MERCY — THE VOICE MEMO Raw transcript, 36,077 characters. This is the raw transcript of the author’s voice memo — as is, unedited: the “ums”, the repeats, the false starts, no paragraphs. This exact text was pasted into PromptyFlow (promptyflow.com) as the only input. The finished novel “Mercy” is alongside: compare the input and the output. The process is recorded in the walkthrough video “Write a novel from a rough voice memo — PromptyFlow full walkthrough”. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ okay so our job is to write a novel in six scenes, roughly six scenes, maybe a bit more, we’ll see, and let’s call it Mercy for now. So it’s a novel, um, social science fiction, in English, written kind of in the style of the Strugatskys, Stanislaw Lem. Yeah. I mean, uh, Bradbury, maybe. I mean it’s that kind of, uh, story, uh, and the voice has to be, uh, on the one hand kind of ordinary, you know? We’ve got, uh, uh- I mean it’s this reflective voice of a guy who lives in a totalitarian state and doesn’t realize it himself. Yeah. I mean, well, in that realist way he’s kind of narrating it to himself in his head. is going on, he’s basically not a bad guy, right, and, well, I mean, but overall it’s this ordinariness, right, I mean the language has to describe an ordinary, basically-makes-sense-to-him simple life on a simple pattern, and inside that pattern he explains it to himself in this simple calm way, right, well, realism but the fantastical kind, but at the same time the tension has to build up gradually, right, there’s gotta be something unsaid leaking through, uh, and every so often in the language, in the text, you get these little jabs, sharp, irritating, from, from- maybe from the realiz-from recognizing something creepy, or some other way, whatever. Anyway, but overall a simple, beautiful voice, right. And the plot should unfold gradually, not totally clear to the reader, right. And the main thing is that almost the whole, almost the whole story, right, is gonna be from the POV of the main character, an unreliable narrator. Let’s call him Rey. Rey lives on a planet, on some totalitarian one, where a few, well, he’s, I think, 25 to 27, that’s roughly his age, and on this planet about fifteen years ago a terrible war ended, right, and with, and from the edge, or the planet, anyway, the region where he lives, it’s gradually, really slowly coming back, in, like, atmosphere, in the whole, right, that’s, well, and historically too, though that’s not clear to him. Territory, right, so we have to be really careful here, uh, with all the names. Okay, I’m picking the recording back up. It cut off. So, right, about the names, right, since this is another planet after all, even though that shouldn’t be obvious right away, then we have to try not to use names of, well, say, Earth plants and animals, right, well, I mean Bird-tree is fine, right, but like snow or an apple, not so much. You can even use these kind of vague made-up names, right, he ate something that sounds like the name of some fruit or vegetable, but what exactly, unclear, right, I mean. I mean the point is, right, on a first read the reader shouldn’t get, basically, right, what’s going on here, that it’s another world, where and what and how any of it works, but on a second read he should start finding these scattered details, crumbs we tossed him, that let him put the whole picture back together, right, but these details have to be really carefully rationed, right, there should be very few of them. They’re scattered through the text, just a little, adding tension, you know? And honestly the story should be written so that for all the fairly detailed telling most of the events stay off-screen, right? Like, for example, the details of what’s going on between the main guy and the main girl. We and we got what’s happening between them more from hints, right, from gestures, slips, A look. Yeah. And that’s actually the most important thing, right, that line between the two of them, it’s physical, right, it’s there the whole time, but we never once name it directly. I mean not one bedroom scene, nothing like that, right, we don’t need any of that, it’d kill the whole thing. But the reader has to feel it the whole way through, right, like right there on the skin, yeah. Through how he looks at her, right, through where she sleeps, through what he says to himself and what he doesn’t. Yeah. And the main thing, right, is that he never admits it to himself, and that’s the key to the whole text really, right, he keeps putting some other word in the place of wanting her. Pity, mercy, responsibility, whatever. Yeah. Okay so the general plot is like this, right? A young guy lives in some totalitarian state. He doesn’t realize it himself, and it won a big military victory about fifteen years back. He… no need for the teacher thing I there I mean all of this should probably come to me in hints, subtle, subtle, out of the text, so, the young guy rey He’s coming home from work, he’s a teacher, he’s coming home from school late and at the edge of the forest, right? And he calls it the Big Forest, because the country’s still kind of- half in ruins, right, and, like, not far off there are these barely-controlled territories, I mean the cities are patrolled and all that, right. Well, anyway, there are these gray zones, and basically the outlying towns count as gray zones. Yeah. Well, basically he’s not scared, he’s just walking along and thinking about his beloved motherland, right. Yeah. Oh and the war, another important thing I forg uh his state fought it against some, well, also, other people, state, whatever, that they call Aisa. uh in what, uh what, what exactly this Ai-this Aisa is and the details generally, well they’re kind of hidden, right, we don’t sh-we don’t show any of that, right, all of it, well, we work from what the hero mutters to himself about it, uh, and we’re watching him from inside, right, because he, but I’ve got it narrated in first person past tense right I walked I saw I came up and the characters so Yeah, okay, moving on. Yeah, so, I just wanted to say that the telling has to work so that, uh, yeah, the hero isn’t gonna explain basic obvious stuff to himself, right, straight out, well, because to him it’s self-evident, right, and to build that, uh- Atmosphere, right, of the story we shouldn’t spell any of it out in plain words, right, all of it comes through actions, through hints, through what he sees, what his inner voice comments on, but behind that there’s always gotta be a second layer we never said out loud. And, and generally, that stuff I said about the war, about the aises and so on, none of it gets said out loud, it all runs along as one background, comes out of some, the reader should gradually taking into account, like a mosaic, right, the picture has to come together out of random excuses, things left hanging, throwaway lines and so on. Yeah, well, in gen Well, you can give a few simple basic clues, especially since the teacher works as a teacher at a school, right? And you can do one scene at the school, where he’s talking to the kids in the cl-in the classroom, and there you can drop in an extra, like, set of facts, so the teacher comes out as a more formed, more understandable face. Okay. So, uh-uh- The point is, right, these aises and their state got destroyed, right, they’re scattered, so to speak, right, and they’re surviving somewhere somehow, right, inside the country, right, in the controlled territories. These aises are basically in the position of, like, serfs, slaves, and in- Kind of, well, a lot of them just live in these ruined-out settlements, I don’t know, hiding in the forests, in ruins somewhere way out, right? And nobody pays them any attention as long as they don’t make trouble. Yeah. Well, again, and I’ll say it one more time, none of this gets stated directly. This is just so it’s understood. Yeah, so he the young guy is walking back and he sees at the edge, by a tree, a girl, settled in there nicely, in some odd clothing, the kind we’d recognize as a jumpsuit, zipped up. He walks over to her. Yeah, he right away he looks at her and right away he gets that she’s an ais, right? Well, he figures she came out of the Big Forest, got lost or something. So getting closer, he sees, okay, and just before this he’s walking through the woods thinking about how he hates aises, right, and loves the motherland, generally, right. I always loved the motherland and hated its enemies, that’s how he tells it, right, I mean he sees the girl, gets that she’s an Ais, right, and at first, okay, confusion, right, on the one hand he feels this hatred toward her, but not toward her, toward Ais in general, right, on the other hand she pulls at him, well, especially since she’s really beautiful there, and that pull is physical, right, his mouth goes dry, but he never says that word to himself, right, he tells himself he feels sorry for her, yeah, and she’s sitting there, she’s got, when he comes up blood running from her temple, right, so she’s. Either somebody hit her, or something’s wrong with her, right, and, like, part, uh, of the coverall is scorched, torn, uh, yeah. Well, and he gets it, he explains it to himself, that she was trying to- she got lost, or here, came out of the Big Forest, and somebody hurt her, and she’s sitting there. And he gets, Therefore, well, they’ll take her away. Underneath it Rey obviously knows what’s most likely gonna happen to her, right, that further on best case a concentration camp, and worst case a lot worse. But of course he calls it the sanitary service. Well, again, none of this needs saying out loud, it should. And plus, given where the aises stand, right, in society it’s already normal to work them pretty hard, and, well, this girl’s suddenly looking at him, he likes her, he’s obviously scared to admit to himself that she’s attractive, beautiful and all that, right, he’s always coming up with these constant excuses for himself, that he feels sorry for her, that he’s showing mercy, hence the story, so-called. and so he backs up sees she’s disoriented yeah holding her head gets that she she got hit and by the way do the aises speak the same language as the people in the country and he so though no probably maybe different ones No, probably different, different after all. And he talks to her, she clearly doesn’t get him, right, and can’t really say anything at all, disoriented, but she smiles at him, right, she looks at him and smiles, sitting under the tree, and when he holds out his hand she comes too, gets up to meet him, though she’s swaying, well, he catches her. Yeah. Well I mean he goes back and forth for a while about whether to call the sanitary service on her, and then he decides, okay, fine, he’ll take her home with him, his place isn’t far off, he brings her in, he’s got a small detached house, two floors. Yeah. Well, jumping ahead, let’s say his biography is such that, despite the fact that he works as a regular school te Even so his father’s got some serious position in security, in state security or the police, and so he’s always calling him to come serve the motherland somewhere, but he’d rather work with kids at the school. Though obviously, he calls it, it seems to him that he’ll do more good for the kids, right, teaching, than chasing some criminals around out there. But underneath we get it, right, somewhere, though he’s scared of it, of admitting it to himself, that he does feel uncomfortable with everything that’s going on, with the violence and all that. Yeah, that’s why he picked himself such a. A relatively safe job, but again we won’t say that out loud, that should never be said out loud at all. Okay, so he brings the girl home to his place, tries to talk to her, she can’t answer him anything, right, he gets that she doesn’t know the language, that surprises him a little, even the wild ones usually more or less. speak at least some. Well, he still kind of figures the reason is the girl’s head injury, right, that she forgot, forgot something, probably, where. Okay, so he brings her in and, so, kind of thinks about what to do with her next, right? She’s dirty, torn jumpsuit, he decides to undress her, she looks at him surprised, I mean she goes along with everything, right, but, let’s say, well, let’s say, she’s trying, on the one hand, to keep some distance, on the other hand to figure out at all what’s going on with her, well, I mean she’s disoriented, but, uh-uh-uh- Well, I mean, like, he, well, and he, well, he treats her like some kind of unconscious child, right? He figures she needs to be led by the little hand, she looks completely helpless to him and, how do I put it, like she’s lost her subjectivity, right? He undresses her, obviously, he’s got his own motives for that. Intimate ones, so to speak. But not so much because of that, right, he wants to help her, clean her up, deal with the wound, look and see if she’s all right and so on. Okay, but here’s the important bit, right, this is probably the first time in his life he’s seen a naked woman for real, right, I mean sure, training films, a museum, I don’t know what they’ve got over there, but like this, close up, close enough to touch - first time. And we’ve gotta give that, right, but again not head-on, we give it through the fact that he suddenly starts describing all this irrelevant stuff in enormous detail, right, the tap, the bottles on the shelf, anything, anything at all so he doesn’t have to describe her. Yeah. And something drops out from under him, right, that pull in the stomach, and he immediately explains it to himself, he’s tired, he’s hungry, whatever. Yeah. And he’s embarrassed, and he tells himself, what’s there to be embarrassed about, she’s only an ais. Yeah, and that embarrassment is the whole giveaway, right, because nobody gets embarrassed in front of a thing. Okay. Well, after, like, a little awkward moment, she goes along with it, he takes her to the bath, she washes up in the bath. Yeah, and he’s standing outside the door and for some reason he doesn’t leave, right, and he doesn’t understand himself why he isn’t leaving. Well, he’s meanwhile somehow, he a bit, seeing she doesn’t know the language, Fine, I mean some in simple words. Oh, yeah, I forgot too, before this he obviously introduces himself to her. I mean he says he’s Rey, asks her name, she doesn’t really get it, he names her Leia, right? Says, I’m Rey, and you’ll be Leia. I mean he’s also giving her a name, right. I mean in every symbolic sense he’s showing his complete control and ownership. Yeah. Well, dress her wound, and when she’s already coming out of the bath he gives her some clothes like that, feeds her, and then locks her in the bedroom upstairs and goes to sleep, yeah, roughly like that. And he’s down on the couch himself, by the way, right, that matters too, she’s got the bed. And he stands in the doorway a bit longer than he needs to, right, and then he goes. Yeah. Well, roughly like that. End of scene one, next scene. It’s the next day, he’s at school, so he’s talking, and here you can give a bit more context about his, so, history, talk about the Aises. But the class he got is a difficult one, experimental, sixth grade, and they’re asking these provocative questions, which uh-uh somebody like that, I mean, more precisely, they, well, one of them says the motherland has to take care of everyone out there, and about the a-aises too, right, well, I mean, provocative questions of that kind about where the aises fit in society, right, about how you’re supposed to treat them, so, uh-uh, he’s torn, he says the aises aren’t people, but you can’t treat them like non-people either. I mean he starts. And the main thing, right, is that he actually, uh-uh, here again in this scene you can show, uh-uh, again literally in the background, that his, you know, his arm starts itching, the one with, uh-uh, what’s left of a camp tattoo on it, right, so the reader would get it, right, that as a kid he himself, uh-uh, Rey was in a camp, in some concentra Well I mean like here, what, to show how complicated it is, how ambiguous the whole thing is, right, I mean we don’t know the reasons for this war and we don’t talk about it, obviously in the eyes of the Ais, oops, in Rey’s eyes, he obviously, his country’s in the right, but, well I mean he, well, like, says what Aises. bad ones, they tell all the horrors out there that they did. But at the same time, right, he says it’s every person’s duty to hate ais, right, well, I mean in this society of theirs clearly people are people, citizens, residents of the country, ais that’s not people. You can’t tell them apart on the outside, of course. But when he’s saying all this to the kids he feels this split, right, he, having said it, remembers He’s telling the kids just right now. Anyway, I think scene three is several days later already, and how Rey tells himself about the progress, how he-the one that happened. with Leia, right, that she already, obviously, feels herself, that she started picking up the language really fast, that she’s moving through the language with astonishing speed, right, yeah. He sits with her, talks, looks at her, she’s really beautiful, he’s admiring her. Well here I have to think about which moment exactly, maybe in this scene, and maybe the next one, I mean maybe the conversation about what she is, you can show that, though no, probably no point dragging it out, it’s just one scene, right? Maybe about a week later. Well I mean and Leia talks, right, in his, well, somewhat broken but already really good language, right, really nicely. He bought her some kids’ books with the words in them. Anyway, she picks everything up astonishingly fast, it blows him away. In the house, maybe, it started getting doubled up in there, at home everything’s tidy, the dishes, washed and all that. Well, I mean the house with Leia in it, Leia. A table, warmth, coziness, right? And again, out of the context we should get, again, from subtle, again, hints, this never gets said directly, that Rey and Leia most likely have a sexual thing going too. And how do you show that, right, well, say, the door upstairs doesn’t get locked anymore, right, and he never says a word about it, the key just quietly disappears out of the text. Yeah. Or he comes down in the morning and she’s already downstairs, and that’s it, right, nothing more. Or there’s one towel for the two of them, I don’t know, some little domestic thing like that, that says all of it by itself. Yeah, and no scenes, nothing, right, the reader just at some point realizes this has been going on for a while, and that he missed when it started, because it isn’t in the text either. Yeah. So look, about a week in they’ve got this going, right, and for Rey it’s completely self-evident, he doesn’t dwell on it at all, right, not one thought, not one doubt, it just simply is. Because she belongs to him, right, that’s the whole explanation, he doesn’t need another one. And more than that, right, this is probably the most important thing in the whole story - he’s doing it for her, as he sees it. I mean in his head he’s doing her a kindness, right. He’s responsible for her, he picked her up, he feeds her, treats her, registers her, yeah, and all of that sits in one single row for him, right, one more form of taking care of her, one more mercy. That’s how he says it to himself, that she’s better off, that she’s got it good with him, that where else would she live like this, yeah. And not once, right, not once does he ask what she wants, and it never even occurs to him that the question exists. Yeah. And this is where the reader flinches, right, and the hero doesn’t, the hero just carries on like nothing happened, and that gap is what the whole thing rests on. Well, he dis- he disposes of her, let’s say, like a kind, caring master. He feels like the full-on master of the house, and it seems to him all of this is absolutely normal, natural, he’s within his rights. And, well, uh, He tells her that she’s an ais, right, ais and not people. I mean she listened, and cried, burst into tears, said, well, obviously, that I’d figured about as much. Well, anyway, some dramatic story like that to hide. Yeah. Then, I think, the next scene is Rey’s conversation with his father, right? Well, maybe a short little scene here, well, rather than a big one, well, maybe, to-a bit more of, of, describing life generally, the everyday stuff, maybe he’s riding the metro, watching, also how out there, uh, people ride the metro, they see buses, public transport, and a lot of them nearby, out there, aises, well, and not nearby, maybe, for the aises, I think, There are, there’d be separate little pens on the bus, right, but the one with family, riding with family, they sit at the back, right, people sit up front, and if they’re carrying heavy stuff out there, helping with something, whatever, so, well, yeah. Well, and Rey’s looking at this and suddenly starts catching himself thinking that he’s looking at it with slightly different eyes because of Leia, at first he wanted to, right, so he’s walking through the city, through a nice park, say, right, he’s walking along, and everything’s kind of fine, he likes all of it, and he thinks, ooh, it’d be great to take a walk here with Leia, arm in arm, yeah, and he pushes that thought straight back down, right, because arm in arm is something else entirely, you don’t walk that way with an ais. Only it’s a shame she’s not registered, right. Well, that can also be in the background, in the early, in the earlier scenes it can sit there, that she needs to get registered, right, now And so he’s walking through this nice city, say, nice weather out there, sun, okay, and he’s thinking how great it’d be with Leia to take a walk here, and then get on a bus or whatever and watch, how out there, and think, so it turns out I’d be sitting up front and she’d be sitting at the back, and somehow that thought makes him a little uncomfortable. Well Well and he has a hard conversation, right, I mean he asks his father to help with the legalization, right, and the father’s obviously against it, says she’s trash, that she’s an a-a-ais, and that they all need wiping out, sanitary service and so on. Well, anyway, some emotional conversation like that. Rey says he hasn’t gone to his father for help that often, yeah. Well, anyway, short version, Rey’s happy, he’s got the permit for Leia’s registration, Leia comes home, well, or he just walks out of his father’s office and happily goes home to Leia. The next scene is Rey and Leia going to get registered at the inspector’s. Leia’s walking, she’s basically in the city for the first time, right, it’s already getting evening-y, well there’s still time before closing, closing, she’s looking around, taking it in surprised, right, maybe she out there, they run into some cop, and Leia looks at him a long time, right, and the cop out there starts going red in the face, realizing she’s an ais. and somebody out there says, look, look at him, I don’t know, look at his eyes or whatever, and Leia can’t figure out what’s happening, but she goes along with it. well, finally they go in to the inspector. the inspector’s this really soulless one, this, really indifferent one. Well, he obviously takes Leia as a thi, makes her undress, examines her, maybe photographs, out there, something, and right here, right, Rey suddenly feels this anger that somebody else is looking at her, right, and he doesn’t understand where the anger’s coming from, he brought her here himself. Yeah. I mean it’s jealousy, but that word isn’t there and can’t be, right, you don’t get jealous over a thing. Yeah, checks she’s got no brand on her, says by the regs the brand goes on the forehead, well, he says, maybe on the arm, and the inspector gives this dirty little smirk, right, and says, “I see.” Yeah, one word, “I see,” and that’s all, right, and Rey wants the floor to swallow him, because the inspector has understood everything about him, and they both know it, and out loud nothing has been said. Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I want, right, that’s the whole technique right there. And he also says, well, all right, sure, we can put it on the arm, but the patrols will give you hell, and you can always duplicate it later anyway. And I’d recommend sterilization. Yeah, and that sterilization line, right, it finishes the sentence for both of them, because why else would you. And Rey acts like he didn’t catch it. Okay, and Leia’s standing there through this conversation, probably, impassive, staring at the floor or at the wall, indifferent. Finally, well, the branding is this special device, they say, out there, you dial in the digits, you get the number red hot and… You burn the skin, right? And the inspector also asks Rey to help, to hold Leia so she doesn’t pull away. Yeah. Well, when it all happens, right, the smell of burnt meat, but Leia basically didn’t make a sound, and didn’t… barely flinched, twitched a little, braced her forehead, well I mean she obviously gets where all of this is going, and anyway she went along with it. And Rey, Rey feels, again, I mean on the one hand this doubleness, it seems to him, on the one hand, that everything happening, the happening is right, because, well, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Aises have to be registered, branded and that’s it, finally Leia will have, Leia will have all the papers, she’ll be able to walk around, go out, and everything will be, everything’s gonna be fine and quiet now. Well, still, this scene leaves him with this odd awkwardness and this inner not-getting-it, that. Well, Leia doesn’t say anything, he helps her get dressed. My arm hurts, she says, she thanks him, and he even handed her some ointment ahead of time, he gives it to her so she can put it on the burn. Well, anyway. And the inspector, right, he talks to her like she’s a little dog. Good girl, for not making a fuss out there and all that, and I mean he treats her very Well obviously, right, like a thing, like an animal, like a dog. When they come out onto the street they’re walking, right, Leia’s quiet, Rey doesn’t really get what’s going on, right, and this silence starts to offend him, and to make him angry, right, because to him it seems everything ended fine, Leia’s registration is done, and now she can go out on legal grounds. Nothing’ll happen to her, the sanitary service isn’t coming for her, there’s nothing on her now, and he only thinks he’s happy about this situation, though obviously on the other hand he must know this isn’t it at all, and that’s what starts making him furious. And suddenly they see a house across the way, where He walks up, jumps out. A guy drags out a boy, some boy or other, also with a brand on his forehead, thirteen years old, and starts, I don’t know, beating him with switches. Clearly furious about something. Well, I mean, well and, What do you expect from aises, they’re so clumsy, everything with them, they drop everything, break everything, well and obviously they have to be brought up right, right? Yeah. Well, that’s what switches are for, bringing up the aisish ones. And yeah. Well, he doesn’t much enjoy watching this, but he Leia, grabs her by the arm, tries, tries to cross over to the other side of the street. Somehow subconscious Well, she suddenly stops, steps off toward the two of them, leave him alone, you see. And the old man, oops, this, this, this, uh, guy who’s beating down the Ais, he goes into a rage, sees who’s talking to him, Leia, and maybe he notices the brand on her arm, gets that she’s an Ais. Well, and also here, uh, an important point, this needs saying separately, something. We’re not gonna reveal how an ais visually differs from people. By and large they don’t differ at all, right? Everybody, actually, inside this society, so to speak, they can tell by behavior, by clothing, by how you hold your body, right, ais or not ais. I mean the brand out there is purely a backup thing. But actually, obviously, people don’t differ from an ais in anything. But we don’t say th Overall, right, a thoughtful reader should come out with the conclusion that an ais really doesn’t differ from people in anything. Yeah. All, all this quote-unquote recognition is just a learned, so to speak, posture and type of behavior. Yeah. Well and when Leia, so to speak, says, Leave him alone. He looks, well, and maybe, he sees the brand on her arm, gets it, or what, ais, uh, well, this him, obviously, this, uh, guy who was smashing the boy, blows up from the rage, okay, and Rey somehow tries to smooth the thing over, and they pull him off, he’s saying, No, no, that’s it, it’s fine, fine. Sorry, we’re j And this same guy starts winding up on the boy again, right, and here Leia with this impulsive, deft move immobilizes him, knocks the switches out of his hand or just does some kind of takedown, and the guy goes down on the pavement from the pain. And Leia takes the boy by the hand and lifts him up. And everyone’s obviously watching in horror, in shock, and suddenly whistles go off on both sides, right? Police patrols come running from both sides, four guys on one side, three guys on the other, they panic, they’ve got no idea at all what to do, they’re already pulling batons out there, they run at them, and then Rey sees it like it’s all in slow motion, right, Leia suddenly turns into Short, precise strikes, moving fast, right, she takes out every one of the cops, okay, pretty hard, yeah. Uh, but not fatally. And literally a minute later, when it’s all over that fast, he looks around in horror at all of it, right, at this picture of beaten-up, so to speak, cops, groaning. This guy, right, now somebody’s gonna drive up and something’s gonna happen, it’s totally unclear. He grabs Leia by the arm, says run, she grabs the boy. Anyway, they start running away in a panic, no idea where they’re running, and behind them somewhere the cops’ whistles keep going. And finally the last scene, which completely flips the optics and generally puts everything back together. Here it’s already told from the POV of two pilots, two pilots of an alien recon-and-rescue cruiser, let’s call them, and they’ve clearly got these Earth ones, for example, David and Sam, well, I don’t know, we’ll pick something. those are typical names, so they’re flying, they’re shown, right, that a scout cutter’s cruising over some big unclear city, right, and they’re talking between themselves about how two weeks ago out there, ten days ago out there, an emergency signal came from down here, some cutter went down, some kind of accident happened, right, but Well, say, they talk about how they came down there from the ship that answered the signal, right, going off route. They talk about the best way to look for the pilot, right, given the planet turned out to be inhabited, that pilots in that situation are supposed to, if you end up on an inhabited planet, you’re supposed to. Hide, right, stay unnoticed, wait to be found. Well, the beacon’s not working. Well, I have to think about that one, actually. Is the beacon working or not working? Or maybe it is working. Probably the beacon’s working. They fly toward the beacon signal and maybe they’re talking about the best moment to make the drop and pick the pilot up, right? Well, they try to raise her, the radio’s not working out, right, say, I mean they get that… All they’ve got is the beacon, the signal’s really weak from the beacon, or say the beacon signal, right, probably, you have to get in closer, they fly over the city, they make, they wind circles, looking for this beacon signal, because it’s really weak, they’re trying to pin down the pilot, at this point already, almost desperately, or maybe the other way, they’re watching this whole situation from up high, what’s going on down in the city, suddenly they started to Sirens driving everywhere, they start, surprised, one of them says, let’s drop down lower, and the other one says, come on, what, we’ve been hunting this beacon for two days already, we can’t get a lock, the signal’s too weak, or maybe something happened. Yeah. Well I mean the general idea is that the cutter’s signal, after the signal from with the cutter, it destroyed itself, looks like, or it self-destructed on its own, Well, in theory it’s supposed to self-destruct, I think, in tech-level-four worlds. He’s watching what’s going on, trying to find the pilot roughly in this area, for many hours already, say, even a couple of days, circling, but for them to register the beacon, to get a lock on it, they’ve gotta drop down at least, like, a kilometer, two kilometers. Yeah. Well, he se-sees, this prison thing of some kind down below, it’s evening already, say, right, getting dark, okay, and sirens all over the city and the district, and this surprises them. They think, well, one of them’s talking the other one into it, come on, let’s go down and look, and the second one says, yeah, well, come on, let’s head back to base, well, base isn’t from here, the ship’s in orbit, Though no, no, that’s wrong. A rescue crew wouldn’t do it that way. Anyway, they decide to go down, they decide to drop lower, to catch the signal. Well, obviously, right, and they fly in, and, say, they… come down right onto Leia and these boys at the very last moment, when the cops out there have already got them surrounded, out there, maybe, surrounded, maybe they’ve got guns on them out there or something like that, right? Yeah. Or maybe Leia’s still fighting, maybe ten bodies lying there, but they’re already, already coming, out there, I don’t know, running in with shields and batons. Well, I have to thin How to make it more dynamic. And they see this, right, and they, say, put out some special gas or non-toxic radiation, okay. And everyone around them, accordingly, goes down, right. And Rey with the boy watches the rescue cutter coming down in horror and in shock. human, Earth ones, right? And, uh, the airlock opens, the hatch, okay, and they’re calling Leia, and Leia takes this boy by the hand, makes a step toward the ship, then turns and… Turns back to Rey and holds out her hand to him. Like, calling him along with her. Well, I think that’s where the story can end, right? I mean, break off. The story, so it’s clear that this is where he is, and that all of this is gonna end. Yeah. Well, it’s clear, right, that Leia actually turned out to be an alien pilot who crashed, who had to… hide. So she never actually lost her memory, right, she was just trying really hard not to stand out, right, and not to draw suspicion as much as she could, yeah. But with Rey, let’s say, she and him ended up with this, I mean, relationship, I mean, this arrangement. she’s grateful to him for the help, right, and on the other hand she just felt sorry for him, so she, let’s say, went along with him and, and with that too, right, I mean with that too. Yeah. And that’s probably the most terrifying place in the whole story if you land it right, right, because in the finale the reader has to reassemble that entire line from scratch and understand that she was choosing the whole time, right, and he thought the whole time that he was taking. Yeah. And again not one direct word about it, right, the optics just flip, and everything that already happened starts reading backwards. And tried to him, and, well, the reader should get that during those conversations, which out there one, one, we can show, in a bit more detail, uh, well, she was kind of trying to humanize him, so to speak, to get him thinking about it. with naive, naive provocative questions generally. Well I mean that she, well, the reader should come out with this final feeling, right, that she actually had the whole situation under control the entire time. And again, this never has to be said out loud, it should out of- just out of the facts, become clear. That she had the situation under control and just acted this way, because, well, first of all, obviously, she wanted to make minimal problems for herself and everyone around. And on the other hand, it seemed to her that this way she’d probably just be able to, well, let’s say, re-educate him. And she felt sorry for him, she did it out of mercy. Well, I mean To get it across here, that it isn’t that he took pity on her, actually she’s the one who took pity on him. Yeah. The end of the story.