Perfect State deleted scene

This scene is to be read after you finish reading the novella. I do consider this to still be canon
for the world of  Perfect State, but I cut it for various reasons that I will discuss in the
subsequent annotations.

Melhi pushed idly with her foot, swinging her swiveling bucket chair first right, then left. Back
and forth in front of her monitor.

On her screen, Conan the Boy Scout talked to his sniveling machine-born servant about the
Wode.

Even his expressions are ridiculous, she thought, sipping on iced scotch from her glass. That
beard, like you’d find on some Greek statue. Sorrow, like sappy poetry. And that voice . . . every
sentence sounds like it’s from a movie trailer.

She tapped her glass with her fingernail. It felt good to be back in her bunker. Sleek, metallic,
and filled with all kinds of things that the Emperor Superhero would find amazing and magical.
Like flush toilets. She loved buffed steel décor; perhaps she should change it. Her comfort here
could mean she was becoming complacent again.

The others conversed in the conference chamber, their voices drifting in through her open
doorway. They sounded like barking dogs. Liveborn, every one. Accustomed to ruling the world,
to being the most important person in the room.

“I traveled through six states to be here!” Gnass’s voice. “Now she can’t be bothered to pull
herself away to join the meeting?”

“Who cares? The food is good.” That was Ho Nam. He would attend the execution of his
favorite nurse, so long as it was well catered.

“I’ll check on her,” Dionissa said, followed by footsteps.

Melhi continued to watch Kai on the screen, enjoying her drink. Data reports scrolled by on the
two screens next to his image.

“Sophie?” Dionissa asked from her doorway. “Are you coming to the meeting?”

“Don’t call me that,” Melhi said.

“Very well, dear.” Dionissa strolled in, then leaned down beside the terminals. She wore a filmy
blue dress, antiquated style, but had her hair in a pixie cut that was dyed bright pink.

Dionissa ignored Kai, studying the data streams. “Curious. They haven’t noticed?”
Melhi shook her head. “Not so far. Unless they can mask themselves from my sentries—which
they have never shown any sign of spotting before.”

“They locked you out,” she said, pointing. “Here, here. Here.”

“The obvious hacks,” Melhi said. “Which they think themselves clever for finding. The
distraction worked perfectly. Invade a communal state, send them into chaos. They think they’ve
isolated my touch, but they were so focused on my primary hacks that they didn’t find the riders.
My network expands.”

“We could actually do this.”

Melhi wasn’t certain what “this” was yet. But getting into the general system was a good step
forward, regardless of what direction the next part took. For months, the others had been
complaining that she was too overt, drawing too much attention. They said the Wode was going
to strike, cut her off. Doom their movement before it even got a chance to start.

So she’d done what she’d always done. Defy them all, even her allies. It had even been fun.

“Come, tell the others,” Dionissa said.

Melhi nodded her chin toward Kai, still on the screen. A data feed the Wode would certainly
have cut off if they’d known she could access it—proof, the best she could provide, that her
access to the system was unprecedented.

“He’s contacting nearby states,” Melhi said. “He’s accepted what he is, what we all are.”

“Melhi,” Dionissa asked flatly, “you can’t possibly be thinking of recruiting a fantasy stater.”

“You’re from ancient Rome.”

“Real Rome.”

“Fake real Rome.”

“That’s a long leap from fake Narnia. Look, you know how they are.”

Yes, she did. So easy to manipulate. So . . . straightforward. But also genuine. So little in her life
could be considered genuine. Even most Liveborn were as interested in power and inter-state
politics as they were in freedom from the Wode. Only Gnass was completely trustworthy, and
she had her hands full with her own projects.

Still, Melhi left Kai and the monitor, joining Dionissa and walking out into the conference room.
She’d spent years trying to wake up—or destroy—nearby staters. She didn’t really mind which
she accomplished. But that was losing its charm. She needed a bigger challenge.
“Welcome,” Melhi said to the group of five Liveborn. “So far as I know, this is the first meeting
of its kind. Completely obscured from the Wode, taking place in a state that they don’t even
know exists. We, ladies and gentleman, are trapped, imprisoned, confined to a nearly solitary
existence within a machine.

“Let’s talk about how to get out.”

Perfect State Annotation One: Why

I Cut the Deleted Scene
This story began with the idea of taking some common tropes in science fiction—the brain in a
jar, the Matrix-like virtual existence—and trying to flip them upside down. In every story I’ve
seen with these tropes, they’re presented as terrible signs of a dystopian existence. I asked
myself: What if putting people into a virtual existence turned out to be the right thing instead?
What if this weren’t a dystopia, but a valid and workable system, with huge benefits for
humankind?

Kai’s and Sophie’s stories grew out of this. I loved the idea that putting people into simulated
worlds might actually be the rational solution, instead of the terrifying one. An extreme, but
possibly logical, extrapolation of expanding populations and limited resources. There are certain
branches of philosophy that ask us to judge what is best for all of humankind. I think an
argument could be made for this case.
This is the first reason why I cut the deleted scene. It shifted the focus too much toward “Let’s
escape the Matrix” instead of the theme of technology doing great things at the price of
distancing us from human interaction.

All that said, Sophie’s arguments in the story do have validity. One of my thematic goals for the
story was to reinforce how the fakeness in Kai’s and Sophie’s lives undermines the very things
they’ve built their personalities upon.

For Kai, this is his heroism. The fact that there was never any actual danger for him meant that
he was playing a video game on easy mode—all the while assuming he was on the most hardcore
setting. This asks a question, however: if his heroism felt real to him, does it matter if he was
never in danger? I’m not sure, but I found it one of the more intriguing elements of the story to
contemplate.

Sophie has a similar built-in conflict. Just like Kai’s heroism is undermined by his safety net, her
revolutions and quests for human rights are undermined by the fact that she was fighting wars
that had already been won in the real world. Her state was intentionally built without these
things, just so she could earn them.

And yet, does the fact that the conflict has been won before make her own struggle any less
important and personal to her?

She thinks it does. She thinks that the conscious decision of the Wode to put her into a world
with fake problems and suffering is an unconscionable act. One that undermines any and all
progress she could have made.

I like that the deleted scene helps raise the stakes for questions like this. However, there’s a more
important reason why I felt I needed to cut it. And that has to do with a problem I have noticed
with my writing sometimes: The desire to have awesome twists just because they are
unexpected.

In early books, such as Elantris, this was a much more pervasive a problem for me. I was
eventually persuaded by my editor and agent that I should cut some of the twists from that book.
(There were several more twists in the ending; you can see the deleted scenes for Elantris
elsewhere on my website.) I was piling on too many surprises, and each was losing its impact
while at the same time diluting the story’s theme and message.

I felt like this ending was one “Gotcha!” too many. I see this problem in other stories—often
long, serialized works. The desire to keep things fresh by doing what the reader or viewer
absolutely would never expect. Some of these twists completely undermine character growth and
audience investment, all in the name of a sudden bang. Sometimes I worry that with twists, we
writers need to be a little less preoccupied with whether or not we can do something, and a little
more focused on whether it’s good for the story. (With apologies to Ian Malcolm.)

A twist should be a natural outgrowth of the story and its goals. In Perfect State, I decided that
my story was about Kai getting duped: duped by the Wode, then duped by Melhi. The twists in
the published version contributed to this goal, giving in-story proof that his heroism could be
manipulated, and that his existence had grown too comfortable.

I worried that the extra epilogue would divert the story away from these ideas. And so, in the
end, I cut it. (Though I’ll talk in the next annotation about some ramifications of this that still
trouble me.)