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20 years after 80% of the human population spontaneously petrified, the survivors who rebuilt civilization within the statue-filled cities discover that the statues are, one by one and at a very slow rate, reviving.

A horror story where nothing truly unusual happens: it just documents a series of coincidences that get more eerie the more attention the protagonist (and thus the reader) pays to them. By the end, the protagonist is a gibbering mess with little connection to reality because he is unable to separate the feeling of meaningfulness from the idea that something actually has meaning, and thus is unwilling to stop trying to assign meaning to this series of events, as it grows and fewer and fewer meanings can even be projected.

A Nixon-like 'law and order candidate introduces an anti-counterfeiting measure: a device that scans cash, which all vendors are legally required to use. Later, it's leaked that it was storing the serial number, date, & location of all cash purchases, sending it to a central database. It'd defended on the grounds that none of the info was identifying. But, it was determined that most people could be deanonymized from this info, & indeed the candidate (now in his 2nd presidential term) bolstered his position with blackmail based on such correlations.

NO SILVER BULLET: In the late 1980s, a skilled bullshitter with no technical background interviews for and unexpectedly gets a programming job. The day before his work starts, panicing, he decides to snort a large quantity of cocaine and memorize some programming textbooks, but ends up passing out in front of the book, during which time he has a vivid dream: Satan has come to him in the form of Lawrence Talbot, the man who transforms into the titular Wolfman in the Universal film franchise of the same name, and gives him a box of 1024 silver bullets, saying "your blood sacrifice allows you to solve any problem, but of these, four are my accursed share". He woke up with his nose bleeding, blood soaked into the pages of the textbook. He goes to work, and finds that every time he bullshits a solution, not only does it work but it's considered brilliantly successful. As a result, he quickly rises up the ranks, making fewer and fewer technical decisions. By the late 1990s, he is a VC, and firmly believes that he has some kind of subconscious genius. In 1999, he invests all his liquid assets into four startups -- the day before the bubble burst. Two days later, his corpse is found in a bathtub, a copy of this story handwritten beside him, a silver bullet in his brain.

A buddy cop movie with an odd-couple pair of psychics. One's powers are fueled by extreme emotions, while the other's powers are blocked by them and require calm meditation to produce; as a result, the first one has developed a firey personality and is constantly overreacting, while the other is deadpan. They eventually figure out that they can work as a team only through careful delegation, and if they work too closely together during an operation they just drag each other down; however, working together in non-emergency situations makes sense because it prevents the kinds of accidental use of powers that occasionally occur when one overreacts & because the other is pathologically indecisive & lacks an intuition for when something might be important in hidden ways.

A zombie movie where the zombie virus is spread through inhalation of aerosolated or atomized blood (and as a result, the zombies are liable to pop like ticks).

A standard high fantasy hero & villain (from a world that resembles all the worst stereotypes of high fantasy) are transported into our world. The hero must come to terms with the concept of moral ambiguity in order to gain the capacity to move forward, while the villain becomes politically powerful by embracing and endorsing a false moral clarity.

Panic over the plummeting domestic birth rate & strains of nascent ethnonationalism in japan merge to result in the reintroduction to state shinto of temple prostitution, with a twist: miko volunteer to be artificially inseminated by donor sperm, and the children are raised in the priesthood. After a few generations of this, the administration of state shinto has an army -- one set to challenge both the diet and the once again rising star of the imperial family (from whom all claims of godship have already been long stripped).

With advances in ultradense non-newtonian ballistic gel technology, the 'big titty combat maid' form factor has become popular for robot & cyborg bodyguards: able to shield VIPs, cushion them in motion, and absorb projectiles that would tear through normal flesh. Unfortunately, these prosthetic bodies have a relatively low effective lifespan: though the frames remain fully functional, explosive or radioactive projectiles embedded in fake fat reserves cannot be easily removed. In an era of espionage and assassination, a new kind of hazardous zone appears: the lobotomized robo-maid grave yard, with shelves of unexploded prosthetic bodies too dangerous to move. These compounds become problematic when a terrorist group finds a way to control them remotely.

Prediction markets for long-term forecasting, though high-risk, have become trendy with the rationalist set. Naturally, one would expect this to result in an insurance-like conservativism. However, long term bets provide plenty of time for manipulation. Ultimately, this manifests in a wealthy futurist class who have bet, against sensibly large odds, that natural progress along various lines will suddenly halt or go in reverse -- and who then intentionally harm the world by using their power to make their prophecies of doom come true.

When vampires feed, they steal their victim's life expectancy -- their compulsion to count is part of an adaptation for making them better at intuiting mortality statistics. So, while vampires who feed on adults need to hunt every few decades, with new advances in medicine causing infant mortality to drop, vampires who eat babies can, locust-like, stay dormant for a hundred years at a time.

Among monks who have attained full conscious control of smooth muscle, an ancient martial art: entrail grappling.

The combined feng shui of a skyscraper in Dubai and a parking lot in Singapore diffracts the global ley line network. The luck waves interfere with themselves, creating banding: along odd lattitudes, winning the lottery is common, while even lattitudes are subject to repeated natural disasters. As people begin to migrate accordingly, slowly, the bands begin to expand and shift. Eventually, a signal appears: a repeating video clip stretched across the globe, encoded in patterns of misery.

With the advent of long-term space shipping (required by not-quite-self-suffcient colonies on the moons of Jupiter), ship's cats take on extra importance: just as airplanes are infested with mice, so too are the intra-system transport vessels that, with a skeleton crew, spend ten to fifteen years shipping staples like flour that can't be grown so far from the sun out to the colonies. As a result, polydactyl cats are bred on space stations, where they are exposed to both free-fall and a variety of g-forces through centrifugal chambers. First contact with an alien race occurs when an alien ship attempts to conquer one of these cat-nursery stations, to the aliens' peril.

Psychic powers are caused by insufflation of a cocaine-like drug. Unfortunately, people with psychic powers have an exaggerated sense of their own abilities and importance and some difficulty accurating predicting the consequences of their actions as a result.