The ultimate distillation of story

_darkvictory and I were sitting around discussing story, form, the nature of consciousness, and what life might be like in a fully uploaded world, when we came to the subject of the "what if?" story. As most of you know (because it's an old rusty saw with broken teeth), science fiction has often been described as the land of "what if?" I'm of the firm opinion that all fiction is "what if?", as in "What if there was this giant white whale and a sea-captain obsessed with finding and killing it?" or "What if someone were convicted of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family and was chased for the rest of his life by a duty-ridden policeman who had problems with the concept of compassion?" If we follow this reasoning to its logical conclusion, unlike those who say that there are only XX number of basic stories and everything is a variation on these, we can come to but one conclusion – there's only one basic story. "What if there's some guy who did something? Or not?" Once we've embraced that, we can all get back to writing whatever it was we were working on. Okay?