Rules of the game

Ideas are like any life-form, a cascade of code.  Cascade, mutate, cross-pollinate: pick up a fish here, lose a shark there (autotomy?): the usual prom.  The fittest filled-out sequences, when put through the machine, ilume not always large jaws and sharp teeth, but also cuddling and cooperating: like the old Quaker game, Population. 

Stories are alive statistics: winged things: some persist, some perish; the swarm’s the thing. So authors change a verb here, they reverse the birthdays of two characters there.  The beaurocrat, the mardarin; masonic, surgical.  A cataclysm can mutate a form into transcendence; two middle-class septeganarians, a chance meeting at a bar between two divorcees: then, a baby is born.  No, the baby is found in the woods.