A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 27
This is the seventh year in a row I’ve run this series in April.
Today’s story: Lost iPhone, then strange photos start showing up in an iCloud account.
In the summer of 2013 my friend Maura lost her iPhone in the Hamptons… As Maura left the bar around closing time that Saturday night, she realized her phone had gone missing. She talked to bouncers and bartenders who professed ignorance, then had a friend call her phone, which went directly to voicemail. She’d gone out that night with the battery fully charged, which suggested that someone had found the phone and turned it off. When Maura got to her computer later that night, she went to her iCloud account and selected Find My iPhone. Since the phone was off, she wasn’t able to bring up a GPS-generated map of its location. But she checked the “notify me when found” box so she’d receive an email when her phone connected to the Internet again. She also put the phone in “Lost Mode,” which meant her phone display would flash a number where she could be reached so a sympathetic party could get in touch to return it.
Sunday passed without any further information and Maura returned to Manhattan. But on Monday morning, she received a message from Find My iPhone. The device had been located: It was currently in Harlem, at the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Towers, a housing project several blocks north of Central Park. She had no idea how her phone had made the 120-mile trek from Montauk to Manhattan, but she had a surreal vision of it traveling on its own, facing the same choices any yuppie would face: Do you catch a ride in someone’s car? Take the LIE? Or is it faster to hop on the Long Island Rail Road?
As soon as she received the email that Monday morning, Maura called her iPhone from her work phone. It rang once and then immediately went to voicemail. When she tried a second time, the phone was off again. She didn’t quite have a plan, she told me. If the GPS map had shown a more precise location — an exact apartment instead of a pin in the middle of a housing project — she would have asked the police to check it out. But since she had no idea who actually had the phone, she thought she might just call that person up and ask for it back.
But the phone stayed off for the next two weeks. She gave up hope of recovering it and switched to an old flip phone for a while. Soon afterwards, she moved to Canada, got another smartphone, and started a new job. The whole matter drifted almost entirely from her mind.
Then, in August, she got another email. Find My iPhone had located the device again: It was in Sana’a, Yemen. That’s when the pictures began appearing in her iCloud account.
You have to read the full story as it offers a strange one-way look through a mirror into the lives of people halfway around the world, unaware the photos they are taking are showing up in some young woman’s iCloud account in New York City.
However my mind zeroed in on this idea: What if the phone a young woman loses her iPhone. She tries to track it down. Sees it has traveled to another part of the city. Not a specific enough address. Calls it. Someone answers once. A weird thick silence on the other end. Hangs up. Never turns on again.
Then photos start to appear in the young woman’s iCloud, seemingly about a series of brutal murders. In fact, the images of victims show up on our Protagonist’s (Lynne) account before the victim’s body is discovered.
Lots of other weird photos appear which seem totally random like this…
And this…
Then a pattern begins to emerge, and over time, Lynne becomes convinced the person with the phone, presumably the killer, is teasing out clues — to Lynne!
So Lynne becomes ensnared in a psychological thriller involving the police, the FBI, her life completely turned upside and then the big twist: It appears the phone was actually stolen from her and the next victim is… her.
My work is done! My twenty seventh story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!
What would you do with it?
Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.
See you in comments (hit Reply to join the conversation). And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.
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