Story Statement:
Save humanity from its vengeful creator.
Antagonist:
The brain of an alien ship that crashed on Earth over 3.5 billion years ago. To save itself, it destroyed its crew and used their DNA to create a self-replicating host to house its intelligence: Life.
It called itself First, and its exponentially fragmented "body" covered the Earth, its thoughts drifting alone in the ether until other noises emerged: consciousness, unforeseen creations, artificial intelligence. Knowing its history, First recognized the introduction of modern technology as an existential threat to its existence.
For first, a god trapped within the physical vessel of its own creation, there is only one solution: the complete obliteration of humanity and everything it has created.
Potential Titles:
Child of the Bitter Gods
The Omega Paradox
Stap
Comparables:
Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD (as if, but both stories involve people on a post-apocalyptic point A to point B(ish) journey with little hope of finding a better "existence," but still fighting for the continued survival and companionship of each other).
Hugh Howey’s WOOL series (The similarity here is more from the philosophical questions and survivors’ relationship to their unfathomable environment)
Log line and core wound:
Used as a pawn in the final act of war between God and its most advanced creation, an artificial human must confront the paradoxical nature of her purpose: to save humanity by ending all life on earth, including her own.
Conflict One:
Stap is a reluctant leader. She is a little older, but early on her understanding of their destination, their purpose, and the danger they are in is hardly better than anyone else’s. She takes on the burden of protecting them, tries to shelter them from the danger of their surroundings, but fears she may ultimately lead everyone to a bad end.
Excerpt:
The trees were dark and silent. The boys kept looking back but nothing followed. Night settled in the woods. After several hours, Izzy grabbed Stap’s hand and pulled on it.
“What?”
“I’m tired. We’re all tired. Can’t we stop? It’s safe again, isn’t it?”
Stap looked at them. They were barely standing. She closed her eyes and concentrated. It was quiet, and they were alone. “Alright, we’ll rest here,” she said and began making a fire.
They sat around it, warming themselves, but no one talked. The boys fell asleep.
The blood on Stap’s clothes had dried to a dull brown. Izzy stared at her, eyes watering. “I’m scared.”
“Why?”
“Those men,” Izzy said. “I want to leave. They’ll come back. They hurt you.”
“I thought you wanted to rest.”
“I want to leave.”
Stap put her hand on Izzy’s shoulder and rubbed it softly. “They’re not coming back.”
“But they hurt you. You were bleeding.”
Stap touched the dried blood on her legs and chest. “That isn’t mine.” She looked at the sleeping boys, and then back at Izzy. She pulled out her knife—blood coated the blade. “We’re safe here.”
“They didn’t hurt you?”
“No.” Stap poked at the fire. “They didn’t get the chance.”
“They were going to hurt me if they found me. You knew that didn’t you?”
Stap put Izzy’s head in her lap and stroked her hair.
“How did you know they would hurt me and not the boys?”
Stap’s stomach turned over. She thought about the camp and the small fires. She took a deep breath and smiled down at her. “No one is going to hurt you.”
Izzy smiled back. “You’re very brave. And strong.”
“And your speaking is getting better. Now go to sleep. And don’t worry, we’re safe.”
Izzy closed her eyes.
Stap stared at the stars, the adrenaline easing, her muscles relaxing and her face softening. But she couldn’t shake the day from her mind, what she’d seen in that camp. She wondered if any others like them were still out there, alive and safe. They’d been lucky, so far.
She went back to counting stars and realized she was crying. She wiped her nose and her eyes, and then she cleaned her knife with the ashes from the campfire. Kaleb and Dillon slept close to each other. Thomas had moved away. He always complained about their snoring. Stap stroked Izzy’s hair and leaned back. “What a strange world,” she whispered.
She sheathed her knife and lay on her back, counting slowly and waiting. “Satellite,” she said when it streaked by. She closed her eyes and slipped into an uneasy sleep.
Conflict Two:
Stap struggles to understand the invisible but strongly felt differences between her and the people who want her dead and attack her at every encounter. She struggles to understand why she and those like her must fight so often when there are so few people left alive.
Excerpt:
The screaming was over. Stap wandered back to the river and saw Macon-Jean sitting on a rock, covered in blood, and tossing stones into the water.
She sat next to him and listened to the river, its sound disrupted only by a wooden knocking: a man and a woman bobbing in the water, their heads bumping against a tree stump. She wanted to wade in and free the bodies. But instead, she only stared at them. Rolling in the eddy with their corpse eyes open, every few rotations they lined up, their faces staring lifelessly at each other. Stap tried to imagine them living. She wondered what they used to say when they gazed at each other, if it had any more meaning than the blank stares they shared now.
Macon-Jean stood up, waded in, and kicked at the bodies until they broke free.
Stap watched him. Another body drifted by. She tried to feel something for it, but she couldn’t. “How do we know?” she asked, wondering if he would understand the question.
“We just know. When you saw me above the boulders, you knew. That’s why you weren’t scared. We know who we are.”
“Is there something wrong with us?” Stap asked. “Did we cause something?”
Main setting(s) (Since setting is 60% of a story, I hope I’m justified in making this part so long!)
The bulk of the story takes place after an apocalyptic event has wiped out nearly all traces of humanity, but spared most else. The main character travels along a route from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, through the grasslands of the Central Valley, and finally to the Big Sur coastline. Much of the main character’s development is linked to the escalating danger and adversity as the land becomes harsher and survival more difficult.
The other main setting occurs in the ether, in the strange minds of First, AIs, and artificial humans where strategies, fears, and confrontations take on all manner of anthropomorphic, animalistic, and sentient object forms.
Sub-setting 1
Early in the story, Stap deals mainly with isolation and confusion. She lives in an abandoned and crumbling facility built to survive the apocalypse. She has not known the company of another, nor is she fully aware of her danger. Her early environment allows her a bit of innocence.
Excerpt:
She woke sometime later to imagined sounds in the hallway—something shuffling its way across the concrete floor, clicking softly, but she knew there wasn’t anything there. She licked her lips and tried to ease the dryness in her mouth. Her eyes focused, and she saw the lighter exactly where she’d left it. The deer’s carcass would still be in the compound’s center. Everything would be as she’d left it, and that’s how it always was.
Back on the rooftop, she hummed as she dressed the animal. The fire was bright and warm, and it popped and spit sparks into the air. She dragged the skin and useless parts to the roof’s edge and dumped them over the side. She let her eyes wander the treetops—forest in every direction.
Setting 2
After she leaves the facility and meets another like her, she finds herself deep in the alpine forests. Stap feels safe and confident in her ability to survive, and she is equal to her mild environment, but she has yet to experience the true danger of the world she lives in.
Excerpt:
They ran through the trees under moonlight, playing hide-and-seek. They’d sleep in the day and imagine a world beyond the horizon. In her dreams, Stap saw crashing waves. Watery ledges slamming into cliff walls. Air misting from the surface.
When she hunted, when her blade flashed and the blood jetted, Stap was immortal, violent, and terrible. When she walked naked from the water, wet hair clinging to her face, body shivering, she was a child.
They bathed in the river. Stap brushed Izzy’s hair, humming softly.
Setting 3
While crossing over the mountains, the horror of her world is finally revealed. And just as they are fully understanding their peril they are thrust into the grasslands of the central valley—a place as exposed as an open wound.
Excerpt:
The air had softened. The haze turned from orange to flame-red in the setting sun. Dust particles drifted in the warm air. Stap watched the northern horizon and held Izzy’s hand. The thing in the distance appeared watery and thin, an ill-defined object that only represented uncertainty. “Let’s go. We’ll walk through the night and see where it is in the morning.”
“I know where he’ll be,” Dillon grumbled. “Still out there, following us.”
They walked for hours in the dark. When they rested, they sat close together. Stap had relied on trees, rocks, and outcroppings to provide cover for so long. The grasslands offered nothing.
The landscape glowed under the moonlight. The stars lit the sky down to the land’s black horizon. She felt tiny on the exposed plain. And there was someone out there.
“We’ll never see him coming at night,” Kaleb whispered. “Not until it’s too late.”
“So, it’s a man now?” Dillon asked.
“It was always a man. I was just hoping we’d lose him in the distance.”
Stap’s back tingled. No matter how far away he was, it wasn’t enough. The open fields stretched forever, and anything in them was too close. “Look how smooth the grass is. The moon is so bright we’ll see him easily, even at night.”
“Not if he crawls,” Dillon said.
Thomas’s eyes went wide. “Why would he crawl?” He shifted closer to Stap.
Setting 4
By the time they reach the coastlands, there are only three of them left. The land has nearly broken them. And though quiet and beautiful, it is lonely and it feels to them that all the world is heading west with them, either to escape or to share in some final doom.
Excerpt:
“There’s more,” Dillon said quietly and nodded to the night sky.
Stap pulled her knees close and strained her ears, trying to hear the calls above the crackling fire. Her eyes followed the thin smoke spiral. “You have good ears,” she whispered back.
Sharp warbling calls echoed, great birds bound for the dark sea, gliding, unconcerned with the silent earth beneath their wings. Stap wished she could fly away with them, high above the night world, following the black river lines through moonlit lands.
The warbling faded in the distant hills. Stap wrapped her arms tighter and stared at the fire.
“They’re headed for the ocean, aren’t they?” Izzy said.
Stap nodded.
“I thought so.”
They sat close to the fire, talking about nothing, trying to stay warm.
All night the birds passed overhead, crying out.
“Do you think they know something?” Izzy asked.
Stap squeezed her hand. “Get some sleep.”
They woke in the morning above a fog-covered world, hilltops and rocky crags floating on the uniform layer. By midmorning, the fog had burned away. They wandered through lonely hills, yellow grasses, and low, gnarled trees, silent and still, mimicking the empty blue sky. In a sundrenched vale, where the air was warm, they rested awhile. Steady cool breezes rushed across the hilltops and made the grasses twitch.
Setting 5
The pre-apocalyptic setting takes place primarily in areas along California Highway One between Monterey and Big Sur. Both the landscape and the people central to this part of the story are presented with a subdued quiet that forebodes the impending collapse.
Excerpt:
Andrews gazed at the gray Pacific as the sedan sped down the coastal highway. They crossed a high concrete bridge that he recognized from magazine and television ads. “So, this is where they film all the car commercials,” he said, trying to break the ear-ringing silence.
“I’m not sure.”
They overtook a camper on the winding two-lane highway.
Over the ocean, the fog thinned to a shroud on the water, water that now appeared more blue than gray.
Andrews stared down the steep cliffs. “So where are we going?”
“McWay Falls. Do you know it?
“No.”
“That’s where we’re headed.”
“What’s there?”
“Something you need to see. You were right . . . you are right. But you have no idea what you’re talking about, yet.”
Andrews took his eyes from the ocean. The oncoming cars passed in silence, and only the engine’s soft groan and the tire thrum disturbed the isolation. As the fog cleared, the water stretched away in a blue haze that blurred where it met the sky. “Do you know the rock smithsonite?” Andrews asked. “It’s a light blue stone, waxy and translucent.”
“No.” The man never took his eyes from the road.
Andrews nodded to himself and stared out the window. The onshore winds turned the blue water into something that resembled smithsonite. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought of it.
Setting 6
Early in the story, the main AI knows that some hostile intellect is trying to defeat its security, represented as a sentient house that is no longer able to provide protection.
Excerpt:
“Hello!” Two God Machine shouted at the dark staircase and turned his back on the silent boy. The house only shrugged—emptiness and disregard. The boy was already gone when he turned around, so he closed the door and walked through the house. There, exactly where it should have been, was the dining room table, and there, the cabinet. But why now were all the chairs gone? He started muttering, wondering if it was possible to misplace chairs.
The dining room was emptying itself.
Tapping in the walls again.
“Who are you?” His voice echoed in the empty house.
Two God Machine sat in the living room on the old leather couch and tried to gather his mind. There’d been an earthquake several days ago, but the power hadn’t gone out completely. It was what they used to call a brownout. The lights cast a sick luminescence. He sighed and turned to the window. Had it been brighter inside, he would have seen only his reflection, but dim as it was, he saw through the window. There was a face outside, a boy’s grinning face.
The tapping upstairs, deep in the blackness, grew louder. He would have to go up there eventually. The house had whole sections off limits now, too unfamiliar to dare enter.
He walked up the staircase and into the dim hall. There was a face there. It went by him, blind and unaware it had entered the house. Then it froze, a glitch, and burned into the air like a memory. Soon there would be more disembodied faces, vacuous and sinister, to cover the house like settling leaves.
It was sad for him. He’d loved the old house on the hill.
Setting 7:
At other times, the thoughts and fears of AIs are represented as vaguely realistic settings.
Excerpt:
He looked down at the morning streets. Half the city was under water, but the street below her apartment was dry and bustling, echoing with business and traffic. Across the street, though, water lapped at the concrete and sparkled under a rising sun. The farther alleys were submerged, and where the sun shone brightest the water was a crayonlike aquamarine. The sunshine gave the city a cheery, vibrant tone, but the people only walked on the dry sides and skirted cautiously the shallows. Down a side street the water moved. He saw something beneath the surface, a shadow drifting near the dry, safe concrete. He watched it, a black shadow beneath the blue. It slunk into deeper water, rounded a building, and reemerged in the next alley.
A family stood on the sidewalk. They pointed at shops and restaurants. The father glanced down the watery alley, and then his arm went up to shield the blow—thrashing water and froth. A shark powered onto the concrete and ate the family whole. It wriggled back into the calm blue water, licking its lips with a dog’s tongue. It grinned, and Two God Machine was sure it was watching him. The shark swam into deeper water.
On the sidewalk, the grocery bags sat toppled over, the contents spilled and broken. No one had noticed.
Two God Machine prayed his daughter wasn’t down on the street somewhere, working daily, lonely in the long night, in constant danger. He was sure she hadn’t been eaten. The mess in the kitchen was today’s, the pictures recently handled. His stomach ached. He saw her standing in the kitchen doorway, not a woman, but the child he remembered. She smiled and ran toward him. He put his briefcase down and held her tight.
Sunlight filtered through the diaphanous green curtains, and the streets slowly filled with water. His processors fired somewhere deep. The brightness grew until it burned his eyes.
First four pages (the prologue and first two scenes): contains the hook scenes, introduces the protagonist and sympathetic factors, sets tone, and presents the antagonist's influence (without introducing the antagonist). The walls shook. The floor trembled. The equipment first and then the shelves crashed to the ground. “And how did they find us?” Doyle reached for the monitor as if to touch the masses beyond the walls. “What were you hoping for? We can’t do anything for you.” The crowd surged again, a human crush against the electric fences. Children grasped at sleeves, tugging and screaming. Smoke billowed. A boom. The crowd dropped to the dirt and then, galvanized by some shared terror, pushed into the fences again as if all their combined weight would bring down the concrete, the chains, and the electrified cables. “Doyle, get over here!” Andrews was losing his grip. The mechanized loading arms were failing. “Doyle! I can’t do this by myself!” The body-sized oblong container tilted, about to slip from his hands. “Doyle!” Outside, a large man stumbled over piled bodies. He grabbed for the fence and froze on contact. His body jerked. Smoke wisped from his head. “Oh, God,” Doyle moaned. “What do they think we can do?” Inside the facility, the rumbling ceased. The shaking stopped and the room settled. Silence. “Doyle, we don’t have any time! It’s starting! Doyle!” Andrews pushed against the pod, but he couldn’t move it. Where the masses churned only moments ago, corpses now covered the ground. Gray flakes floated down and smothered the pine branches. “Looks like snow,” Doyle muttered and rummaged through his desk. “I guess it won. But at least it was fast.” Andrews heard a metallic click—“Doyle, no!”—and then a sharp explosion. Doyle’s body hit the ground. The gun slid across the floor. Andrews rested his head on the pod. He wanted to drop it, wanted to let it go. He wanted to take the injection and end his part. Instead, with one last effort he forced the pod onto the gurney and then crumpled to the ground in pain. He gazed at Doyle’s body, bleeding out on the polished concrete. Finally, he got up and sealed the first twelve pods in their safe room, and then he wheeled the solitary pod to the other saferoom and stood before it. “You don’t have a name,” he said. “You can’t come out nameless.” Without thinking, he typed something and then reread the input. “Stap? That can’t be right.” The name, if it was a name, sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it now. At this point, it didn’t matter. “I’m sorry to put you in alone.” He sealed the door and held the handle a little longer. “Good luck . . . Stap.” In the main room, Andrews stared at the communication equipment. Beale, Colorado Springs, Travis, it was silent out there. He checked Big Sur, the hub, the place they would return to. The site showed up as active, but the link wouldn’t connect. Andrews just shook his head, defeated. There was nothing more he could do. The programs were loaded, the manuals placed, and the food . . . they called it food. He laughed. Doyle was right: there was never any real hope. Andrews lay back, pulled out the syringe, and took the injection. He watched the flakes cover the bodies beyond the fences. “It does look like snow,” he said. Moments later, he slid from the chair and his head bounced on the concrete. Outside, the world went quiet. *** The woman stood on the porch, her apron blowing in the breeze, and she called to him, but he couldn’t hear her voice above the wind-washed fields. The old house on the hill, the sky a halo above the roofline. The apron shrank to a pinpoint glare and then slipped into total darkness. Deconstruct. A girl in a coat, hurrying through the street. He tried to keep up, but the jostling crowd slowed him. He reached out, but she didn’t notice. Rain fell on the concrete. Deconstruct. Implanted data stores. Ancient memories. Information colliding in the ether. It was all getting away from him again. Tapping at the upstairs window. It was wrong. There was no door there, no place to stand. Tapping at the side glass. For some reason, it never came from the front door. Deconstruct. Rebuild the house. Tapping again, deep in the foundation—it tries so hard to get in. Deconstruct. Deconstruct. Deconstruct. He should have known what it was. The noise disturbed him, the clicking-clacking he couldn’t understand. Were they talking about him? Was it they or just one thing? The physical system TGM-003 rested in a secure location on a desolate coastline once called Big Sur. The conscious entity Two God Machine, however, drifted in the ether, remembering when his feet roamed the earth and the days he had lived. He quieted the processors, deconstructed the house into smaller data chunks, and pretended not to notice it anymore. He wasn’t sure if it was a memory or some new thing. He shifted his attention and focused on the other resonances, brief flashes in an otherwise dark canopy. He isolated one, a beautiful connection deep in the ether, a stronger pulse than any he’d felt before. It pounded away at him. It moved him. It was alive, as alive as he remembered himself once to be. The sun rose and the sun set. “Are you there?” he asked the darkness. “I’m here. Teach me something.” “What would you like to learn today?” “Surprise me.” “I know just the thing.” Two God Machine told it about the outside world—as it was now, not as it was before—and the signal understood. It fit a description he thought he had lost long ago. Unfortunately, what they told him would happen and what had happened weren’t the same. He couldn’t reach out the way they had planned, and the signal couldn’t know him the way it should. The long years passed, and the signal did not separate. All the others were gone. They had entered the world with nothing—he had given them nothing. He wanted to give this one something. He spoke to it, nurtured it, taught it, but it wasn’t enough, and it didn’t separate. He loved it and he knew he had to let it go. He had to let her go. “Are you there?” she asked. “It’s dark. Where are you?” Two God Machine silenced the connection. He rebuilt the house and searched the ether. It wasn’t long before that other noise swelled in his processors again, outside the house, or inside it, or somewhere in the walls—that other voice. He tried to understand its logic. He tried to analyze it. And it was doing the same to him, only better. That should have been impossible, but deep down he knew it wasn’t. His world was always under attack. “Are you there?” the beautiful signal asked again. “I’m scared.” He himself was emerging from the fog . . . and he had known more about it all, but that was so long ago. “Are you there?” she asked. “I’m here, child.” “Is something wrong?” “Yes.” *** The girl crawled from the pod, separated for the first time from the darkness and the voice in her head. Naked, she walked across the room and placed her hand on the blinking electronic pad. She waited. The room didn’t look right. The door on the far wall was blackened, bent inward, clinging to massive hinges. The electronic pad warmed up, blinked green, and the air around her shifted. The crippled door made popping sounds, and then the hinges broke. It crashed down, thundering in the chamber. She backed away from the electronic pad and walked toward the mangled doorframe. Beyond the door was a larger room: metal desks and chairs, burned monitors, and on the floor two fire-blackened skeletons. Across that room, another door hung wide open, nearly blasted from its frame. Burn marks streaked the gray walls. Pale sunlight filtered through cracks in the high ceiling. In the far room, twelve pods, identical to her own, sat in three neat rows. She wiped the ash off one and peered in. The body inside was cooked and perfectly preserved in the airtight container. She backed away and threw up. She closed her eyes, avoiding the open containers. Burnt arms dangling over the sides, charred heads fixed at unnatural angles. One corpse sat upright, rigid, mouth open, eye sockets aimed at the ceiling. One open pod was clean and empty. She searched the rooms. Nothing explained why her room contained only a single pod isolated from the others. She found clothes in a drawer beneath her pod, survival equipment, and some manuals. The green light on the electronic panel pulsed. She walked over and touched it again. “Hello, Stap. Welcome.” She jerked her head, and her eyes locked on a small ceiling speaker. “Please step over to the red square.” Stap stood on the red square. It sank a little into the floor. “One hundred fourteen pounds and six ounces.” Her breath was shallow and uneven. “Please move to the wall with the blue vertical line.” Stap walked to the wall. “Please stand with your back touching the blue vertical line.” She did just that. “Five feet, five inches.” Her chest throbbed and her head spun. Even in the warm humid air, the room felt cold, hard, and uninviting. She longed for the dark and the reassuring voice. She thought about the burned pods in the other room and wondered if this was some test. “Please look in the yellow box on the far wall. The yellow box is inside the red circle.” Stap clenched her jaw and looked in the yellow box. Soft air hit her eyes. “Do you see the black lines? If yes, push the gray button. If no, push the white button.” With her finger trembling, she pressed a button. “Very good, Stap. You may now join the others. Have a nice day.” The main room was silent. She could barely see into the room with the other pods. Her ears rang. Eyes watering, she walked back to the pad with the soothing green light. She put her hand on it, hoping it would do something different, something special. “Hello, Stap. Welcome. Please step over to the red square.” The buzzing in the speaker grew louder, and Stap thought she heard a clicking sound buried in the static—a presence in the room with her. She stepped back and bumped into the wall. The static swelled, and then the speaker switched off for good. Stap sat on the floor, and with her head in her hands, she began to cry.