes humans allergic to red meat). Would pharma companies change their trajectory to solve the problem? And if so, would the production of meat alternatives hit the level required to make companies consider changing their production?

An interesting way to approach this would be to wonder what would happen if people began hoarding a household well, like batteries. Why would they do this? Maybe there is a supply chain issue, where the country that has a rare metal goes to war and makes it impossible to continue production. How many companies would switch their focus to create new technology to store energy?

My first thought would be to make this scenario a standalone story, one about an older couple who can’t fight get the supplies they need and eventually succumb to the disease in each other’s arms.

If this was going to play out in a series, it could be a survival story where people try and get into jail in order to stay alive. On the outside it’s hard, if not impossible, to get the required supplies but the government’s responsibility to make sure the prisoner serves their sentence could present some interesting possibilities. Book one is in the prison, book two is breaking out of the prison, book three is finding and protecting a safe haven from those infected.

The pivot of one factory to produce another product is happening in light of the worldwide coronavirus outbreak. The Japanese company Sharp, known for its LCD televisions, will transition one of their manufacturing plants to produce facemasks instead of electronics.

The factory is able to switch its output because the cleanliness required for making LCD screens is comparable to the conditions necessary for sterile facemasks. The change comes as the world is scrambling for supplies in preparation for the outbreak. Sterile masks, gloves, and other common household items have been flying off store shelves as the threat of the virus spreads across the globe.

This got me thinking: what would a future look like if saltwater could be utilized by all crops? Corn, rice, vegetables… the world’s population would have access to much more quality nutrition, allowing more humans to thrive. When more humans thrive, there are more people to contribute to society and try their hand at solving larger problems, like global warming. The increased population density of healthy humans would lead to faster transmission of quality ideas, and the effect would ratchet up. Increased population density is why cities are hotbeds for innovation. 

With better-growing crops, fewer people would be living as subsistence farmers, and there would be an increase in the number and size of cities.

How could this fit into a story? Maybe, when there is enough food for people, they grow more livestock for meat. This source of meat is taken for granted until a plague begins wiping out pigs and cattle, similar to what happened in Asia with the African Swine Fever. 

The story of the Meat Wars would begin locally, and in the third world, countries first helped by the increase in crop production, eventually making their way to the United States.

It would create a society where immigrants were feared. The story could follow a small town in the Bible Belt who has to deal with an outbreak, and how they turn on each other. 

The main character is able to solve the conflict, then goes on the road to another town, another city, fixing/dealing with similar situations all over the country.

A recently published article has addressed how rice can be grown in saltwater in the first place.

For centuries, farmers have been cross-breeding successful crops, replanting the most robust after their harvest. Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are made by using science to speed up the process.

Instead of waiting generations after generations to come up with a plant with the desirable trait, scientists go inside the plant’s genome and create the desired change. This is how scientists would be able to create rice that grows in saltwater.

Growing rice takes a lot of fresh water, and if it can be tweaked to grow in saltwater there would be a much smaller barrier for farmers to enter into growing the crop.

This could have massive implications for those in poverty, allowing more rice to grow in less-than-ideal conditions. If regions typically starved for resources, like third world countries near the equator, were able to vastly increase their food production, they could spend resources on other services for their populations, like education and infrastructure.

What if scientists were able to study the parasite which doesn’t breathe at all and use their findings to tweak the human genome to require less, or no, oxygen? Humans could then survive underwater, or in space, without oxygen or requiring much less.

The technology to edit DNA already exists, and it isn’t a large jump to alter the mitochondrial DNA that affects respiration. There are numerous ethical questions for this to be anything other than a distant-future story, or alternate reality, but there could be multiple uses for humans with these edits.

This could provide the basis for people who live underwater, calling upon legends of Atlantis.

The presence of cloud cities isn't out of the question, though how a city could be suspended in the air would have to be addressed. Magnetism, low orbit might be the answer for this.

Or, humans could live deep underground, needing less fresh air to survive. 

An interesting series of novels could be if these three populations, in caves, water, and the sky, already existed and went to war with each other over a scarce resource.

Alternatively, there could be a thriller where the main character is able to escape into the mountains, using their maintained stamina to gain an advantage over their pursuers. It would be especially satisfying if the character had an unknown past, an orphan, and found out they were in fact from people who came from high elevations.

There are some recently published articles which make these scenarios no so unlikely

A parasite that is known for infecting fish, Henneguya salminicola, doesn’t need to breathe at all. Their existence is spent underwater so there would be little chance for them to use oxygen at all. When scientists studied their DNA, they were shocked to discover that not only do they not breathe, there is no trace of the genes used for respiration.

This is the first, and only, known animal to be missing these genes.

These genes are found in mitochondrial DNA inside all animal cells (other than the parasite). Uniquely, this parasite doesn’t have any mitochondrial DNA at all. 

The scientists guess that the parasite evolved without mitochondrial DNA so they could reproduce faster and infect more hosts.

Another animal, the Himalayan wolf, has evolved to require less oxygen than nearby gray wolf populations. Their genes are responsible for the Himalayan wolf’s stronger heart and increased oxygen utilization.

Similar genes are found in Tibetan people who call the higher altitudes home.