Plot

The plot of my story will be about a humanoid robot who is trying to fit in a future society that rejected artificial intelligence and robotic technology in the wake of a devastating war between humans and robots that left much of humanity destroyed.

The inciting incident is the robot escaping the lab where a group of technicians constructed him. He walks through city streets and observes that everyone else is human and they are prejudiced against robots. He comes across a store that sells household robots who work as slaves for humans. He goes to a library, where he learns information about the fateful war between humans and robots. He meets a police officer character who is initially afraid of robots but learns to be more respectful and open-minded. The robot and his officer friend see how every aspect of the society has been built around the fear of technology and the dehumanization of robots, despite the robots having human-level intelligence capabilities at this point.

7-Eleven

Lien stumbled into the store, her arms crossed tightly. Her body was breathless and her thoughts were racing. She was relieved, for she knew her child would be safe under the care of the nuns, but the whole ordeal had left her in a tumultuous state of mind. She needed a place to unwind, to stroll through, to forget. The neon sign of the 7-Eleven promised at least the first two items.

Sweetness had just received some money in the mail from Lula Ann. She could spend it on a fresh deck or cards, or her face cream, but at the moment all she wanted was a Slurpee. She found pleasure in small treats, because the broad strokes of her life—her uncommunicative daughter, her bitter insistence that her parenting methods had been necessary and beneficial—weighed much too heavily on her heart.

Mayor Hanover hadn’t been to a 7-Eleven in years. She was more of a champagne person than a Big Gulp person. But the campaign trail has a way of taking people to places beyond their comfort zones. She and her staff had a half hour to spare between fundraisers, and this cluttered, bright convenience store was the only place they could stop for some refreshments that wouldn’t topple their already strained schedule.

Character

  1. IMAGE:What does your character look like?

Mayor Geraldine Hanover is in her late fifties. She is aging gracefully. She has short, businesslike gray hair. She dresses professionally at all times—even her pajamas are courtly, like flannel versions of her signature pantsuits. She thinks her style makes her look dignified and official, but it has the unintended (and politically dangerous) consequence of stuffiness and artifice. She knows that the public, and her critics, will hold a much sharper magnifying glass to the way she looks and dresses compared to her male counterparts, so she always puts significant effort into planning out which shade of pearls to wear or which heel size is appropriate.

  1. VOICE:What does your character sound like?

Behind closed doors, the mayor speaks in a more relaxed, sometimes even blunt, tone. She only lets go of her politically savvy inhibitions when speaking with her most trusted associates (her family and a few of her staff members). In all other contexts, she speaks with authoritative, orthodox, stately carefulness. Decades of political and legal experience have conditioned her to behave almost robotically, but lately her shell of decorum has started to crack.

  1. DESIRE:What does your character want?

She wants to put an end to the crises plaguing her town. Her handling of a devastating storm last winter and its impacts on local infrastructure was the subject of merciless ridicule, and it set many townspeople against her. There have been several deaths due to opioids. She wants to improve the town’s education system, because the district has been lagging behind in academic test scores in recent years. She earnestly desires to solve these issues, so her care for the well-being of others is a major factor in her desire to remain in power, but she would be lying if she claimed re-election and a lifelong hunger for recognition have not also come into play.

  1. CONFLICT:Who/what gets in the way of your character getting this want?

For the first time in twenty years, she is facing a challenger in the upcoming primary election. Her competitor is younger, friendlier, does not have all the hefty baggage that comes with a decades-long political career, and is more adept at connecting with citizens in a way that seems genuine.

Recency Bias has caused the public to forget about Mayor Hanover’s previous accomplishments—helping the town recover from the 2008 recession, increasing awareness of mental health in schools, and championing environmental causes since the 90’s—and focus solely on her current fumbles. Her public image has never been spottier, and she needs to overhaul her entire persona if she wants to maintain her people’s trust (and coveted ballots).

  1. ACTION:What does your character do? This can be quite literal—what does the character physically do in the text? Or it can mean figuring out how your character tries to achieve their want.

She is weary of trying to be “hip” like her competitor because she worries it could make her look even more tone-deaf and out of touch than she already appears, but she has made some concrete efforts to be more attuned to the changes that are affecting her town. She has hired more diverse, people-oriented strategists and staff. She has been doing more groundwork, speaking directly to the residents and workers of the town to listen (or at least seem to listen) to their concerns. She is walking a fine line between cringeworthily clinging to relevance and coming across as a real human being who understands her constituents and their livelihoods, anxieties, and complexities.

 

The Mayor

“I’ve never lost my cool like that in a press conference before,” said the mayor. She exhaled, shut the office door, and threw her portfolio on the mahogany desk.

“You haven’t. I don’t think anyone was prepared for that,” replied her deputy, his eyes cautiously meeting hers. “You have to remember, this crisis has affected everyone in that audience, every reporter, every parent in this town. They all know someone who overdosed. It’s not political for them; it’s personal.”

She sunk into the leather swivel chair. It rolled almost as emphatically as her eyes.

“I know it’s personal, and I know they’re suffering, but it’s not my fault. I didn’t prescribe Oxycontin to anybody. I didn’t kill anyone. This town is too small to be creating such massive issues for itself. But I’m doing everything in my power to help, and it’s my job to be political—”

“It’s your job to serve the people of this village, and you simply cannot lash out at every heavy question a News 12 correspondent throws your way. Think of how it looked to the people in that auditorium, their foremost public servant behaving like a child because she didn’t appreciate a very valid question about three opioid deaths in one week.”

“I didn’t see it that way.”

“Well I did.”

There was a painful pause. The mayor said nothing.

“Listen, I’m not trying to make this any more difficult than it already is. We need to release a statement. An apology. We can’t just let this go,” said the deputy sternly.

“What am I supposed to say? ‘I’m a bad, bad mayor?’ That I should resign before I start shrieking at every journalist and addict and family of a victim in this town? That I’ve been nothing but a disappointment to everyone who’s ever trusted me? That I’m a petulant, incompetent piece of—”

“‘I didn’t mean to hurt you’ would be a decent start.”

A Dark Alley

Setting: A creepy alleyway 

The child had just finished his third day of second grade, and he was exhausted. The teacher was friendly, his classmates were pleasant, and he was already feeling more comfortable than he had felt in the old school. But any enthusiasm he had amassed throughout the day was gone now, transubstantiated into fatigue from six hours of learning and playing. All he wanted was to go home and lie in his soft bed with his favorite stuffed animal. 

He knew the safe, familiar path to get home. But it took thirty minutes, at a minimum, to follow that route. To a seven-year-old, thirty minutes is a century, and thirty minutes trekking across hard sidewalks and past indistinguishable brown buildings is a millennium of agony. So he decided to take a faster way home, through the dark alleys his mother had warned him never to even consider exploring. 

The buildings there were brown, too, but a different brown–more ancient, and more rugged. There were no sidewalks, only dirty gray tiles that somehow seemed both worn from the heavy footsteps of crowds of people and vacantly characterless, as if no one had ever touched their dull limestone surfaces with so much as a child’s sandal. The sky was invisible to the child, all he could see from his vantage point was dark bricks, then darker bricks, then nothing at all. 

A shiver fought its way down his tiny spine. He did not belong here. He kept walking. Every shadow could be a kidnapper. Every sound could be a monster. He had walked too far down the alley for turning around to be worthwhile, but he had a long way to go before he reached his familiar welcome mat. He was stuck in the middle, not lost, but unspeakably afraid.

The Astronaut

Night had not yet overtaken the pastel sky, but the moon was already visible. It was not quite a full moon, but it was not a perfect crescent either. It was caught in an inelegant phase somewhere in between. As the hours passed and the heavens dimmed, the moon grew more brilliant, and it greeted the eventide with a radiance that upstaged every other celestial body with natural ease.

An aging man gazed at the twilit sky from his porch. His craggy face was wise and rugged, with hollows like craters and dark eyes that gleamed like distant stars. The moon had always captivated him. It had been forty-seven years since he had stepped foot on its gray surface.

He struggled to recall the details of his mission—the number of rock samples he had taken; which of his crewmates had performed the transposition, docking, and extraction maneuver; the name of the aircraft carrier that had recovered him upon his return to earth—but he remembered the feeling. How could he forget that overwhelming trepidation and unstoppable hope? There were thousands of ways the mission could have failed. The spacecraft could have caught fire at any moment. A single computer error could have derailed the entire expedition. He could have lost connection with his support crew and capsule communicator back on his home planet. But none of the doomsday scenarios could have quelled his confidence in the potential of humanity and his primal curiosity about the workings of the universe. Back then, there was no person or circumstance in the galaxy that could stifle his spirit.

But eventually, the time came for him to come back down to earth. Earth is the most pragmatic planet, with its matter-of-fact food chains and businesslike seasonal transitions. It was no place for the man’s burgeoning young mind full of wild stellar aspirations and ideals. Yet it is also the only habitable planet, so the man had no alternative but to remain grounded on its dependable, safe, overfamiliar crust. The earth-dwellers welcomed him back with cheers and pride. He settled down in a decent neighborhood in a satisfactory state in an acceptable country on a tolerable earth. He fell in love with a moderately worldly woman and married. He bought a midnight blue house with a veranda with a reasonably attractive view of the stars. He sunk into a life of terrestrial mundanity and routine. It gradually ate away at his optimism until his soul was a dying star that gave birth to a black hole that had such powerful gravity it prevented any light from escaping.

The only thing that consoled him was his nightly ritual, the only ritual he enjoyed. At sunset every evening, he would wait for the moon to emerge. He closed his eyes and recollected the sensation of his feet touching the dusty crevices of the lunar landscape. He cherished the memory of looking at earth from hundreds of thousands of miles away and waving stupidly as if all of humanity could see him and collectively wave back. He remembered the soft, silvery haze that had shrouded his landing site and filled his heart with mystery. And in that fleeting moment, the gleaming orb in the sky didn’t seem so far away.