I thought Caroljane and Michael had some interesting  brainstorm results, laid out below. I also had some storms of creativity ... which I will add once I finish furiously scribbling notes on a break by the river. We have secretly kept everything green behind our fencing, despite the water-restrictions. I hate when Israel steals our clouds all summer.

My basic notion is weather weapons, weapons of war, that is what the protagonists come to be up against, discovering and destroying the military-industrial-scientific projects that have been used to manipulate weather events in aid of endless war. 

The thing is, it is a Deep kind of thing that our heroes have to get at. My favourite character-in-mind so far is a refugee from an intelligence agency. He is justifiably paranoid about his design of a master database. He knows too much, courtesy of his eidetic memory.  But which of his fears of rogue action are true?  Is he really just one of thousands on The List, the Kill the Designers list?

In my flight of fancy we would get to fabulous settings, some of them mirroring or paying homage to Atlas Shrugged. Glaciers, underground CERN-style secret facilities. Low earth-orbit nuclear 'climate helper' satellites, that thousand screen command room deep underground. The 'database cities' of the INTEL surveilance future. On supersonic 'chemtrail' secret weapons.

I'd also keep the political shenanigans sort of in your face but slightly out of focus, save that just as in Atlas Shrugged we are in a kind of alternate era where implausible events have already taken place.  One of the questions the protagonists learn to ask is, "Does the President Know?"  

In my characters I want a 'rescue team slash commando force' to coalesce so I am looking to ex-military intelligence people, disparate people from a disbanded training unit, who have made the transition out of the forces for successful contract or independent careers. I want them to be bonded somehow conceptually, as a Protect Whistleblowers and Defectors unit, in the end. As if they all swore an oath and the oath comes in handy. Meaning the team our hero assembles or acquires should have a point of identity in common, to make the whole shelf of sinister secrecy and secret agent of technology stuff plausible.

I need a bad-ass name for the Giant Computer Cloud that eats snow and steals clouds from nations and regions, thus 'false-flagging' weather manipulation events that may be possible in the next thirty-odd years. If Rand could have a free-energy motor, then we and the Frankensteins of CERN-7 can have gravity-enhancers, dark-matter sinks and sleeves and other theoretical devices almost ready to go. This on top of a semi-secret Space Programme where local weather is enhanced, altered, made wet or dry or whatever to punish Mexico.

Somehow we got to stick the Vatican and on-three-continent catacombs in there. I want to avoid the nightmare pace of State of Fear, by having characters sleep and eat and so on. Not too much, just enough so that they don't seem freaky.

So, plausible or wildly not -- Iranians can't get used to Israel-CERN-rogues-hidden-hands stealing their snow and clouds.  Things is gonna blow up if we don't stop the sinister secret organization from carrying out its plans.

And Caroljane gets to write all the terse sex scenes.

On 7/3/2018 at 11:14 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

On 7/3/2018 at 2:00 PM, caroljane said:

Want to collaborate? I can't plot worth a damn...

Carol,

Not a bad idea.

Imagine.

The story can be a thriller about a protagonist, let's call him Caysin Skylo, who works for a wind power company--an idealist in the progressive mold. One day Caysin inadvertently overhears a cartel of globalists (the details of which can be worked out later) discussing their plans to scam the world with a carbon credit scheme. But worse, he overhears them laughing about the future suicide of an eminent scientist who opposes manmade climate change and is in the way of their evil plans. As there are some very famous people in the middle of this cartel meeting, Caysin, conflicted and disillusioned, believes them.

So off he goes to warn the scientist before he can be "suicided." Except he arrives too late and witnesses the murder of the scientist. The hired thugs are dressing it up to look like a suicide. Caysin stumbles across a lady secretly witnessing the same crime and their accident causes the thugs to botch the suicide staging. This is because the scientist has been meeting with several other famous scientists who oppose manmade global warming and they emerge to see what the fuss is all about. They discover the dead body of their colleague. The thugs take off. But one of the thugs panics, returns and kills all the scientists. He tries to kill Caysin and the lady, but they escape.

The lady, let's call her Harper Hale, will turn out to be a private investigator for some small oil fields in Texas and Caysin's future love interest. Maybe she's even the daughter of the owner (Hale and Shale Corporation  ). She's trying to build a case against the cartel, but Caysin, ever the idealist, barges in where several of the globalists are, confronts them and appeals to their sense of ideals that he has heard them preach for decades. He makes a very moving speech about saving the planet to them. They go along with him pretending to be friendly, but when he isn't looking, they try to kill him. Harper, who has been secretly following him (cussing to herself at his bullheadedness) saves him, but now the chase is on. The cartel people are after him and after this lady who, to them, appeared out of nowhere.

The cartel frames the two for the murder of the group of scientists, so, in addition to the bad guys chasing them, law enforcement the world over is after them. The stakes keep getting steeper and surprising twists and turns keep unfolding as the chase goes through its ups and downs--including the introduction of some very colorful characters. There are some gruesome deaths, explosions, gun fights, and so on. Maybe there is an inside friend in a law enforcement agency they can communicate with who helps them a bit and believes them, but who is limited by the law and the regulations of the agency.

They can even secretly meet with the lady's boss (or father), who is a good guy and who provides them with funds and resources to continue their running. He might even be a mentor figure. And there has to be an obligatory torture scene somewhere--maybe the mentor (father) turns out in a painful reversal for Harper and is actually one of the bad guys. He later tortures them both after offering his daughter part of the scheme, which she refuses. He not only wants to ingratiate himself more deeply with the leaders of the cartel, but also to get secret information out of them that he knows they have witnessed. This information will allow him to become one of the leaders of the cartel. They escape, obviously.

The cartel is going to have a huge save-the-planet event that will be broadcast to the entire world. Once it is presented, the US President and leaders of the governments the world over are going to announce the adoption of the universal carbon credit scheme as a save-the-planet initiative, and sign a treaty to formalize it all. Some climate disaster somewhere can be part of this, a disaster secretly triggered artificially by the cartel, just to add urgency to adoption of the initiative.

But Caysin has video evidence of the meeting of the cartel's leaders where they brag about their evil plans. He decides to use this event to expose them to the entire world. What's worse, the video also shows the Big Seven Oil Conglomerates (crony corporatists) are actually the ones funding the carbon credit scheme and the entire manmade climate change movement, including this event (these folks are crony corporatists, too). This is proven by statements and villainous laughter coming from the mouths of the most famous global warming people in the cartel meeting. They even joke about rationing air the globe over and seriously discuss how this can be achieved. At root, the elites on both sides are the same damn people. And they are working together to ultimately rule the world through dictatorship by technocrat.

Things develop to a heart-pounding climax, the climate disaster is foiled, some of the bad guys are killed, some disgraced in front of the whole world and some arrested on the spot as the cameras catch them doing bad things. Caysin and Harper finally kiss in the middle of the chaos swirling all around them. (The music swells.  )

The evil father of Harper just barely escapes and lands defeated, but not broken, in a place, maybe a secret island he owns, where it is clear there will be a sequel.

As to the stealing of clouds and snow, this can be a rich metaphor running throughout the entire story--the clouds representing idealistic innocence and the snow representing the painful hard-won truth about the evil elitists. Appearance versus reality. Or whatever. Anything worth stealing.  This can be enhanced in the settings: snowy mountain climbs, airplane flights in cloudy skies, winter in the city with snow falling, etc. The climate change folks can even have a cocktail they invent called the Snow Cloud. There can be paintings that feature clouds and snow. Etc.

That's just a brain dump I did on the spot and needs a lot of work, but whaddya think?

   

(btw - Not to be difficult, but I prefer not to collaborate on fiction writing at this stage. After I have a few works under my belt and selling in the market, I might be game if you are serious. I mean, why not? You do have a creative streak. Somehow, though, I don't think this particular story will be to your liking.  )

Michael