Dystopian Writing Prompts

You are sentenced to a famous prison. You are not sentenced by time your stay only ends if you die or escape. There are no guards and the prison is broadcast on television. No one has ever escaped.

People do not get weaker and more frail as they age - they get stronger and stronger. "Dying of old age" is when groups of young people band together to kill off their elders before they become too strong to defeat.

To solve the problems of overpopulation, all the governments in the world agree to only allow some of their citizens to reproduce—these people are chosen by lottery. After eight or nine generations, an unintended consequence begins to show up: humans have evolved to be unbelievably lucky.

When you wish upon a shooting star, it's actually a satellite, and your wish has been recorded and cataloged. An agent has been assigned to your case.

The Earth has finally run out of fossil fuels to use as energy and, with the only other option being to turn to clean and renewable energy sources, the U.S. has decided to take drastic measures: trying to reach into alternate dimensions to find oil and other fossil fuels.

Teleportation has been around for years. It's considered the safest form of travelling. One day, while hacking into a government system, you find a secret report on it. To your horror, you read that teleporters consist of two parts: a cloning system on one end and a desintegrator on the other.

Humanity split into subspecies: Alters, who alter their genes, Augmented, who augment flesh with machines, and Ascended, who uploaded their consciousness. After centuries of coexistence, the tenuous peace between the ideologies is threatened.

The edge of the world is real and every few years miles of it crumbles away into the void, forcing people to constantly move toward the ever expanding centre. You're a RimRunner, scavenging the abandoned cities before they slip over the edge.

Time travelers have become such a nuisance that governments have begun recording fake historical events that lead time travelers to areas where they can be arrested. You're a bartender at one of these artificial towns, trying to determine if the customer in front of you is from the future.

A global arms race gets out of control and every country's only option for survival is walling themselves off with impenetrable defensive technology. Millions of years pass before a catastrophic event brings down all the walls, revealing how humans evolved in isolation.

You were born into a society where permanent augmented reality contact lenses are fused onto every newborn's eyes. You're unaware of this until one day, a lens falls into your left hand.

Murder is legal, once a permit has been obtained from the local police department. Permits require a declaration of a target victim and justification to commit the act. Once a permit has been issued it is valid for 72 hours. Once expired you can never get another for the same target victim.

Inventing Bacteria that ate carbon dioxide was a miracle. Releasing it into the oceans, nature began to flourish intill it continued eating, taking more carbon dioxide even from the air. Humanity to survive, had to return to the mass burning of fossil fuels thus began a new era of steam punk.

Rather than being dispatched by a dispatcher, police officers use a bounty system where officers can pick up missions from a constantly updated bounty board. The missions range from: "noise complaint, $20", to "domestic abuse, $150", to "bank robbery in progress, $5000".

Every person has a button they can press at night that deposits a large sum of money to their bank account. However, the first person to press it each night is horrifically killed.

All work centers are mandated to install " Efficiency Microchips" into their employees. The microchip makes the host blackout during their shift and come back into control after work is over, with no recollection of their day. Your microchip just malfunctioned.

It turns out Earth is a really big lobby for a battle-royale and everyone is just waiting for enough players to start

In the future, prisons no longer exist. Instead, prisoners are miniaturised and sent into an inescapable, smaller replica of our world, so they cannot cause damage in the real world. One day, a special agent is sent into this 'hub' world, in search of an especially dangerous prisoner...

There is a species famous for shutting themselves in Virtual Reality, living their lives in fake worlds, this planet should be easy to invade, your masters said, turns out, a lot of members of that species have been spending their entire time in realistic combat simulations.

"Attention civilians. From now on the speed limit will be vigorously enforced." You scoff, before the car beside you explodes into a ball of fire.

The year is 2045, countries as we know them no longer exist as the world has now been divided into Feudal States under the control of Multinational corporations. You are a Noogler, Googles peasant class, and your village is being attacked by the Elite Disney Imagineer Squadron.

Doing good deeds gains you negative years in prison. People collect these negative years for use when they want to commit crimes. As a result, the world's greatest philanthropists are also the most dangerous criminals.

Job hunts are literally that: You seek out the job you desire and kill the one who has it, or even engage them in ritual combat to claim the job as your own. You have just turned of age and desire your first minimum wage job.

Humans have discovered how to live forever, allowing them to die when they feel ready to do so. But it is considered bad form to live for too long. You have lingered much longer than is polite and those around you are trying to convince you to die.

You live in a world where everybody is blind and gets futuristic contacts installed when they are born to let them see the world. But one day your contact breaks and you realize, you can see. But the world you see is much different than what your contacts showed you.

You join the military, you are placed in the gardeners program. You garden in exotic places where the military has done operations, each time they give special glasses and forbid spraying others. One day your glasses fall off and you see you are actually burning corpses with a flamethrower.

Rather than robots replacing human workers, both are mistreated by the rich as cheap labour. The eventual uprising wasn't just robots alone, but the poor and robots together, against their common enemy.

4 more minutes on the run and you would have made it. But now your face in the mud, and a knee in your back the officer reads your rights. "Chosen by lottery, informed within the time limit. You are hearby duly sworn as the President of the United States."

You hit your head and blank out, waking up in a hospital, but as you wake, millions of lines of text fly by in your vision. Turns out that Humans have been getting patched for centuries but nobody has ever updated before, because we only ever go into sleep mode. You just had a proper reboot.

"How many people have died to achieve this world domination of yours?" "769." "...What?" "769 people died to achieve my plans. I counted them, and had each of their names etched on my throne so I never forget what my victory cost the world. Now tell me, how many have you killed to see me dead?"