[Free Ideas] Future Wikipedia

[Kyle]

Free ideas is a topic where I (or anyone else who wants to participate) gives away free ideas I've been holding on to for future books or stories. I've realized that I'm being too precious and, as I get older, I'm forgetting some. So here they are. Enjoy them if you want or steal them for yourself.

I was going to write a novel about Future Wikipedia. A guy is a math major, who comes from a line of mathematicians. While studying an old math journal article written by his grandfather in 1950, he realizes that one of the footnotes looks weird, and kind of looks like a web address. When he puts the web address into his computer, it reveals wikipedia, but five years in the future from the day he's looking. So if he looks the next day, it will be one day later than when he looked the previous day. His fiance is on the couch when he makes this discovery, and they think it's a joke. When they check out their own descriptions- they are non-existent. However, when they check the next day, they realize that future wikipedia has changed-- because of them.

So then they experiment with it, when the lottery, play the stock market, etc. And they find that, five years in the future, they are famous enough to have wikipedia entries. The premise of the bit is this: whenever they act on information they gain from future wikipedia, they change the future, and thus change future wikipedia the next day. So they are constantly in a struggle to form the future through slight "butterfly wing" movements today.

But the real story is the disintegration of the love between the woman and the man. How their weird exercises of power and wealth destroy their humanity. In the end, he ends up a Howard Hughes-type weirdo who, having discovered serial killers five years in the future, makes daily calls to them to drive them crazy and keep them from killing more people. She ends up being a successful author, but no longer has inspiration to write because she refuses to actually experience anything.

They rediscovery their love for each other, as crippled and damaged as they are. They decide to make future wikipedia known to the public-- which makes it worthless because people keep posting to it constantly and it is completely unreliable and random.

FIN.

[Elle]

When I first started reading this and saw the word Wikipedia I thought it was going to be something uninteresting to me. And then the more I kept reading it the more I liked it and the more I liked it and now I think it is totally awesome.