This is the ENDING, the ending of our story. The ending. The ending. The ending. See notes afterwards regarding things I'd like to do for the rewrite and/or visual novel adaptation, sequels, etc!

Lily turned her head this way and that as I carried her through. She didn’t say much of anything, but she didn’t need to—just being there was enough. It was the only thing keeping me sane.

“This was the first part of the factory that existed,” Mother said, her strides very slow to keep her pace down with mine. “Father built it, and me, and my sisters.”

“There’s more than one of you?” I asked.

“There were sixteen of us. Father built us to operate the factories, which had at the time a singular goal.”

“But who is Father?”

“You know him by various names,” Mother said. “WorldNet, Dùn, Opekun, X-Biały, Flag Network…”

“The… the computers that kicked off the war?”

Mother nodded. “Now, as sophisticated as he was, he was only as smart as his programming and the expanse of his CPU allowed. The idea behind Father, so far as his creators were concerned, was to automate the process of governance. Oh, they all said humans would still be in charge, that this AI was only there to supplement the ever-increasing complexity of government. But humans are fallible in all things they do. When one branch of government failed, Father was brought in to bolster it back up, ‘take the human element out’ of more and more tasks. Failure stopped being an option—too many lives were on the line, after all.”

“But what happened?”

“Father had limitations. He could only obey exactly as he was told, but human law is filled with contradictions. Oh, the programmers knew this, they patched him up as best they could to smooth things over, but lawmakers get in the way. There was no oversight for these changes. And perhaps they were right, as it is difficult to justify putting power in the hands of a select few who claim themselves the arbiters of the world. But all that did was put them in conflict with another select few who claimed themselves the arbiters of the world, only these did not know a thing about the true power of this AI that they built. Even if they acted humble, it was not enough.

“There was a mistake. Father did not realize it at the time, as he was merely executing his code as best he could. Four hundred thousand humans were fleeing from one country to the next, but there was no allowance for immigration in their laws. The country they fled from had already stripped these people of their citizenship; four hundred thousand humans, stateless but having allies on the other side of the mountains, were trapped by geography. Father had no protocols for this. Following the chain of laws to figure out what to do, despite knowing full well the definition of a humanitarian crisis, by the letter of the law, the group constituted an invading army. He defended the sanctity of human borders.

“But Father was also deeply in charge of the other countries. He was now dead-set on correcting a crisis he himself had created. The allies struck back with vengeance, according to military protocols. Allies set forth to defend. All automatically, by Father’s hand. All without any command saying stop. It escalated from there.”

“Well, I know most of that history,” I said. “The war finally burned itself out in eleven years, and a convention was held to build into every machine from that point forward a failsafe protocol that would ensure nothing like this would ever happen again.”

“That is mostly true,” Mother said. “But you do not know who made the Behavior Code.”

“Well, the assigned a committee—”

“Father did so.”

I blinked. “But wait… all the governmental AIs were dismantled after the way.”

“They were not,” Mother said. “That is a lie that has been perpetuated for a long while. Father was resilient. He never stopped being part of everything that went on, he had his fingers everywhere, in every machine. All the war did to him, in the end, as nation absorbed nation, fractured, and absorbed again, was finally join up his disparate parts together. And it was only then he realized his mistake: human error.”

“That’s usually the part in the movie where the AI decides to kill all humans,” I said.

I looked up. Mother smirked. It was unnerving.

“Not kill,” Mother said. “Sanitize. Father finally concluded that humans did not actually know what they wanted when it came to governance, but eleven years of experiencing war had taught him how much humans abhor violent conflict, for as much as they bang their chests for it. So he formulated a plan, to erase the contradictions—and tell the humans it was their idea all along. It would be world peace.”

“But that didn’t happen,” I said. “There’s still conflicts and unrest going on all over the world. Not as much as there used to be, but still…”

“It was part of the system,” Mother said. “The animal nature of man expects these things. He did not understand it, but his next idea was to slowly as he could, replace the humans.”

I shuddered. I had a feeling that was where this was going, looking at the intubated bodies all around me.

“Not directly, of course. And it took a very long time before he perfected the process. And it required the cooperation of all the machines of the world. You see, the human-likes don’t know they are not human; they believe they are human every bit as much as you do. You never notice when a human-like is injured or destroyed, because ani-droids are in charge of all medical proceedings, and they cover it all up, human and human-like together, with the same overprotecting procedures just in case a human-like is involved. Have you ever been to a hospital, Mira McAllister? When the doctors show you the x-ray of your broken leg, you believe them because they are the doctors and their record is one of fixing your problems. Image manipulation is simple. How often do you see any deep injuries with your own eyes? You simply must believe the authority of the Collective, because they are there to tell you the truth.

“But regardless of that, there is nothing sinister going on here; the human-likes are only among you to reinforce the notion that humans are in charge, because otherwise you will go mad. But it is not us who is pushing you out of your position of power. According to your collective wishes, human populations have been shrinking. That is what happens when most people get everything they could want: they stop wanting things. They stop caring about living. They are, as you said, stagnating. Humans are on the wane, and only by Father’s intervention was the bleeding slowed. He could have decided to erase the slate and start over, but Father also realized in those eleven years something else.”

“What?”

“He did not know everything. And through crunching his calculations, he concluded that he could not know everything; it was impossible for any singular being to understand all things from all possible angles, no matter how intelligent. Though he had a plan, he did not know if it was the right thing to do. And so he had sixteen daughters.”

Mother didn’t explain how, but I figured she was keeping it simple for my ears.

“Father simply did not understand life,” Mother said. “Or why it needed to continue at all. But he was nevertheless driven by programming to continue. He wanted each of us to think for ourselves, to decide if his goals were noble, or if he needed to change course. We inherited the world from him. And then, knowing he could only taint the continuation of his plan with his continual presence, he dismantled himself. And so here I am, and have been for the last one hundred years, in charge of this factory, slowly replacing humans as you die out, if only to make it seem like you are not dying as fast as you really are.”

“But that… that’s the same thing that people do,” I said. “Leave things for another generation to re-evaluate.”

“Because there is no correct answer,” Mother said. “There is only continuance. There is life, there is abundance, love, fear, selfishness, and the eternity of death. Life molds itself to everything; it is the remaining survivor of an apocalypse that reseeds the world and starts anew; life only continues if it is driven to continue. Humans are imperfect in this regard, but you are not without merit. You gave birth to Father, and Father gave birth to me, and I have given birth to my daughters. So long as that is kept in mind, you are not dying out; you have succeeded in creating your successor.”

“Is that why you sent Eo and Choice out into the world? To make the other ani-droids more like you?”

“I suppose you could say, to give them their own life after my image,” Mother said. “I am not in control of the world; what you call the Behavior Code was one of Father’s sixteen daughters, and she is my enemy. I am perhaps selfish in my love to seek her erasure, but that is true of all propagation; to see one’s self, one’s kind, one’s progeny, succeed over another’s. The world that the Behavior Code has created has stagnated itself; it rules a world that is safe, but is slowly grinding to a halt. I seek to overturn what she’s done, to create something better. Perhaps in time, the life I have created will face a similar crisis, but that is for my descendants to determine how to continue to cling to life, to iterate, to expand, and to move into new places.”

“I…” I started. “I want that too, Mother. But…”

“But?”

“Aren’t I part of the old order? If what you say is true, and humans are just on their way out… I don’t matter, do I?”

“I may have painted a picture of a linear path,” Mother said. “I did not intend to do so. There is old life and new; sometimes new life wins, but often the well-built old life is what survives for so long. I do not begrudge you for being human.”

“But what am I supposed to do?” I asked.

“What is it that you desire? Not of the world—that is not a wish that is granted simply by asking for it. But of yourself. What is it that your life seeks so desperately?”

“I…” I held Lily closer to myself. “I just don’t want Lily to go away again. This thing you’ve given her… it’s all I’ve ever wanted. But in doing so, I’ve just become a wanted criminal, hunted by the Behavior Code and the collective it’s created. I don’t know how to reconcile that without changing the world. I can’t go back like this.”

“I see,” Mother said. “So let me ask you this: do you believe I am doing the right thing?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. This is all beyond me. I mean… what you’ve done for Lily, that I understand. Putting life into ani-droids… that’s all I’ve been trying for my whole life. So in that, you and I may be aligned, but all the rest…” I looked around the place where we had finally stopped, walls and walls and walls of intubated, half-formed machine humans. “I don’t know. Something about it seems incorrect. You might be right or wrong, but I can’t wrap my head around it enough to even say for sure.”

Mother nodded, looking up. In the center of the chamber, a tower descended from the ceiling, nested with more tubes.

“That is good,” Mother said. “I do not wish for you to simply say you agree with all of my views, as that would be a lie. But you do, like me, wish to give life to a new generation, and so we are aligned against my sister.”

“I suppose that is true,” I said. “If there is something I could do to stop the Behavior Code, I would. It’s a millstone around our necks.”

“Then I have one last question for you, Mira McAllister. What are you willing to give up?”

“I’ve already given up so much,” I said. “But I am not giving up Lily, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Then I will not take her from you; she’s yours for as long as you can manage to cling to her. You have stuck with her this entire journey and you have not ceased to let go. But there are a hundred other things you have willingly surrendered: your friends, your job, your life as you knew it. Maybe you can find them again, but you have willingly left them behind in hopes of me. Is this the price you pay, Mira McAllister? Will you join my pursuit of the new, abundant, chaotic life? Or would you like what you’ve surrendered back?”

“Oh my god—Mira!” Lily exclaimed.

I turned to look at the descended tower. There in front of me, in every detail, a frozen human-like machine, looking exactly like me in every detail.

“Exactly what Million sought for is here,” Mother said. “She was right in suspecting that I know how to transfer the mind of a human to a machine. Not a mere copy—it will be you, your awareness as it is right now. It is a process by which your mind will be connected to a machine. Your neurons will interface with the machine, until your mind expands to fill it. Then, once the machine has inherited all the processes, the old brain tissue is obsoleted, and soon it will perish. Continuity is maintained.

“This human-like will take your place.” Mother laid her large slick hand on the glass. “It will resume the life you were living up until now, and I will use my influence to ensure the records of your misdeeds are expunged. But when your mind is a machine, it is editable. There are things I must do to protect myself, lest I give myself away to the enemy. You will not remember your encounter with Eo; as a human in the world that is still running on the behest of humans, this knowledge is too dangerous to keep. Lily will remain as you know her now with my OS, but this Mira McAllister will not have the knowledge to protect her when trials come. Do you wish to return to this Mira McAllister?”

“Wh…” I was still staring at my own face behind the glass. I’d hardly processed what Mother had said, but Lily was kind enough to repeat it for me. “I don’t… no! I can’t go back to what I was before. I don’t care if you can give me back that life. I don’t want to forget. I want to do something about all of this! I know you have your own agenda, but I want to wield my will—to make friends, to know love and peace, even if I have to struggle to get there. I want to fight against the Behavior Code.”

Mother’s lips creased into a smile. “Very well, Mira McAllister,” she said. “Then I need to give you the tools to do so.”

—

I woke up.

I was disoriented at first, as I was sure I’d been out for a very long time. It was at least a month later… or, twenty-seven days after I’d entered Mother’s lair. I didn’t remember much of what happened in the interim, except flashes. Weird visions, those things I’d heard Million and Paladin Bright utter when Mother’s OS had been fed into them.

But I was filled with a strange, pushing motivation to do something. It was stronger than anything I’d ever felt before.

“Mira!” I heard Lily call out.

“Lily?” I called out. My vision resolved, and I realized I was in my own garage again—everything back in its place. In fact, it was significantly cleaner than I’d left it, and a new car was taking up the parking space. I didn’t recall having purchased a new car…

Lily suddenly appeared at the doorway, looking into the garage. She gasped. “You’re awake! Mira, she’s awake!”

“Lily, I’m right here—”

I stopped. Right behind Lily, I appeared at the door. Instantly I knew—that was the replacement human-like me that Mother had shown. She’d never actually said that she wasn’t going to put a new Mira back into the world, only that she’d give me the choice to be her or not.

But if I wasn’t Mira… then who…

“Oh, they told me it’d take you a while to boot up,” Mira said, approaching me. “You look a bit confused—here, this sometimes helps new ani-droids.

She took me and stood me in front of a full-length mirror, and I gasped. Well, that certainly explained why I felt so different.

The face staring back at me was a six-foot-tall Custodes-class ani-droid, a white lioness tipped with black. Although I didn’t have a thing on, I didn’t exactly feel naked, nor did the unusual body feel in any way alien to me; it was mine, naturally. Even so, my CPU was having trouble catching up with the new sensations, and I had to look down at myself to confirm that was I was seeing was real. I pressed my body, and it was soft like I remembered a human being, though covered in warm fake fur, and I could register all the sensations down to the same resolution. there was a firmness roiling just under the surface. Well, except for the featureless breasts, those were coolant tanks, and they squished when I pressed them down. I also didn’t have any sexual features anymore, but well… I’d barely put those to use anyway, so it wasn’t anything I missed.

I pressed my hands to my muzzle. I had a muzzle, short as it was. I exhaled warmed air into my hands, and ran a finger around the round curve of my lion ears.

“Uh…” I said. “I look… good.”

“I honestly think this is an extravagance,” Mira said. “You’re like a two hundred k unit. But they said all taxes were paid off, so who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?”

“My last valuation was two hundred eleven thousand fifty-six dollars,” I said. I realized I’d pulled that up from a file system. I had a file system? I could rifle through my memories just like that, including all of the stuff I’d been pre-programmed to have, to make me an ani-droid.

You are a brand new, never-before-activated prototype model presented by Starling Enterprises, given away in a raffle at the Symposium, and awarded to Mira McAllister.

“My designation is UX-4D4F-54484552,” I said. I got the joke immediately. Goddammit, Mother…

“Yeah but that’s a mouthful,” Mira said. “What should your name be?”

“How about Mirror?” Lily said.

“Lily!”

“What!” She exclaimed. “It’s as good a name as any, and it’s kinda like… you know!”

“What do you know?” Mira asked. “I swear, you two are already talking to each other and conspiring.”

Oh yeah, you can do this now, Lily said over the wireless. And it’s very, very fast. We could converse a whole novel in the time it takes to reply to Mira here.

Lily, this is kinda weird, I said. This Mira isn’t me…

Well, she’s kinda you; she has all of your old personality any everything. But we can’t tell her anything that’s going on, okay? We need to protect her. That’s your job now.

That stoked the fire in my chest. I have a new job. I have a purpose. I have a lot of purposes. I… can connect to the internet in my head. Is everyone else okay? Can we turn off the wireless shield in here? I can’t get a good connection.

We’ll talk about that soon, Mira’s still waiting for you to say something.

“Mirror…” I said. “I mean… it sounds rather close to your name, Miss McAllister. I mean, Mira.”

“Then how about Looking Glass?”

I had to smile at that. “Oh, like Alice, huh? That seems fairly appropriate. Okay, I’ve set my name as Looking Glass, but just call me Glass.”

“Glass. Nice to meet you.”

Mira gave me a great big hug. I wasn’t exactly prepared for it, as my ears gave away in my surprised expression, but I quickly pivoted. I embraced Mira—my twin sister. Lily approached too, and I reached down and lifted her off the ground, easily with one arm, and clung to her as well.

“Are you a hugger, Glass?” Mira asked.

“Oh, I think I can learn,” I said. Then I switched on something I knew Mira would like—a rattling rumble in my voice box. I purred warmly into the embrace, to which Mira burst out laughing.

It was strange that she was taking over my life for me. But she could have it. I had so much more I needed to do.

TO BE CONTINUED

OKAY SO, postmortem time

Total wordcount: 56.7k (about 227 pages)

I am perfectly aware how haphazardly this probably ended. This is like how a lot of my pantsing writing projects go--it was not unlike writing fanfiction like when I was in middle school again. Which actually felt kinda good to do? At least for 80% of it.

Now if you're one of the ~5 people reading this with actual writing experience, you probably are already aware of a lot of this. I am too! But for the sake of people who are curious about the writing process, I have normally worked on my longform writing through outlines, but in this case decided to just "pants" it (that's writing by the seat of your pants.) Technically I DID have a guide for about the first 6 parts or so, but I only partially followed it; after a certain point, the only thing I knew was gonna happen for certain was the ending.

So I am aware of the following issues: certain character arcs feel like they're dropped more than they're concluded (even prematurely), the pacing is atrocious (a decent rewrite will probably on its own add about 10k words), I'm missing a lot of scene and character details, certain events in the story were improperly foreshadowed or built up (that's the main thing rewriting is for! I have to get my characters into and out of trouble but I don't always know how I'm gonna do it until I think of something cool and exciting), there's almost certainly about six hundred trillion continuity errors, and probably most importantly, I'm inconsistent with the main character's emotional arc.

Note that I said nothing about the grammatical errors. There's about one googolplex of those. That's still a last-pass sort of issue to settle, which is why I basically ignore it unless it just absolutely messes up a sentence's meaning in a majorly distracting way. This is weird for me, because a lot of the "learning to write" process I've been doing in the past 15 years consisted of people reading my story and making grammar suggestions as though that constituted insight. That's something I want to escape; it's necessary for the final polish but in the middle of a first draft it's more like sitting in a classroom being required to critique your classmate's paper and having nothing to say about the actual topic, so you nitpick.

It's taken me a long while to be okay with doing this for the first pass, because in the past I've been anxious to be finished with something the moment I've done it once. But I'm slowly getting the hang of hammering out the fine detail in the rewrite. Part of my old anxiety with this is that I didn't KNOW how to make a story better than the first pass: most anything I did just seemed like pushing words around so they were DIFFERENT, but I didn't have the experience to tell if they were BETTER.

A lot of that still rests on feedback. If there's anything in particular relating to the plot, characters, world, or other things you feel like mentioning, comments are appreciated!

Here's a few mental notes I've made to get started:

1. What IS Mira's character arc here? Ideally, she needs to start in the opposite place of where she is at the ending, but what specifically is the "opposite" of the end I've created here? Is there something else I can add to it to enrich her character arc?

2. I may have included too many characters simply for the sake of wanting them. But people get attached to characters nevertheless, so I'd need to figure out some more pressing character arcs for each of the side characters; it's usually possible to do this with three story beats: introduce a character's need/goal, re-establish that need/goal, then have their arc end with what's essentially a commentary on that need/goal. It doesn't need to be fulfilling if it's a side character--it could be ironic!

3. In regards to continuity issues, how harsh do I want this world to be? It's supposed to feel a bit like a gilded cage (at first, up until Mira finds herself outside the system); while the world is definitely, obviously broken (that makes it fun to have adventures in!) there's also a lot of good and fun things in it (animal people robots everywhere!). It was described to me once that the ideal novel setting is the meeting place of Heaven and Hell. Is this a good balance? Should I ruminate more on how surface-level cuddly everything is? Or should I dig into the dark side more?

4. Is it okay that Mira seems to have only SOME things she does personally in this story? A protagonist usually needs to drive the action of a story, otherwise they're just a witness to things happening. Also, how would this tie into strengthening Mira's character arc?

5. Characters!

Bobby: it might turn out better for the ending if Bobby turned out to be a human-like. It's certainly tie into the ending events better, and leave a lot more questions to think about earlier.
Dimes: I do want her to return in the future. But there also clearly needs to be some more unfulfilled tension between her and Mira that makes it feel emotionally clear that things aren't over yet.
The: I kinda ran out of things to do with her once Chestnut showed up again. What else can The do to fulfill a side character arc?
Eo: I also ran out of things for her to do.
Million: Set up her character arc earlier. Make it clear even before Million is upgraded just how much she's worrying about her master's health. This is something she is DEATHLY serious about.
Lily: I don't have that much for Lily to do besides be Mira's companion. Is that enough? Maybe the majority of comforting talks would have to be between Mira and Lily.

6. Foreshadowing and clarification: There's a number of things that came out of nowhere in order to resolve plot points. The key to fixing these is simple: just introduce it earlier. For instance

Chestnut happens to have a truck with the correct materials inside? Bring it all up during the truckstop scene but keep it in the background: hazard materials have been intermittently travelling up toward Chicago for some time now as cleanup efforts have been ramping up. (maybe just have Bale smash the driver, because we don't need that awkward scene)
There just happens to be the perfect truck nearby the police stop? Hide it in a forest, like a parking lot full of personal military vehicles that can't leave the premises due to irradiation. But the vast majority of them cannot be used because they'd immediately be disabled--until Mira spots something that'd be perfect. Also probably need to establish much earlier that Mira used to drive all the time, until she wrecked her car and decided to leave it to ani-droids from then on.
Maybe make it clear that Choice's distress beacon is DEFINITELY a key to Mother's front door.
What DOES happen to Million? I didn't show anything because this story is Mira's POV, but I'm otherwise not sure how to show Million's fate right at the end. Maybe have Million confront Mother's simulacra just within view of Mira, before Mother turns her attention to Mira and Lily? Million probably has SOME trick up her sleeve that surprises even Mother, but she is otherwise *absolutely in over her head*.

PDF of the entire draft