Short Story on The Beginning of Mechanicha

Warning: This post may contain spoilers for How to Stop Wildfire and beyond!

‘The Liberation’ is the other ‘past’ short story contained in the compilation file I talked about here. Its history is more complex than the End of the Second story, though.

As weird as it sounds, this was originally part of How to Stop Wildfire. Like when the group meets the Ascended, Jessica looks at a memory of Reno’ala’net…and basically this plays out. It was part of the old drafts of the book.

I extracted it out into that short story file at some point so it’s possible this is many years older than 2015. I’m more confident that it is older than 2015 than being from 2015, since some of the names of the OG draft are using old style spelling for a few things, which I feel has to be pre-2015, but I don’t remember anymore.

Rereading the old version was…painful. I think it was painful because it reminded me of how HTSW is sort of the black sheep in style, prose, and in some world building allusion tone. I’ve had…thoughts of rewriting HTSW to a degree before and doing this really makes me want to dive back in HTSW and clean it up. I don’t know if I will now, but it’s…becoming a more pressing agenda item.

Anyway, this story isn’t perfect, and I might have a mental block on it due to the HTSW connection, but it’s better than what it was and I’m OK enough to share it. I reserve the right to change it later and tweak the message of it, but I think it’s pretty good.



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