TL;DR - random list of 10 mandatory words to include in your story. 1000 words max, deadline is a few days.
A mandatory word list is a fun challenge. It can not only suggest a number of ideas, but also force some limits.
Thie 2012 Flash Fiction challenge was titled “I’ve Chosen Your Words”. We were given a list of 20 words: beast, brooch, cape, dinosaur, dove, fever, finger, flea, gate, insult, justice, mattress, moth, paradise, research, scream, seed, sparrow, tornado, university.
The challenge was to pick any 10 of them to include in a story. I stuck the 20 in a randomizer first, and came up with these: gate, justice, seed, sparrow, university, dinosaur, insult, finger, tornado, paradise.
I shuffled them in my head, spun around widdershins, and came up with an intriguing idea. It was a very short story, more of a concept, but does have potential to develop into more. Feedback from readers seemed to concur. I’ll leave more comments after the story. This is a new, tweaked version. 696 words.
What If
The gate sat smack dab in the middle of the farmer’s corn field - an annoying but manageable location. This was the tenth gate the alien artifact had created, so by now there was a process to follow. The advance team had rushed in with Jeeps and bulldozers, clearing a wide and muddy path through the field. They’d set up the portable containment station and then left Dan to babysit until the team arrived later in the day from the Science department in Toronto. It seemed like an insult to ask him, a double Phd at 22, to do this, but there was little justice in university politics. The gate was locked down anyway, until they could send a robot through for recon, so his presence was just a formality. Each gate was linked to a somewhere and a somewhen. Preliminary readings for this one said the “where” was the same location, and the “when” was about 1000 AD. No danger of any dinosaurs bashing at it. Dan stared at the gauges, bored, scratching idly at his blond beard. He’d grown it in a futile attempt to look more mature. He ran his finger over the access panel — what the heck, he thought, one peek won’t hurt. He keyed in the code, and the immense force field, swirling like a tornado, shimmered then faded. He poked his head through. Bright blue sky, long grass waving in the wind, a mixed forest in the distance, birds chirping, a mixed bouquet of spring flower scents, several small animals grazing by the forest edge. Sort of like the area on his side of the fence, but without all the noise and pollution. The colours and sounds and smells all seemed enhanced, like in a paradise, but maybe that was just an effect of the gate field on his head.
Suddenly, a sparrow swooped past his shoulder and on through the gate. He took a step after it in reflex - arm up, mouth open in shock - then just as suddenly the bird flew right back into the present. He pulled back in haste and rekeyed the gate field - he’d almost passed through with no protective clothing. Contamination of the past was a danger they were all aware of, but luckily, the gate monitoring was off, so his mistake would go unheeded.
If the monitoring had been on, or if he had been honest later, the team would have noticed and retrieved the clump of mud his boot had left in the past. And also retrieved the several seeds in that clump, especially the kernels of corn. Modern corn, enhanced for growth and yield, resistant to disease and pests and drought. Seeds left in a field 1000 years ago, on the edges of the developing Huron Nation. Seeds with the potential to provide a miracle food for the country’s first peoples, replacing a dependence on their meagre maize crops, on the necessity of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, on the evolution of a culture and lifestyle still vulnerable to the might of Europe.
He wiped the sweat from his bare face with relief — no harm done after all, everything OK, the gauges looked normal. He hadn’t turned into a purple monster or erased the world. He heard voices approaching — they were back. He turned, flipped his dark braids over his shoulder, and waved with relief.
“Ho, Little Bear,” called the leader. “Hope you didn’t fall asleep on us. The ride took longer than we thought.”
The leader slid down off his horse. “We brought all the equipment we needed from the elders. It was decided that this will be a Bear Nation find - it’s finally our turn to manage one and learn. We can’t always be trading for technology with Europe; we need to encourage our own scientists. And of course, we brought grav sleds - we can’t forget in our haste that we also must show respect for Mother Earth.
He pointed the remote and lowered the laden sleds to the ground by the station. “So - anything exciting happen while we were away?”
Little Bear shook his head. “No, my brothers, just a quiet and boring wait.”
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I was intrigued by the idea of introducing a super-crop into a subsistence culture in the past. I just wish I had the First Nations background to do justice to a longer version. I'm not sure exactly when and where this change would have the biggest impact in North America, or how the inhabitants would have developed, but this seemed a reasonable guess. I surmise that Cabot and Cartier might have arrived not to find scattered bands roaming the countryside, willing to casually trade some land for beads. Instead, they might have found an already strong nation - perhaps a union of tribes - with deep roots in the land and a focus on agriculture, possessing rich natural resources yet a conservationist view of their relationship with nature. Perhaps with a strong mystical connection to the spirit world that gave them powers to help fight against the ships and gunpowder of Europe. Rather than an easy addition to the empires of Europe, North America might have been more of a trading partner.
Would America have developed into the same manufacturing giant, with all the environmental impacts that came with it? Would a slave trade still have developed? Would the North American culture have influenced that of Europe? Of China? If Hitler had still rushed through Europe, would North America have come to his aid? Would they have put a man on the moon? Would people care if they didn’t?