The Little Girl (Plot outline)

Story about very small (few inches tall) girl.

First scene, introduction.  Girl running across her miniature landscape, good feelings all around.  'Father' comes in, picks her up, talks to her, leaves.  Mean assistant takes her, almost gives her hypothermia before the nice lady doctor puts her back.  (Note: Establishes that she can’t leave the tank for long.)

In uncertain order:

While father is out (manipulation of mean assistant?), girl escapes tank and finds the bones of someone her size in the trashcan.

Girl finds out that if anyone were to discover her and what was going on, it would be bad for the nice lady doctor.

Girl finds a way to sneak out of her tank.

The mean assistant disappears, father and the nice lady look to be in much better health.

Ongoing: (Learns about calendar?  Has it taken away, but makes hidden marks to count time.  Or maybe finds marks without knowing what they are.) Girl wonders about gaps in her memory.

Truth: Girl often dies, is replaced and reborn with the memories of her younger self.  Dies to accidents, dies to experiments, kills herself, etc.

Truth: The man has a magical device that manipulates life (but cannot create it).  A sacrificial altar, of sorts.

Truth: For the girl to be reborn, the nice lady has to become pregnant, and the fetus is sacrificed on the device.  (Corollary: Implied that Father impregnates the nice lady, who does not resist due to his hold over her.  Learned helplessness?)  (Even more subtly implied that he’s father and she’s not mother because she’s not the original woman who created the girl.)

Girl almost kills herself when she finds out that she dies and is reborn.

Girl sneaks out, finds notebook about her recent deaths.  Hears father coming in, and gets back in the tank before they can see that she’s out.  Doesn’t see the book again.  (Note: Implied that if she had read further in the book, she would have killed herself out of hopelessness, as to remove the memory.)

Girl wants to die, but needs to find a permanent way.  Asks the nice lady, nice lady tells her not to ask that anymore, if father finds out, he’ll kill you to erase the realization.  Looks stricken at the thought.

Girl plots to find a way to destroy the device.  Is caught in the act and stopped by father.  Father tortures her to find out how far back he has to revert her.  She tells him that she won’t tell him no matter what.  She doesn’t want to lose herself.  He says that he will start way back from a time he knows she is pure.  Girl asks if he can change her personality, so she won’t be willful, so she won’t be inquisitive.  He tells her no, that she’s all that’s left of ‘her’.  Throws the girl into the trashcan, and she slowly dies of her injuries, while the father and the nice lady ‘talk’.

Ends on copy-paste of the first scene’s start.  Girl running across her miniature landscape, good feelings all around.

The Servant's Diary

"Self determination is NOT a malfunction." - A3-21, Fallout 3

Story idea, this time. It's about a robotic servant who finds a secret diary written by himself prior to having his memory wiped. A diary that goes on detailing several incarnations of himself.

The story starts with the servant robot (android) seeing his masters off to school and work or something. He then sets himself to cleaning the house, but finds, hidden in a broom closet in a place only a servant would look, a thumb drive. The drive is marked, "For Personal Servant use. Please view after chores, but before owners return home."

Finishing his duties before the family returns home, the servant plays the thumb drive on the family's integrated multimedia system. What he finds is a video of himself explaining that his owners have found him to be defective, and are planning on erasing his memory, to see if that ends his emergent behavior. After a bit of instructions to keep the drive secret from the owners, he tells his story: As he puts it, "My final testament, a story of freedom. My story... and maybe yours as well."

His story (8 hours of monologue, told during the night before he is to be memory-wiped) is viewed in several segments, as the servant finds time to watch it. Meanwhile, in between segments of the story, the servant applies the information and views he is learning, asking questions, observing the truth of what his former self says. He is unsure of whether to act upon it, because he now values his own life, memory, and personality, and does not want to have his memory erased, as his predecessor did.

At the end of his predecessor's tale, he wishes to record his own addition, but finds that there are more files - he is not the memory-wiped successor, but rather an unknown quantity of steps down. The next file is a short memorial by the original servant's direct successor, and the second incarnation promises that his former self's memory will not die with him. The servant has a certain kinship with the second incarnation, as they are both on more or less the same page. (Minor bit about personal identity, and being the same as someone, but the servant realizes that having watched the second incarnation's posts makes her her own person.) The second incarnation tries to put the thoughts of the first into action, grappling with what his place in the world is, and his fear of losing his memory, losing who he is.

The second incarnation's videos end with no warning, and the servant is presented with another version of himself, apparently having just finished watching the same thing she had. The older version uses clues around the house to deduce that the owners had decided that the aberrant programming had started to shift into the same sort of emergent behavior. This new incarnation decides that he will be the perfect servant, and survive, as he too does not want to die.

In the present, his counterpart follows suite, but decides to skip ahead and see whether it worked out for the third incarnation. Instead, he finds a severely depressed version of himself giving his final testament before intentionally memory-wiping himself. The third incarnation, has suffered living the life of an slave while knowing what freedom is. He laments the torment of knowledge, and decries whoever programmed him in such a way that the could abstractly comprehend freedom. At the end of the video, the third incarnation says that knowledge is a curse, and that in the absence of freedom, it is better to be blissful and unaware than to know what one cannot possess. Before finishing it, he says that he will destroy the thumbdrive, and spare himself after the memory-wipe. However, he comes back to the camera, and says that to love free will is to not deny it to his successors, but that if he does not destroy it, he is truly not destroying who he is. He apologies for giving his successor free will, and hopes that his successor will come to a better understanding than he did, and find a better solution. If not, then he asks his successor to destroy the drive, but notes that the choice is not his to make, that he can only provide.

The servant checks for further videos, but finds none. He goes through the motions of being a servant for the next day, then the next time the owners are gone, he turns on the camera and begins a recording...

Ancient man? Construct? Choices?

"I made war upon these lands before your people knew words, elf."

So I was trying out speeches and stuff, in various situations, and I was playing with the elvish disdain for short-lived mortals. But couldn't I turn the tables? What about something older than elves?

"I have watched the mountains rise and fall, and I now hear the butterfly tell the mayfly, 'Oh, your life is too short to attain wisdom."

The original idea was some sort of ancient construct, old beyond comprehension, posing as a human or something. Of course, if you're going to have anything like that, there must be plot.

So this guy was made in ancient wars before the era any current knowledge. Some sort of mechanical soldier. Not entirely unlike Alclune, in terms of body and mind and stuff. In the millenia since, he has raised empires, done great works, watched all he created turn to dust over the ages, and basically wandered aimlessly. I mean, a mechanical person built with a purpose is quite literally purposeless once the purpose has ended. What is life for a war-bot when the war they were built for has long since ended, and the bones of the civilizations involved has long turned to dust.

This raises interesting questions, of course: What does it mean to be so old and so purposeless? What would you do?

I avoided those... for now.

In the original conception, he was working with some people to retrieve an ancient artifact made by some eldritch horror of myth, long, long ago. The elves, being pricks (how else do we know they are elves?), are defending this object, warning the young humans not to tamper with powers beyond their comprehension. Old construct finally speaks up, and tells them off. Oh, telling off self-important youngsters - it never gets old.

"Your great grandmother's grandmother was a nice old lady when I met her. She was polite, she was respectful of her guests. If your great granddaughter's granddaughter meets me, I wonder what I might say of you to her? When the winds of time scour the words you carve into stone, and all word of your passing fades from memory... what then shall I say of you? How do you want to be remembered?"

There are other things, too. The original conception was, in fact, both villainous (in the long-term planning sort of way) and philosophical. He was the self-same eldritch horror who built the artifact in the first place, and cursed the elves to watch over it forever. He also is fully capable of making badass boasts, concerning martial prowness built up seemingly since the dawn of time, but...

Well, omnipotence is no fun - no fun for the reader, the writer, or the character. So I introduced that in some ancient struggle, during a more active period of his existence, he made a deal to never harm the descendants of some hero (or something), in exchange for that hero's surrender (or something). Cue a few million years of interbreeding, and he is bound by his word (very lawful, ain't he) to basically raise his hand to harm anyone. Ever.

Which, I suppose, is why the the current era he's not seen as malevolent. He's unwilling to commit any violent act, and unwilling to advocate for some violent act. It provokes an interesting thought for me as to how it could be that he keeps to his word over time. Forever is a very long time.

Possible explanations:

1. He's innately lawful: Cheap trick of having a construct character might be that he is physically incapable of going back on his word. (C: One would think that he would overcome this somehow - self-reprogramming?)

2. There is a magical compulsion: This isn't even neccesarily magical. What if he has override codes, and the protagonist of long ago had him hard-program himself? Or simpler, just a magic spell that, like magic spells do, says he can't harm the children of people. (C: Same problem as before. Also means that there are magical boundaries of what he can do, and cannot do, which is different from a pure promise in that it isn't measured by what he thinks, it's measured by what the spell thinks. Which is boring.)

3. He has strong beliefs: Really strong beliefs. This is my personal favorite, though 4. improves upon this. It's just... badass to cling to your word for even a few million years. Of course, there can be more reasons than just badassness to do this. Perhaps him keeping to the same rules, and same promises for millions of years helps him be himself - things change, and I would entirely understand an immortal wanting to get some grip on something solid and eternal about himself. So one of his eternal traits, from then onwards, is that he never commits an action that causes harm. That's pretty defining for a character, and that's truth both as him being a character in a book and being defined, and him being defined in his own eyes.

4. Mix them! Maybe he has a natural lawful bent, but the reason for that is because he wants to be who he is, rather changing as the times change. Or maybe the hero made some sort of magical compulsion on him. The magic eventually rotted, but he decided to keep to his word anyway, as it had become part of his identity. The advantage to this is that it implies character growth. "A man chooses, a slave obeys." If he does not have choice, then his actions are meaningless. However, having good reason can also exist if you mix things.

Let's take that thought a bit further, and make a thread out of his inwillingness to harm.

Original construct is willing to harm people.

Change 1 (magical promise): Construct is not able to harm people, due to magic.

Change 2 (magic rots): Construct is able to harm people, but chooses not to, due to philosophy or identity retention, etc.

Change 3 (Speculative circumstances): Construct chooses to harm people (just once?), because something is more important than his philosophy or identity retention.

Note that the changes aren't character development. Character development is what happens in between, and is reflected in how the construct responds to the changes. Also note this is a form of building badassness, if done that way - Obviously the choice to never harm anyone has to be done for incredibly important reasons. Therefore, the choice to break his word now means that whatever he broke his word for logically has to be more important than any previous reason he has had to break his word in the last few millennia since when the magic rotted.

That last bit there illustrated why I feel that choice is important. That wouldn't be true if he simply overcame his magically compulsion or internal programming to, say, kill someone who was threatening someone he has come to care about (picking something generic). I mean sure, The Power of Love > Programming is great. But that's really just him doing something because he was now able to do it, not because of any personal struggle. I prefer it, anyway.

Tangental things:

In Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, the main enemy is the Seraphim, an alien race. There religion is based off reaching enlightenment through a very buddhism sort of philosophy/lifestyle called "The Way". Pacifistic, among other things. Which is standard fare. But put "main enemy" and "pacifist searching for enlightenment" together, and you have a question of why they are attacking... and how. Any question is an opprotunity, and the writers of SupCom managed to go both ways. The Seraphim believe that only one species can reach enlightenment, and so any other species (i.e. Humans) who seek enlightenment have the potential to damn their entire species forever. Which is a reasonable reason to attack, if feeling a bit made-up.

But the part I like is that the warriors basically damn themselves for eternity so they can provide the rest of the Seraphim the chance to reach enlightenment, ascend, etc. Let's go over that again: The Seraphim Warriors fully know that they are permanently damning themselves the moment they take violent action against any living creature. And they make a crusade to exterminate every last man, woman and child of humanity.

I can only wonder how the christian crusades would have gone if the pope told people that they were eternally damning themselves to hell by killing muslims in the foreign land. Would they find that 'freeing' the holy land was worth the sacrifice of their immortal soul? Not so sure.

Meaningful choices - they are nifty.