From time to time, I think of an idea for a short story. I don't actually want to write them--they interest me as ideas, not as stories. But someone else might. If so, feel free.

You have a stasis box. About a week after the baby comes home from the hospital--a week of extreme sleep deprivation for both parents--you decide you need a little break. Put the baby in stasis for two days while you recover. Take it out and continue.

Gradually, the breaks get longer--babies are a lot of work. You end up with the parents age seventy or so, the child two or three, and ... .

Over the past century or two, age of menarch has fallen quite a lot. Many parents do not regard this as a good thing. An eleven or twelve year old daugher is emotionally a child, biologically a woman. Problems.

With the progress of medicine, we should be able to cure this problem fairly soon--come up with a medicine that delays the onset of puberty. You don't have to worry about your daughter getting pregnant at fourteen, because at fourteen she's still a child.

Fifteen? Sixteen? ...

Two variants:

One lets you slow physical aging. Perhaps it is how we greatly extend life expectancy--slow down the aging processes, starting at age one. So a twenty year old looks like a ten or twelve year old. Physically is a ten or twelve year old. Intellectually--twelve year olds are as bring as adults, they just don't know as much. But this one does. Emotionally? But it gets you to 180.

The other is much less radical. Kittens are more fun than cats. If only they remained kittens longer. Much longer. Wonders of modern medicine.

Block of houses, all appearing identical. By each doorknob a light, red or green. Someone comes around the corner, goes to the first door with a green light, inserts his key, opens the door. He is home.

What is happening, of course, is that his key contains the complete description of the inside of his house when he left it that morning (or last week or last month or ...). The houses are all identical until a key goes in (red lights are occupied houses).

Now we add one crazy person who actually thinks coming home to the same house matters--who believes the identity of objects (and pets--possibly also children if we push it?) depends on continuity. So he does various things to try to get around the system everyone else takes for granted.

Patient in a doctor's office, getting a test which involves wiring patient to a machine. As the description and conversation continue, it becomes clear that the doctor's office is in a prison and this is part of the release procedure. The patient has just been acquitted, and the prison wants to make sure he is healthy before they turn him lose.

Finally, the doctor tells the patient to hold still, and pushes a button. There is an instant of surprise in the patient's face as he slumps over dead.

At which point we discover that the patient was actually convicted, not acquitted--but doesn't know it. This is a very merciful society and they decided that although it was necessary to execute criminals, they could at least be spared the horror of knowing that they were about to be executed.

An idea that shows up in some Christian doctrine is that one's fate in the afterlife depends on the state of one's soul at the moment of death--so the sinful man who truly repents on his deathbed ends up, eventually, in heaven.

Has anyone done a science fiction version of this? Imagine, for instance, that we can emulate a person in a computer and can upload people. But the emulation isn't perfect--it emulates the person as he is when uploaded but has much less ability to change thereafter than the person had before uploading.

When you die, you are uploaded. If you happen to die angry, your silicon continuation is an angry person--forever. If you die in a mood of repentance for your sins, on the other hand, your continuation is the good person that you (perhaps, absent death, very temporarily) were at that moment.