Story Notes

So this was the novel I was working on before I abandoned it. First off, for the purposes of the
story contest, I should get zero credit for this one even if you love the ideas, because we should
be judged on our execution rather than just having good ideas.

I ended up losing energy on the project because the ideas didn't inspire me enough, and I also
wasn't sure if they were even good to start with. Nonetheless, I still think there's some good stuff
here, so I'm writing these notes to preserve that. I'll explain the general concept here, and each
chapter will have notes explaining what was supposed to happen in that chapter.

The premise was a reimagining of the Oracle at Delphi set in a cyberpunk university, exploring
themes of academic isolationism and gender as a social construct. I was trying to satirize my
problems with academia by setting the story in a futuristic university where all the professors
cared much more about personal status and funding than actually helping the world, resulting in
a Game of Thrones environment where they all backstabbed each other and used grad students
like pawns rather than doing anything productive.

Another problem I have with academia is how insulated it is from everyday society, so the
central tension of this story is that things are getting so bad for the grad students and staff that
they need to break out, but they can't, because they're trapped in the university bubble, which
was literally a giant Bubble. I was going to capitalize it and everything.

One genius professor sees the unsustainability of the system and decides to create a computer
that can predict the future to see how to stop the inevitable breakdown of the Bubble. The
computer tells her the faculty is hopeless, and the only hope is for the grad students and staff to
break free. The system is too corrupt, and needs to be completely abandoned. The computer
predicts a special leader among the students and staff, a messiah who will lead them all to
freedom.

The computer is the Oracle at Delphi. I love the story of Achilles: his mother goes to the Oracle,
asking how her son's name can go down in history. The Oracle tells her to dip her son in the
river Styx, which she does, holding him by the heel, which doesn't make it in the river.
Everywhere the water touches becomes invincible, turning Achilles into an absurdly powerful
super-soldier who can solo armies. The prophecy seems to be coming true, but then he gets hit
in his vulnerable heel by a poisoned arrow and dies. The prophecy comes true with an ironic
twist: Achillies' name does go down in history, but as a synonym for weakness.

Ironic twists in prophecies are fun, but I didn't want to go down the tragic route, so I turned to
another source of inspiration. This, unfortunately, was League of Legends. My favorite story in
that game is the story of a character called Poppy. Poppy feels like she doesn't fit in until she
joins the army. The army is the perfect place for her, and she learns a lot from her wise mentor.
Her wise mentor eventually dies, and tells her his secret: the weapon he's carrying is meant for
a mighty hero. With his dying breath, he entrusts her with the weapon, and she swears to
deliver it to the hero it's meant for.

After years of travelling the land searching for the mysterious hero, Poppy still doesn't find them.
It never occurs to Poppy that the deeds she accomplished in her search for the hero were
themselves heroic, and she has been the hero all along. She never realizes it, even to the end
of the story.

Here we have a prophecy with an ironic twist that ends positively. It was exactly what I wanted,
so I reworked the idea for my setting. A janitor was going to stumble on the computer, see its
prediction of a savior messiah, and set out to find him without realizing she was the messiah the
whole time.

Her misapprehension was going to hinge on a gendered pronoun, which would also hopefully
mislead the audience: the prophecy says something like "He will save us all", while the janitor
character identifies as a she. But this isn't a mistake: at the very beginning, as a throwaway line,
it's established that the genius professor who made the computer totally rejected gender as a
social construct and expressed that by using he/they/she interchangeably. Then the janitor goes
and saves everyone with the help of some friends.

So that was the general idea. After I planned out all the chapters, I found it incredibly hard to
write, for a variety of reasons: First, the overall premise was too over-the-top and overly critical.
It felt like I was someone with an ax to grind against academia, who was saying academic
institutions were totally broken and needed to be destroyed. This is the opposite of my actual
attitude. I love academia. Academic institutions have huge, glaring problems, but they're also
amazing, and I felt like the world I had in mind ridiculed universities to the degree of being
worthy of ridicule itself.

Second, the overall story structure felt unoriginal, unexciting, and uninspired. I felt like I was just
rewriting the Poppy story, and I couldn't think of a way to execute the prophetic twist in a
satisfying manner. This was partly due to the next problem, and partly because I felt like nothing
I was working with was truly my own. That sapped a lot of energy.

Third -- and this one's the biggest reason I quit -- I wasn't confident enough in gender theory to
deliver the story with all the subtlety and nuance such sensitive topics deserve. I wanted the
story to explore themes of gender very badly. One of the central characters was going to be a
genderless person questioning their own identity and place in the world, whose in-univerde
deconditioning process was going to serve as an allegory for the the my own deconditioning
process with respect to gender norms. Another one was going to be gender fluid and totally
badass, exploring the best aspects of streamer culture and amateur YouTube journalism (things
I normally despise). But given the overall tone, setting, and plot, I felt like these characters and
themes were going to read more as a handwavey "gender theory isn't important" at best, or as a
contemptuous "gender theory is ridiculous" at worst, none of which I wanted to say. The one
gender studies class I took in college in no way prepared me to tackle these issues, and
especially not in the form of a sci-fi novel.

So there you have it: the longest excuse for quitting I've ever managed to come up with. Each of
the chapters below will have bullet points explaining what was going to happen in them. For
your entertainment, I rewrote them in the style of a 4chan greentext. A few have been full
written.

(Prologue) The Egg

- Weird egg computer thing

- Dead body in piss and sweat
- Room is filthy

The start of the end of everything came quietly. There were no deafening clarions, no acrid
fumes, no flashing lights; no crowds to scream in abject horror; no shrouded figures speculating
in reverent whispers; nothing to suggest the magnitude of what had just been done. The sole
potential witness lay facedown on slick laboratory tile, eyes rolled back, hair matted, heartbeat
fading rapidly, unable to see the result of her creation.

It took the shape of a black egg the size of a watermelon, speckled with silicone computer chips
spaced at regular intervals, crisscrossed by innumerable silver wires arrayed in a delicate
geometric pattern. It hung noiselessly, suspended by a single, micron-thin strand in
near-vacuum conditions, contained by a sophisticated system of lasers inside a meticulously
engineered electromagnetic potential well, separated from the rest of the room by a thick pane
of tempered glass. Its transistors lay dormant, but ready.

Its resemblance to the ancient Fabergé jewels was no accident; it was a tribute to the Russian
heritage of its designer, a blending of the proud history of Soviet science and late-Romanov
style gemcraft. The initial Fabergé egg was commissioned as a celebration of Easter, a symbol
of rebirth; this egg would be no different. Its designer had made sure of that.

The Egg's immaculate opulence hung in stark contrast to the rest of her lab: a frenzied mess of
wires, screens, and keyboards; not-quite-finished electronics abandoned in not-quite-empty
takeout boxes; piles of ramshackle textbooks that would infuriate the least-motivated graduate
student and trouble the strongest-willed Jenga champion. Yes, she had poured everything into
The Egg; everything, as evidenced by her current state: curled into the fetal position, fingers
twitching, eyes rolled back and fluttering, consciousness a distant dream. Sweat intermingled
with tears and urine on the cold laboratory floor. Worse was soon to come.

Before she had flipped the switch, she thought back to the innumerable sleepless nights, the
overclocked neural pathways enhanced by illicit substances that later took their toll, the
heartbreaking failures and agonizingly slow successes, the wasteland of her social life, the total
abandonment of her once-idyllic career. A quarter-second of doubt flashed in her mind -- an
eternity for those overclocked neural pathways. It wasn't too late to get it all back. It wasn't too
late.

Tear ducts that had not leakedp for decades began to flood. A finger trembled against the
switch's cold, harsh metal.

She set her teeth and flipped it nonetheless.

A spark, a flash of light, a body's thud against that cold, unforgiving tile. The electrodes
connected to her temples and the thick metal coil plugged into the base of her spine were not
patient; they immediately began to extract the information she had painstakingly incubated over
decades. She had known what this process would entail, and she was prepared to make the
sacrifice. The end of the world was coming, and she was the only one who could prevent it.

As she breathed her last, the transistors sparked to life, and the egg began to thrum.

(Sera 1) Three reasons to like door hinges

- Be Sera, Bio professor

- Have massive money problems
- All money came from Kovalevskya
- Kovalevskya missing for weeks now
- Beingpoorsucks.jpg
- Sera negotiating with Chem professor
- Big vote coming up
- Sera: I vote for you, you give me $$$
- Fine
- Grad students are trash

Sera liked door hinges for three reasons.

The first was their antiquity. The door hinge was obsolete long before anyone’s grandmother
emerged from the womb -- emerged, most likely, to the near-soundless whisper of a
doorhingeless automatic door sliding open to admit a nurse drone on a cleaning protocol.
Hospital birthing rooms at the university were so sterile they had a way of making even birth
seem lifeless. The door hinge, by contrast, was a reminder of simpler times, times when
technology required the warmth of human contact.

The second reason was their rarity. Even if she scoured the entire university looking for people
who knew what a door hinge was, she probably wouldn’t be able to fill the tiny room she
currently occupied. This lack of knowledge allowed her to exploit particular door hinge
properties to her advantage. The door hinges guarding her current room were engineered to her
meticulous specifications, opening slowly unless the user applied an upward force at a particular
angle; their creak served as an unexpected, off-the-grid alarm system. It was a valuable thing --
off-the-grid was becoming increasingly rare these days.

The third was that “door hinge”, contrary to popular belief, was something that rhymes with
“orange”.

“Damn noise,” her guest grumbled, door creaking shut behind him.

“We all have our foibles,” she replied with a shrug, glancing at his eyepatch.

Oliver Strauss was a giant of a man, standing nearly seven feet tall, with musculature and
political acumen to match. As he entered, he had to stoop a little to avoid bumping his head
against the lintel. Sera wondered how much of his stature was natural, and how much was due
to gene therapy. Not that there was much of a difference these days.

He looked around, surveying the odd room. It was dim and cramped, lit exclusively by a pair of
flickering candles at the center of the desk she sat behind. The room bore no adornment, no
paperwork, no trace of personality -- just two chairs positioned across a slab of ancient
mahogany. Long shadows danced across barren walls.

“Welcome, Professor Strauss.”

She motioned for him to take a seat. There was barely enough space to pull the chair back
enough, but he managed to avoid the back wall and squeeze in. It was too small for him; his
knees bent at acute angles and his arms spilled over skinny armrests. The frail frame groaned
under his massive one, but held.

“Reznik was tenured today,” she told him. His good eye stared back at her, unblinking, piercing
green. She watched his chest rise and fall, trying to gauge his reaction. His breathing was deep,
slow, calm. She knew what he was communicating with his silence: This is old news. Your
strange room does not upset me. I am comfortable. I know what we’re doing here.

She was using one of the oldest tactics in the political playbook, first codified in Chapter 4 of
Machiavelli’s seminal publication The Professor:

Truths are powerful because they are useful. But truths are also powerful because they are not
useful. Feeding truths to your opponent, as long they cannot use them against you, is a powerful
strategy. Always throttle information.

“The Math department is growing stronger,” Sera continued, ignoring his silence. “On faculty
alone, they are already competitive with ME and DSE. And while Reznik may not be a major
player in the game, he is a major pawn. His research -- “
“Is that why we’re meeting in this hellhole? To waste our time discussing trivialities that turned
stale weeks ago?” Strauss spat, green eye burning cold. Sera gazed into it despite its
genetically enhanced ability to detect emotional cues. Politics was about relationships, and
Strauss’s respect was far more important than minor cerebral advantages.

“Please, Strauss. Pleasantries constitute an important part of human social interaction,” she
replied, refusing to break eye contact, “and being summoned here is an honor. I personally
designed this room for my most important guests. Aside from myself, you are the second person
to step foot in it.”

Another meaningless truth, designed to keep Strauss thinking. Let him wonder who that first
person was.

He blinked -- a minor victory, but she savored it nonetheless. As soon as he’d walked in, she’d
sectioned off a part of her parietal lobe to count his heart rate. It was slightly elevated, even
considering his age. Good. His discomfort was palpable here, deep within the bowels of the
Physics department, entombed in this technologically barren meeting chamber. Uncomfortable
people were easier to negotiate with. Uncomfortable people make mistakes.

“Regardless,” Sera continued, “I can see you’re keen for haste. Very well -- let us be honest with
one another. We both know my department is experiencing funding troubles. We both know your
election is coming up. My vote is open for purchase.”

Another blink -- another victory. Sera didn’t need Strauss’ eye to see the calculations he was
making, the understandings he was coming to.

Do not mistake words for communication. Every text has a subtext, and while the text may constitute
ten percent of communication, the subtext contains the other ninety.

“I will need time,” said Strauss, a full quarter-second faster than Sera expected. A stall? Or
something more?

“No,” she replied, “This must be done now. We both know the position you’re in. I’m on the cusp
of financial ruin. The election is only a week away. We do this here, we do this now. There’s no
other way.”

“And if I say no?”

“I abstain, and wish you the best of luck.”

His eye gazed steadily forward, calculating. Her offer was tempting, and just not-tempting
enough to be a trap. An abstention didn’t guarantee his loss -- they both knew that. But it did
erode away at his most important resource: time. Without Sera’s vote, Strauss would have to
spend more hours arranging meetings with Mechanical and Computer Science, courting them,
negotiating. Or he could buy her vote here and now, and turn his attention to other things.

“I accept,” Strauss finally said, exactly as fast as Sera had anticipated.

“Excellent,” smiled Sera. “Dispatch a grad student to meet with one of mine and they’ll hash out
the specifics.”

“Disposable?”

“Of course.”

She saw the twitch: an immediate, reflexive reach toward the phone in his inner pocket,
suppressed just as quickly, resulting in a near-invisible shake of his right hand. He tried to pass
it off as an involuntary muscle spasm as he shifted his weight onto it, getting up from the chair.

So he knows. The doorhinges, the lighting -- they weren’t for atmosphere. No, this was Sera’s
newly-created anti-tech chamber, a room where anything designed after the Age of Electricity
was as useful as a grad student in a political negotiation.

But how? A new cybernetic augment, with the ability to perceive electromagnetic fields? A
genetic enhancement to his all-seeing eye? A tip-off from one of the grad students who built it?

“Wait -- before you go, I heard your Chemical department was having some recruiting troubles. I
have a solution. Poetry is a bit of a hobby of mine, you see, and I came up with this recruiting
jingle for you:

‘There’s so much in the world to see! The best of it is called Chem E! Opportunity, bright and
orange! Swinging open, like a -- “

“Nothing rhymes with orange,” he interrupted, rising, and left.

(Jordyn 1)
- Weirdroom.jpg
- Creepy people in control room
- "They're a particularly rebellious one. Increase the suggestibility factor."
- Naked person (Jordyn) on operating table hooked up to computers
- Computers do random shit to naked person while control room watches
- Computers keep doing random shit
- Finally stop
- "The conditioning process was successful."
 - Jordyn now takes orders unquestioningly
- Weirdmoth.jpg

“Control, this is Operator. All systems normal.”

“Copy that, Operator. Engage.”

(Enna 1) Debugging in a literal sense

- Be Enna
- Have badass father
- Father teaches her important lessons with wise anecdotes
- "Sometimes things are better when they’re broken"
- Enna also badass
- Physical prowess, Jenga champion
- Hates Big University power structure and politics
- Loves learning
- Finds strange moth in university computer servers (The Root)

“Have you ever heard of The Harvard Mark II?”

“No...”

“It was an early prototype of the computer. It was made in 1947 -- over 200 years ago. Back
then, computers were big, you understand. Massive things. They needed to fill rooms and
rooms with hardware to do simple multiplication. Well, legend has it a woman named Grace
Hopper was performing routine maintenance on the Harvard Mark II when it broke down. She
went into the rooms and found a moth trapped in one of the relays.”

“A moth?”

“Yeah, a moth. She submitted an error report: ‘Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual
case of bug being found.’ It’s the first known case of a literal ‘debugging’ in computer science. A
lot of people think it’s why the term ‘bug’ means an ‘error’ to this day. And that incident is by far
the most famous part of the story of the Harvard Mark II -- a literal breakthrough in computer
science.”

An eyeroll, a sigh, a hand wiping a tearstained face dry.

“So what did you learn?”

“... Moths are bad?”

A warm smile, an understanding nod.

“Moths can be bad. But they’re not always bad. Here’s what I learned: we don’t want things to
break, right? We’re happiest when everything’s working just like we expect them to. This circuit
board you broke -- it was designed for a specific function, and now it can’t perform that function
anymore, and now we’re both sad. But life is such a funny thing. Sometimes, things are better
when they’re broken than when they’re working.”

Life is such a funny thing. The words of Enna’s father returned to her as she crouched in wait,
muscles tensed, waiting. Funny how things come full circle.

Her quarry had been troublesome. It had eluded her for the better part of the day, ducking and
weaving between the wires, always just beyond her fingertips. But its mercurial tactics hadn’t
fazed her. She had chased it relentlessly, heedless of time or exertion, and her hard work was
paying off now.

She was part viper, part panther, part praying mantis. She sat in a low crouch, weight distributed
evenly, right hand palm-down and extended for balance, left arm reared back and clawed, ready
to strike. Her only movement was the shifting of her eyes, pupils tracking every detail of her
prey’s movement as it flitted within its transitory prison. As she watched, she became attuned to
the creature’s predilections -- a high flutter here, a dip there. It would tire soon.

A solitary bead of sweat slid down her cheek, clinging to her face. She clenched teeth, biting
back her acrimony, but the tensing of her jaw only exacerbated the issue. The bead slid further
down; it now hung near-chin, precariously low. She dared not twitch, nor blink, nor breathe. As
she prayed to the gods of surface tension, her prey flitted to a stop --

She struck. Arm shot through dense wiring, fingers closed, and hand retracted in one smooth,
flawless motion, the precision of a virtuoso pianist married to the quickness of a lightning strike.
The instant she had seen the opening, she had known her hunt was over. The Root was her
domain; she knew the future here.

The moth wiggled helplessly between her fingers. She held it with the gingerness only a
champion Jenga player could bring to bear, lifting her prize up to her eyes so she could study its
patterned wings. They were dark brown, near-black, with diamond splotches of white and silver
connected by thin strands of the same colors. She inhaled for the first time in an age, admiring
it.

It really was quite beautiful. Its wings reminded her of all the engineering her parents had made
her learn when she was young, all those power supplies and soldering irons and oscilloscopes
-- fragile, technical things requiring a firm, yet gentle touch. She thought of all those nights
hunched over smoking circuit boards, bending them to her will. She had always been good at it,
but never managed to get truly interested. No matter how hard her parents had prodded her,
she had always preferred playing Jenga and watching movies.

“Consider yourself debugged,” she said to it, and tried not to think about her father.

An especially loud thrum from a nearby server casing seemed to be the universe’s way of
voicing its disapproval.

She stood within The Root, the university’s subterranean central server farm, their locus of
every department’s power. All around her, towering monoliths of aging hardware hummed and
buzzed as zettabytes of information careened through myriad avenues: from nanofibers even
the most supremely enhanced optic nerves couldn’t sufficiently magnify, to cables bundled wider
than the pillars of the Parthenon. All of these were color-coded, forming a rainbow forest of
matte plastics, a simultaneously vibrant-yet-mundane explosion of color interspersed with an
endless constellation of whirring fans and blinking lights. Only a single, tiny, moth-shaped
aperture amidst the computational foliage betrayed what had just transpired.

Enna used her free hand to tidy up the disturbance. It was her job, after all.

Being a custodian at the university was not at all exciting, contrary to what the tone of the
recruitment pamphlets might lead one to believe. Hours on the clock mainly entailed sitting
back, tidying up your fingernails, and watching a maintenance bot do your work better than you
ever could. Sometimes, she wondered why the place even bothered to hire people to do these
jobs. But she kept these thoughts to herself -- she’d never complain about the easy paycheck.
And besides, she had excellent cuticles now.

The moth sighting had been her first spot of thrill for months. She first glimpsed it on The Root’s
boundary, just before the sunrays ended. It had to have somehow slipped through a vent during
a power outage -- that’s the only way it could’ve evaded the maintenance bots. Her competitive
instinct had kicked in then, and she had chased it for days as it meandered deep within The
Root’s tangled undergrowth, flying just high enough to evade her itching fingers. Thirst started
becoming a problem after day one, with hunger soon to follow. She had been lucky the moth
had flown directly through the path of one of her food stashes -- otherwise, she might have
given up entirely.

----------

It was time to make her exit. She knew the way. The Root’s outer layer was as familiar to her as
her own apartment; she often disappeared within its cables for days at a time to train, or to
avoid any real work, living off what she could scavenge from the IT department’s discarded
scraps. It was fun to race the maintenance bots to the remains: either she’d barely make it in
time, or she’d go hungry.
She had never made it past The Root’s outer layer, though. She only ever ventured a week or
so in at a time, never deep enough to see the full extent of the structure’s massive size. That
was the job of the IT department. She would sometimes survey them from behind a web of
cables as they trekked through one of The Root’s main thoroughfares, encased in their heavy
excavation gear, looking inhuman.

Ever since The Root’s construction had begun, it had never stopped growing. Even now, a crew
of highly trained IT professionals was tunnelling deeper towards Earth’s core, expanding the
university’s ever-increasing need for computing capacity. Last she heard, it would take several
months to reach the digging.

The moth fluttered once more within her grasp. She blinked, breaking the wings’ hypnotic spell,
and began the journey out.

(Sera 2)
- Sera still needs moolah
- Pretty much desperate at this point, will do anything for cash
- Sends some rando staff member to check on Kovalevskya
- Literally doesn't matter who she picks
- New meeting with some other university dept head
- More political info:
- CS dept rich as fuck, but understaffed
- No one wants to study computer science
- CS dept started top-secret super-soldier conditioning program
- Turns people into drones
- Literally everyone knows about it

(Jordyn 2)
- Still mindlessly taking orders
- Exploring many different university biomes
- Wowsocool.png
- The Root keeps growing

(Enna 2) Another meaningless assignment whose tedium is only bearable

when contextualized within an ocean of similar banality
- Enna receives assignment from Sera: find Kovalevskya
- The Root: “economically minimalist”
- “Bad times are what the good times roll down”
- University bad
Enna emerged from The Root and exulted, basking in the daylight, letting it wash across her
sun-starved face and arms. She had been carrying her moth for three days under the harsh
fluorescent lighting of “economically minimalist” server design, and the warmth of natural rays
were a comfort to eyes and skin alike. She smiled for the first time in a while.

“You know how they say ‘let the good times roll’? Well, the bad times are what the good times
roll down,” as her father said.

Her journey out hadn’t been difficult; just boring. The most exciting part had been fashioning a
moth cage from a Dead Zone -- those areas in The Root that were no longer operational,
hours-wide swathes of limp cables, cold metal, eerie silence. She had found some thin wire
there and, one handed, applied what she’d learned from her Underground Basket Weaving
class to fashion a small cage for her companion.

All university employees were entitled to one free class a semester; that way the university’s
army of PR staff could say they were “being given opportunities for career advancement”. Most
of Enna’s colleagues chose to specialize, took prereqs and coreqs, and aspired to transcend
their low-wage station -- perhaps to get a minor certification to start their own business, perhaps
even to ascend to the heights of grad-studenthood after half a century of rigorous study. Enna
always chose to take the most eclectic, dead-end classes available: Practical Shaolin Kung-Fu,
History of Board Games, Ancient Grecian Myth, Applied Ergonomic Interior Design. Her parents
disapproved, but she didn’t care. She liked the small class sizes.

She looked back at the moth, perched in its cage. She wondered why she hadn’t been able to
bring herself to kill it. Under protocol, all foreign contaminants found in The Root were to be
disposed of as soon as possible. The moth was no longer in The Root, so she had technically
done her job, but her efficiency had been far from optimal. She sighed. She’d need to deal with
more power outage complaint paperwork to make up for this excursion. More bad times to roll
down later, she supposed.

(Sera 3) Vote
- Sera on Vote Day
- Vote for Chem prof, her only ally
- Chem prof wins, yay
- Later: Chem prof gives no money
- Saywhatnow.jpg
- Sera weak as fuck now
- Errybody knows it too
- Oh shit
- Last-ditch plan: declare war on CS dept to steal their money
(Enna 3)
- Enna visits dad in hospital
- He's dying
- University ruins everything
- Insert another wise anecdote here

(Sera 4)
- Sera takes out big loan to finance war vs CS
- More political maneuvering
- Will definitely be able to pay back loan after janitor finds Kovalevskya
- Things are gonna turn out fine

(Jordyn 4)
- CS nerds discover Sera's war plans
- Start getting conditioned grad students ready for war
- Jordyn suiting up
- Totalbadass.png
- Move out for preemptive strike
- Hit Kovalevskya lab first

(Enna 4)
- Cleans out Kovalevskya lab, finds Kovalevskya dead
- Weird Egg computer activates
- Prophecy:
- The Bubble is bursting!
- You'll be in prison soon. Follow moth to escape
- Messiah will be born in the center of the Root. Protect him. Give him the Egg.
- When you find him, the Egg will break
- What's that noise

(Jordyn 5)
- Noise was CS dept attack
- Total success
- Enna captured, taken prisoner
- Jordyn's friend maimed in battle scene
- Jordyn runs
- Mental meltdown breaks them out of mental conditioning process
 - Gender is a lie
- Want to destroy CS dept now

(Sera 5)
- Kovalevskya's dead
- Ohshit.gif
- Creditors closing in, pressure mounts greatly
- Last way out: advertising economics
- Broadcast everyone's secrets to entire university to stir up drama, get paid

(Kovalevskaya 2)
- Designing the Egg: need some kind of physical manifestation that can interact with the
world
- Moth.jpg
- High chance of error in the Egg’s programming
- Risky, but goes ahead anyway

(Jordyn/Enna)
- Jordyn betrays CS overlords
- Enna ecapes prison w/Jordyn’s help, and moth
- Recent events match Egg's predictions
- Oh shit
- Need place to hide
- Place we know well
- The Root here we come

(Sera 6)
- Hiring hypersensationalist video journalists/streamers
- Picks Tricia Navarro, gender fluid social media sensation
- No way this could possibly backfire

(J/E)
- Running into The Root
- Enna believes Egg now, wants to destroy university
- Bonding over mutual hate of the university
- Jordyn tells Enna was conditioning was like
- It's not good

“What makes you want to do this?” asked Jordyn.

“My father. He’s dying because of the university.”
“Fuck that.”
“What?"
“Fuck your father. You do this for you."

(Tricia 1?)
- Vlogging about CS dept conditioning malfunctioning
- Prison break
- Keeps investigating, find J/E
- Chase them to get the scoop

(Jordyn / Enna 9)
- Enna teaches Jordyn about hunting / scavenging in The Root
- Enna builds stuff with circuit boards, demonstrating engineering skills
- Successfully evade CS dept
- Friendship forming
- Rootiscool.jpg

(Tricia 2?)
- More vlogging
- Next adventure: go into the Root
- Rootisweird.jpg

(Jordyn / Enna 10)

- Fight big Bio monster in the Root
- Enna shows kung fu skills off
- Weeks and weeks of travel
- Bonding
- Root gets weirder as you get closer to the core

(Tricia/Sera) How many views do I have?

- Vlogging about weeks and weeks of travel
- Story gaining traction
- Money rolling in
- Sera realizes Tricia has too much control
- Shuts off Tricia's statistics from her

(Jordyn / Enna 11) At the Center’s Edge

- Encounter IT dept, big fight, Jordyn wounded
 - Tricia out of nowhere
- Barely escape w/Tricia’s help
- Enna panic

(Enna 12) Rotten to the Core

- Reach Root core
- Jordyn dies
- Enna searches for messiah
- No one there

(Tricia 4?)
- Enna, ranting in Tricia's camera about how the university is dying
- "There's no messiah out there. We have to do this for ourselves."
- Hellomessiah.wav
- Egg breaks, moth dies
- T/E don't know how many people they've reached

(Enna 13)
- Tricia and Enna steal IT dept vehicle, tunnelling out of the Root
- Mayhem and destruction
- Enna recovering slowly

(Tricia 5?)
- Broadcast continues; they escape The Root
- Huge crowd of grad students + staff waiting outside for Enna
- Enna ready to break out of the Bubble
- Sera + other professors surprise attack
- T/E captured

(Sera)
- Sera gets Enna’s father
- He founded the university
- Oh shit
- Father: “Sometimes, things are better when they’re broken.”
- Enna devastated
- Sold off to the CS dept for drone conditioning

“Enna,” the man wheezed, voice barely audible over the buzzing of his life support machine.

The young woman stood there, unmoving. Uncomprehending.

“Enna,” he said again. She didn't want him to say her name. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you... I was
ashamed."

(Enna 14)

- Enna subjected to conditioning process

- Realizes gender is a social construct, short-circuiting conditioning process
- Breaks out of containment using Jordyn's insider info about conditioning process,
engineering, kung fu, Jenga skills
- Deep reflection. Recalls more fatherly wisdom
- Accepts role as messiah
- Transition to "they" pronouns reflects new societal understanding

(Enna/Tricia)
- Building weapons to prepare for final fight
- Bonding over shared experiences
- More wise anecdotes
- Inspiring staff and students via undetectable livestream
- "You know what all bubbles do, in the end?"

(Sera)
- University faculty all weak
- In-fighting crippled them all
- Dept heads call meeting
- "We need to join forces to stop them"
- Sera remembers being betrayed
- Nothanks.gif

(Enna/Tricia) What all bubbles do in the end

- Epic final fight

(Tricia 6)
- Flash forward: documenting life outside of Bubble

(Epilogue: Enna's father) Things that matter

As soon as he saw her daughter running to him, he knew something was wrong. It didn’t take a
genius -- if the charred half of a still-smouldering circuit board didn’t tell the whole story, then the
plump, glistening tears running over her daughter’s puffy red cheeks did the rest. Later, he
would nevertheless fondly remember the moment as a flash of clairvoyant insight, a
clear-as-day example of the mystic connection shared between father and daughter.

“Dad, I broke it again,” his daughter cried out, voice brimming over with despair.

Sometimes he thought he was being unfair, forcing his daughter to learn electrical engineering
at such a young age. But then he thought of all his time in the corporate world. The cutthroats
and the snakes wouldn’t care -- they’d have started earlier. He swallowed his pity. Better that
Enna learn self-sufficiency now.

The ten year old threw the broken circuit board to the ground, stamped on it with one foot a few
times, decided that wasn’t good enough, and started jumping on it, screaming all the while.

“I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it --”

He took a deep breath.

“Don’t worry about it! It was always going to break eventually.”

“Yeah, but now it is broken. Now it’s worthless.”

“Is it?”

The child rolled her eyes.

“Dang it dad, you always ask me that. It is worthless. It is!”

The crying had been replaced by screaming. He looked into his daughter’s eyes, watched the
cogs turn and align. The despair he saw was softening, becoming pliable. He could work with
that.

“But all that time I spent, dad, I wasted all that time...”

“What went wrong?”

“I miscalibrated the power supply,” the child seethed, rage creeping back into the crevasses of
her voice. “I did the math wrong -- “

“Aha!”

“What?”
“All that time you spent? It wasn’t worthless! It wasn’t worthless at all!”

“What do you mean?” Good. Despair was turning into curiosity.

“You learned! You learned about math, and power supply calibration, and how to solder. And I
know you learned, because you’re telling me about it now.”

“That doesn't matter! It's gone now!"

“Why should something have to last a long time for it to matter?” he asked with a smile.

Her daughter stared back at him and blinked.

Just one more little push...

“Have you ever heard of the Harvard Mark II?”