Story thoughts?

[pink_silk_glove]

My mind doesn’t go to the wealthy eccentric’s dilemma but they damsels he’s trapped with him. Imagine the drama between the ladies duped into this bunker as they also unravel in various ways wondering if this was all futile and the world is perfectly fine. The possibilities are endless. Do they bond together to fight the man? Are there factions for and against escape?

Jealousies? Cat fights?

 

[8letters]

My thoughts:
#1 - I think the world would have to be very close to nuclear war or some other similar disaster for Schrodinger to convince the women to join him in the bunker
#2 - I wouldn't have Schrodinger not build a way to keep in touch with the outside world. I'd have him have an internet connection that he's using to keep a close eye on the world. And then it suddenly goes out. Did WWIII happen, so there's no more internet? Or did some piece of his internet connection suddenly break and the outside world is fine?
#3 - Once Schrodinger loses his internet connection, he's just an eccentric man with several women. He no longer has wealth and power. Control is now determined by the most physically powerful team. The women could cut him off sexually. The women could make him clean the flat in order to earn his meals
#4 - Once Schrodinger loses his internet connection, the only way to restore his power is to open the portal. He's the only one who knows how to open it. But that could lead to his and all his women's death

 

[NoTalentHack]

MB, I guess that’s what I was trying to say. Is there a difference? It’s like Zhuangzi recounting that he dreamt he was a butterfly. “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man."

In any case, he has built the perfect refuge but it’s increasingly feeling like a trap from which he wants to escape. Which is reality?

You could also approach it from the perspective of the Cave. One of the girls sees how much he’s spiraling, and she breaks the seal. Armageddon never came, and she returns to the bunker to try to “save” everyone.

 

[StopT]

This is not Schrödinger's box, but Sartre's enclosed room where the characters are already dead.

While some would sell their mother for a $50 prize, he actually declined the Nobel Prize. His sexual depravity would have fit well here, though.

 

[HectorBidon]

Thoughts?

In one of his deeper thinking moments, Mr. S. realizes that he and his playmates may be the last surviving specimens of the human race. Unfortunately, he had had himself snipped years ago, so they cannot continue the species.

He has no idea how extensive the damage outside may have been, but he suspects that thermonuclear fire will not have been as forgiving to the server farms of today as palace fires were to the cuneiform tablets of antiquity. This means that his well-protected little bunker will likely prove to be an important artifact for future xeno-archeologists trying to reconstruct the history of intelligent life on the planet. He feels the heavy weight on his shoulders of being the final custodian of the cultural heritage of his race.

He takes stock of the bunker's cultural inventory. Not a single book. A modest assortment of DVDs: thrillers and romcoms mostly, a bit of porn. They will give the future Alpha Centauri Joneses at least a glimpse of what it was like to be human. But he feels compelled to provide a more complete picture. He composes a sweeping monograph outlining the important arcs of human history and philosophical thought, at least to the best of his recollection. But then his computer crashes and he can't get it working again.

He hadn't really thought it through when he first launched the project, but he and his playmates now face spending the rest of their lives—getting old, getting infirm, dying—confined together in this little bunker. He takes it as his duty to chronicle the last years of the last remnant of the human race, writing sparingly on the bunker walls with the one pen he was able to find.

Not too erotic, not too superpositional, not too original perhaps, but thoughts nevertheless.

 

[countdowntolov3]

For high concept stuff like this I think that, as a reader, I want the sexy bits to integrate with the story. Your outline doesn't make it clear how they will.

I think @SimonDoom and @onehitwanda laid out an idea, which is that the decision to open the door could be a more interesting one if it's one of the women making it. Following on the idea that the man's tastes get more wild as time goes on, maybe one of the girls gets fed up with the increasing perversions and opens the door. Or the opposite direction, the girl(s) could decide they don't want him to open the door, even as it gnaws at him to find out, and so they are using their wiles to distract him.

 

[Duleigh]

I don’t normally ask for help developing a tale, but I’m unsure which way to go with this, so comments would be welcomed.

Working title: Schrödinger’s Flat

We are, I suspect, all familiar with the thought experiment proposed by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in which a cat is placed in a box with an atomic clock which will eventually but unpredictably open a vial of poison, killing the cat. His point was that, given that one cannot actually see into the box at any time, the cat is in one sense both alive and dead at the same time.

So, an eccentric billionaire, utterly by coincidence named Schrödinger, is terrified by the possibility of the world coming to an end, perhaps by nuclear war, perhaps by plague. In any case, he (and this would work about as well if the character was female) builds a deep, well-protected, perfectly camouflaged bunker, stocked with food and booze and fine wines - every luxury one might conceive. He then locks himself inside with a staff of lovely young women and throws himself into a life of desperate end-of-the-world hedonism.

The problem slowly becomes apparent. He has been so convinced that The End was inevitable and so distraught by the thought, that he deliberately omitted any means of finding out what’s happening. (I did say he was eccentric, yes?)

He becomes increasingly driven to find out, but lacking both raven and dove, has no way of finding out, save the irrevocable step of opening The Portal (or some term equally pompous), which will of course expose him to… what? He’s in a private paradise, but is becoming frantic to escape from Eden to, quite possibly, Armageddon.

So, I see this primarily as a psychodrama, with the reader gradually watching Mr. X unravel, but it offers lots of scope for unnecessary and gratuitous sexuality. The point is, despite everything he could possibly want, is he (cue Twilight Zone theme) alive or dead?

Thoughts?

I always thought that Schrödinger’s Cat was nonsense.

Just because YOU can't see the cat has no basis on what or what is not going on with the cat. YOU are not important to the experiment. Because you cannot see into the box at anytime merely means that the cat isn't seen. Is it alive? Who cares? Clearly not you because if you liked the cat you wouldn't have put it in the box in the first place.

If a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound? If you're not in the forest, does it matter? Will falling trees force you to wear hearing protection in the woods?

Will the high cost of atomic clocks force you to find a different way to get rid of unwanted cats?

Philosophy professors lived in fear of me signing up for their course.

 

[countdowntolov3]

I always thought that Schrödinger’s Cat was nonsense.

I think you might be missing that it is a meditation on quantum mechanics. It's not an idle philosophical question.

 

[samhasstories]

I always thought that Schrödinger’s Cat was nonsense.

Just because YOU can't see the cat has no basis on what or what is not going on with the cat. YOU are not important to the experiment. Because you cannot see into the box at anytime merely means that the cat isn't seen. Is it alive? Who cares? Clearly not you because if you liked the cat you wouldn't have put it in the box in the first place.

If a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound? If you're not in the forest, does it matter? Will falling trees force you to wear hearing protection in the woods?

Will the high cost of atomic clocks force you to find a different way to get rid of unwanted cats?

Philosophy professors lived in fear of me signing up for their course.

I think people often borrow Schrodinger's Cat for musings on ignorance, i.e. if something hasn't yet been revealed to me does it actually exist? But its purpose was to illustrate quantum superposition, the measurable phenomenon where a quantum particle seems to have multiple states at the same time until it is observed, when it 'instantiates' into just one - i.e. going from behaving like a wave to behaving like a particle*.

Back to OP, I think it's a great idea, and I will try not to steal it.

* (so I understand it, though I am not a physicist, nor am I particularly smart)

 

[Lovecraft_Lore]

I feel bad for that guy who got killed by the door of the missle silo in Nebraska a few years back. But that is how I would end it. The world is fine but as he steps out the door closes and he is crushed.

The old gypsy woman was right.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I think you might be missing that it is a meditation on quantum mechanics. It's not an idle philosophical question.

Duleigh is just an order of magnitude smarter than all of us. It's okay, we can all continue to have fun in our foolish blissful ignorance.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

For high concept stuff like this I think that, as a reader, I want the sexy bits to integrate with the story. Your outline doesn't make it clear how they will.

He probably recruited his ladies through some sort of doomsday cult. At first, the sex is cathartic, but then it slowly becomes the wonderful distraction from the boredom and insanity. I would think that some handle the solitude and confinement better than others.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I think people often borrow Schrodinger's Cat for musings on ignorance, i.e. if something hasn't yet been revealed to me does it actually exist? But its purpose was to illustrate quantum superposition, the measurable phenomenon where a quantum particle seems to have multiple states at the same time until it is observed, when it 'instantiates' into just one - i.e. going from behaving like a wave to behaving like a particle*.

Quite so, but the uncertainty is central and looking will in a sense cause a shift in reality, so there is a parallel to some degree.

Besides, I simply couldn’t resist ‘Schrödinger’s Flat’. My bad.

 

[MajorRewrite]

The rich guy seems like a “prepper” idiot, and the character is unsympathetic to me.

It’d be more appealing if the rich guy was in fact a bumbling, neurotic dope and the story was a comedy poking fun at prepper twats.

Maybe after much nervous debate he opens the hatch and finds … everything is just fine. A couple of kids approach and ask dubiously, “Do you live in that thing?” “Um, yes.” “Weird.”

Probably I’m the wrong audience for your story.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Ultimately, the outside world has both ended and not ended, and the act of opening the door is the filter that selects for the final state of the many Superpositions.

I'd have one of the girls do it with with a "Oh for fuck sakes, if you won't do it then I will." you could name her Pandora.

That's pretty much where my mind was going. Play up his solipsism, show him obsessing on the idea that the world only exists if Mr. Schrodinger perceives it, and then reveal that actually the women who he's just been viewing as fuckable NPCs are observers too and have been watching the outside world for months.

(What, he thought none of them had anything they cared about outside the bunker?)

For bonus points: he's the unwitting subject of a Truman Show level hoax. Once he starts to wonder about the outside world, the women show him a camera feed of a howling nuclear wasteland, and he settles back into his bunker. As soon as he's out of the room they go back to happy video calls with their families, in a non-apocalyptic world that's doing so much better with all the survivalist billionaires sequestered in bunkers where they can't hurt anybody.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I think people often borrow Schrodinger's Cat for musings on ignorance, i.e. if something hasn't yet been revealed to me does it actually exist? But its purpose was to illustrate quantum superposition, the measurable phenomenon where a quantum particle seems to have multiple states at the same time until it is observed, when it 'instantiates' into just one - i.e. going from behaving like a wave to behaving like a particle*.

Yeah, it's been turned into a science-y version of "if a tree falls in a forest and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound?" but Schrödinger was referring to real, observable Weird Physics Shit.

Speaking of which, has anybody done a Literotica take on the double-slit experiment?

 

[VallesMarineris]

Thoughts?

I imagined a tech billionaire locking himself in the bunker and setting up his own quantum computer that is his sole connection to the outside world, and on which he is completely dependent for finding out if and when it’s okay to go back out.

But his harem does double duty. Besides keeping him well-entertained, well-fed, and well-fucked, they also maintain the bunker, including the quantum device. Through it they take control of his multi-billion-dollar company without his knowledge and use it to make a killing in various markets. He keeps asking the computer if it’s time to leave, but it keeps giving him equivocal answers, never saying one way or another what it’s like outside. The women want to maintain control.

Then one day the women all disappear. They’ve made enough money that they can all be billionaires themselves.

He ends up breaking out of the bunker because he can’t run it himself, and discovers that he's penniless. They’ve also sold his name, which was part of the brand of his company, so he no longer has an identity. He’s stuck between the two worlds.

The billionaire shouldn’t be the main character. He’s not likable or heroic enough. So one of the women should be the MC. Might work as a femdom.

Oh, nothing happens in the outside world, by the way. It keeps running the same as before he went into the bunker. He did it all to himself. Maybe the final scene happens years later, and the MC, now a world-famous dominatrix, is slumming in some sleazy BDSM brothel and finds the former billionaire working there, a professional sub.

 

[onehitwanda]

For bonus points: he's the unwitting subject of a Truman Show level hoax. Once he starts to wonder about the outside world, the women show him a camera feed of a howling nuclear wasteland, and he settles back into his bunker. As soon as he's out of the room they go back to happy video calls with their families, in a non-apocalyptic world that's doing so much better with all the survivalist billionaires sequestered in bunkers where they can't hurt anybody.

I love this.

 

[samhasstories]

Quite so, but the uncertainty is central and looking will in as sense cause a shift in reality, so there is a parallel to some degree.

Besides, I simply couldn’t resist ‘Schrödinger’s Flat’. My bad.

Absolutely. I was just responding to someone arguing with science. For the purposes of your story I think it works well, whether or not Schrödinger himself would have agreed.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

VM - I really like that spin. Much to think on. Thanks