How I wrote a story

The story "No Lips to Scream With" is a Science Fiction story I wrote.

How I came to write this story is different to how I write most of my fictional pieces.

An idea came to me for the end of a story: "...He tried to scream, but his lips fell off."

That made me laugh. I mean... how could that be? How could someone's lips fall off?

What if it was a dreadful alien disease for which there was no cure? A disease that made parts of the body (lips, nose, fingers, etc.) quickly start to fall off, once the infection had set in?

But how did the disease get out into the wild?

What if a kindly, gentle race was experimenting with a universal vaccine? What if this vaccine had somehow caused a plague that killed everyone it came into contact with? Then I thought that the world phage seemeds more deadly than plague, so the disease became a phage.

OK, then? What was this race called? Revilians. And they tried to stop the disease from spreading at home bgy sending out plague barge ships crammed with the sick and dying, spreading the disease far and wide.

A survey ship finds an Earth ship that was 500 years old. The crew had been killed by a virus, perhaps a variation of the Martian strain of flu that had killed the second Mars expedition, as theorised by the survey ship's doctor?

However, the doctor is certain that the Universal Mega Vaccine -developed in the meantime- would protect them. The only thing the Universal Mega Vaccine could not cure was the Revilian Phage, but as the symptoms of the disease were nothing like Revilian Phage, they knew it could not be that.


However, they realise that the 500-year-old ship had come into contact with a Revilian plague barge.


The ship's doctor was able to theorise that in its 'natural' state, Revilian Phage caused the deadly flu-like ailment, but with the addition of Universal Mega Vaccine it transmuted into the current form of the disease.


Readers will note that as the world is far into the future I took a guess on what the language would be like. If you do read it, please check at those words!
 No Lips to Scream With