This story got a bit away from me, but it's still something to enjoy I think!
I had the image for quite some time, and this morning, I wanted to make a caption so I'd have something to post tonight .. so I went to one of my picture directories and thought about the story I wanted to create. When I came upon this, I loved the idea of someone trying to recreate themselves by escaping their old environment and genetics .. but becoming a slave to them due to perceived fate and destiny.
A good friend of mine found out that her grandma was having a 30 year affair with another man, and that the last two kids grandma had weren't gramps actual children. She was processing the information and how it happened .. my thoughts were mostly of .. "it wasn't fair to those two women that their entire medical and mental histories were now completely wrong!" Most insurance and doctors want a family history of issues that could impact their well being through heredity. If dad was an alcoholic, prone to strokes or certain allergies to meds or whatever .. it'd be great if people responsible for your well being knew about this before treatments could start. Apparently that was still on my mind when the plot was jogged by the image I wanted to use.
So when I started making this, I had no idea I'd be wading into the idea of predestination and I guess a bit of Calvinism .. which I always thought was a bit classist if not outright racist .. perhaps it was how I learned about it, but I found it fatalistic at the least. Your results may vary I guess! But that's all thrown into the mix, as well as genetics vs environment, or how they mix together in how they make us who we are fundamentally.
Anyway, as I got to the bottom of the text, I realized, this is one of those few captions I wrote that could be expanded into a short story, and I really had more to go with the plot, and had to honestly just cut it short. Is the image just in his mind, or did the molecular device transport him somehow into a real version of his fears? Will Rudolf be able to conquer the fears and the mind and body he now possesses, or will that become his life now? Was it just a mistake of programming, or was there something behind Dee's work on the project motivated by something more evil? I understand that having me be a co-star makes it seem more ominous, but truth be told, I just used myself because I'm recognizable to everyone here, and it led to more brevity in the writing so I wouldn't have to introduce ANOTHER character into an already crowded story structure.
So, here's where you, the readers, come in. I'd love to see you let me know what you thought happened with the whole caption in general. Maybe some backstory into Rudolf's earlier life, his interactions with Dee, what the machine actually did (Yeah, it's a Deus ex machina in a way,) and elaborate more on the last 2 paragraphs.
And of course, let me know what you think of the caption in general. For some reason, the idea has just come into my head that Dee is going to be the Henry Higgins of Rudolf's evolution, or perhaps his downfall!