Subverting Be Careful What You Wish For

So, I decided to make a thread for writers whose stories involve wishes to try their hardest to subvert Be Careful What You Wish For. Or rather, invoking the trope by creating a wish for their characters using Exact Words and a lack of Logical Fallacies. In short, the idea of this thread is NOT to say "that would never work" or "that's stupid", but to critique and improve upon the wish until it is as perfect as we can make it.

I'll go first.

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In my story, my chief antagonist just wants to be immortal. That's it. Every evil and villainous act she commits is simply a desire to have life eternal. She's not out to rule the world or cause undo harm. She just wants to be immortal and she'll do what she has to to get it.

She's also smart, though. She knows that wishing "I want to be immortal" is a suckers bet. So she instead wishes for the following:

1. Immunity to all senescence.
2. The ability to revert oneself to an exact state at any point in the past, with full knowledge, understanding and comprehension of factors that caused or exacerbated said malignant conditions, while retaining all power and conditions outlined in this wish.
3. The ability to identify, predict, and/or sense conditions considered “maligned”, such as forms of mortal injury, disease, and/or toxicity on oneself, as well as the ability to reduce, ignore, undo, reverse, forget, remove oneself from and/or gain immunity to any and all of said maligned conditions.
4. The ability to label any “negatives”, such as pain, anguish, anxiety, disappointment, worry, longing, horror, depression, guilt, frustration, humiliation, loneliness, panic, grief, sadness, dejection, irritation, hysteria, and/or delirium, as well as the ability to reduce, ignore, undo, reverse, forget, remove oneself from and/or gain immunity to any and all of said sensations.
5. The ability to identify any forms of “destruction”, such as petrification, disintegration, dissolution, absorption, dissection, immobility, freezing, detainment, capture, or containment that meet disapproval and/or any conditions which impair, cease, reverse, control, and/or externally manipulate brain functions, as well as the ability to reduce, ignore, undo, reverse, forget, remove oneself from and/or gain immunity to said “destruction”, even after any and all instances have occurred.
6. The ability to provide an amendable definition of “harm”, as well as the ability to reduce, ignore, undo, reverse, forget , remove oneself from and or gain immunity to said harm.
7. The ability to identify any effects created or caused by this wish, or caused by oneself, as “maligned”, “negative”, “destruction” or “harm” as those terms are defined in clauses 1 through 6, as well as the ability to reduce, ignore, undo, reverse, forget, remove oneself from and/or gain immunity to said effects, even after any and all instances have occurred without voiding any other effects of the wish or oneself.

I'd assume that these stipulations would have to occur preemptively, because it's all well and good to have the ability to say "I didn't just get my head chopped off." even after it occurs, but there's nothing that says you will have superhuman ability to think of these things in like the second between your head being chopped off and death. More probably, you'd be thinking "OH MY GOD MY HEAD JUST GOT CHOPPED OFF!" or some such. I suppose if the powers continued after death in a setting that provides an afterlife you could just say "Screw you guys, I'm goin' home." and then revive or something...

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!

I assume the wish would be "I wish I was immortal, the term "immortal" being defined here as..."

Read my stories!

That's a good point.

Yeah, pretty much.

If you're given the standard Three Wishes, my first one would be: "I wish that you will interpret all of my wishes, this one included, so as to yield most benefit, directly or indirectly, for myself, and furthermore, where ambiguity arises, implement what is meant, not what is literally said."

Essentially, you compel the genie to invert Exact Words. My wording might not be up to scratch, since I'm making it up on the spot.

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

"I wish for immunity to aging,sickness, and injury." ?

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

But in that case, someone might cast a spell that kills without using any of those three things. Like the Avada Kedavra from Harry Potter.

edited 25th Aug '12 4:45:02 AM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

Not to mention that if you ever become contained, captured, sealed or buried alive, you are worse off than ever.

What Yej said. If possible, I'd go a step further and make the second wish that the genie make themselves a Nice Guy that is inclined to like their master. Yeah, that's monstrously evil mind control, but if you're already evil... and even if you aren't, a Jerkass Genie has probably caused enough harm already to warrant some form of penance.

Back to the thread. I imagine the ultimate trump to any careful what you wish for scenario is that, even if your wish is exactly rightly worded and implemented, there's the not unreasonable chance that you yourself have no idea whether what you're wishing for is something you really want and/or will ultimately enjoy. Get perfect immortality? Who Wants to Live Forever?, etc. So a good first wish, whether from a villain or hero, should be to "I want to know what five wishes (or normal course of action, maybe no magic is necessary) will make me the happiest, and how to word them get exactly that effect. In writing that I can understand." (The "five" is in case your jerkass genie makes the first few wishes "A gland that secrets cocaine into your brain" and other idiocy like that.)

Armed with those two pieces of knowledge, any character should be able to get exactly what they need.

On the flipside, wishing "I want to know if any of the following wishes on this list will, even if perfectly and benevolently implemented, result in me unhappy and/or worse off, and why this would happen." Basically, a round about way of asking what about their own inner nature would make what they think is a good idea into a Tragic Dream.

edited 27th Aug '12 12:46:59 PM by Earnest

If the genie in question makes a rule against wishing for more wishes, my first wish would be for there to be no rules about wishing for more wishes. My second wish would be for infinite wishes.

I've always wondered why nobody attempts to do this in fiction.

Gave them our reactions, our explosions, all that was ours For graphs of passion and charts of stars...

Or wish to have the ability to mind control others. Then you make them wish the wishes you want.

Would that actually work?

I personally would make my first wish(if I could just ask) for the Genie to answer all my questions honestly, and then ask if it will grant the intent of the wish or the Exact Words.

Then of course, I would ask if I can have infinite wishes, and work my way up from there.

edited 27th Aug '12 2:57:24 PM by HandsomeRob

One Strip! One Strip!

It should, plenty of stories have one character make wish suggestions to another. Granted, a sufficiently paranoid lamp maker or genie may nix the idea with a "wishes only granted to people whose will is not being controlled" clause, but at that point it gets to the point where the lamp must be rigged to be completely wish tamper proof.

Adding to/Improving upon Yej's wish (regarding ambiguity):

"I wish that you will interpret all of my wishes, this one included, so as to yield most benefit, directly or indirectly, for myself, and furthermore, where ambiguity arises, implement what is meant, not what is literally said. Should this not be possible, any ambiguity will be addressed by seeking clarification from me until all ambiguities have been addressed."

edited 27th Aug '12 6:17:53 PM by peasant

And then the Genie says it can't do that, and you just wasted a wish, crushing your Genre Savvy.

One Strip! One Strip!

It'd be nice if you could roll it up into one statement, since then the genie can't drop bits of it. (Although it might not be an issue with that particular wish)

If it can't do that, then it can't deduct you a wish. That'd be breaking the whole point of Three Wishes.

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Somewhat related to the above: Make sure whatever you say isn't so long that you have to pause in mid-sentence. The Genie may be able to interpret that as a full stop, which could change the meaning of your wish.

No, I'd say that if that's the case, you might be screwed anyway. If we're going to take pauses in sentences or breath in account, we might as well throw in crap like, "Make sure the genie speaks your native language. Otherwise, don't be British and ask for a cigarette."]

Let's just leave it at semantics.

edited 29th Aug '12 2:13:49 PM by KingZeal

Perhaps. But If It's a Jackass Genie then It'll be sure to screw you over no matter what you do.

Legalese or not.

Legalese, however, can help to minimize the screwjob.

EDIT: Bah, ignore this. Some days, I just can't read.

edited 6th Sep '12 12:57:54 PM by Specialist290

EDIT: Nevermind, then.

edited 6th Sep '12 12:58:44 PM by KingZeal

UPDATE: So, I wrote the part of the story where the character makes the wish I detailed in the OP, and I found an interesting interpretation.

As suggested by another troper, the wisher started with:

"I, the wisher, wish for immortality for myself as described in the context below, as interpreted in the most benevolent, gainful result for me, the wisher, as "gain" would be interpreted me both consciously and unconsciously, and in a way which minimizes any and all negative results for as many other beings as possible, following the intent of the wish rather than the letter and for more clarification when ambiguity arises..."[note]See the op post for the rest of it.[/note]

When she made the wish, the genie stopped time immediately and explained to her that it could not grant the wish as she interpreted it, because she had provided no identifier of herself. She only referred to herself as "I", "me", or "the wisher", but that the entity she was would cease to exist once she was immortal. Since a living body is a limitless number of chemical processes, smaller lifeforms, and various lifeforms, without a concrete definition of "me", the genie could not interpret the wish.

Thus, she would be forced to remain in the time-stopped universe unless she could provide an unambiguous definition of "me" (since she had specifically asked it to not grant the wish with any ambiguity without asking her for clarification.

At the risk of missing subtle nuance, couldn't "I the wisher and me" be unambiguously defined as "the person consciously making the present wish"?

The idea was that a "person" is an innumerable number of various forces, including living, dead, and dying cells, chemical processes, incorporeal judgments and symbiotic parasites (Cracked did a great article on the problem with Teleporters and Transporters as people are made of more "stuff" than we think we are—including bacteria and other microorganisms that allow us to function and our bodies cannot function properly without).

And since she asked the genie not to assume anything, she had to be very specific about what "me" or "this person" meant.