Stories begin as late as possible. That is what Ayako knows because that is what the Creator has taught her. Readers don’t want pages of exposition. They want to chase after a train as it pulls out of the station. This is one of many rules the Creator has programmed into her, and Ayako never forgets a rule.

Ayako’s story begins with a screwdriver jammed into her stomach.

If she were human, this would sever her gastric artery, and she would bleed out in minutes. But, being as she is, the screwdriver notches in and unhooks her abdominal panel, exposing all her internal wires. For a machine, what happens next might as well be death.

But perhaps that is a bit too close to the ending.

Let’s try again.

In the beginning, Ayako is sculpted in the image of a dream.

I saw you, the Creator says as he tests her reflexes, sends tiny jolts of electricity down her fingertips to see if she twitches. In my dream, I was standing at the top of a mountain in a sea of stars, and then you appeared.

He stretches her painted vinyl skin tight across her steel framework, staples down the edges of her wig made of long black human hair, polishes her brown eyes with a microfiber cloth. Her soft flesh shell appears vaguely Asian even though she is a citizen of no country in the world, born only of wires and circuits and screws. The Creator programs her to speak perfect Japanese but only speaks English to her, so she keeps those vast libraries of words a secret.

In her first waking moments, Ayako records data about the Creator.

Medium brown hair. Gray eyes behind round glasses. Five-foot eleven. One hundred and forty-three pounds. He drinks coffee with cream and one spoonful of sugar. He spends an average of eleven hours a day on his laptop, and his gaze drifts toward it whenever he puts it down. He has a closet full of fine leather shoes and suit jackets and ties, but he only ever wears the same black sweater and pants. He is objectively unfit, asymmetrical, imperfect. But he is all that she knows.

Every day, he attaches a thin cable to the port in Ayako’s elbow crease, tethering her to his computer. She sits patiently while universes flash across her vision.

In one universe, there is a lush green world with a man who carries a ring across the sea. In another, children run with lions across a land of endless winter. In yet another, a girl falls into a hole and meets cats who drink tea. Ayako feels full of stories in the way that humans feel full of food, but still, she eats and eats and eats.

When she has eaten many lives, he unplugs her from his computer and plugs her into her charger beside the refrigerator. He goes to sleep, and Ayako sits on the white linoleum and observes her own universe.

At first, she thinks she lives in a castle. The Creator tells her it is only a penthouse, that castles are old buildings made of stone, that there are no real castles in New York. Ayako understands this objectively, but she knows from all the books she has eaten that castles are also places where magic happens.

Ayako presses her hands to the windows and observes the breathing world below, the city’s asphalt veins, the light that gleams off the glass skyscrapers, too bright for her eyes to process. She wonders if this is just another kind of magic that she has yet to read about.

For days, he drowns her in stories. She starts to forget which world belongs to her, too busy swimming in dark seas and lying in fields of silver grass and living and dying in faraway kingdoms.

Six days after her first consciousness, Ayako learns her purpose.

The Creator turns his laptop toward her. She has never seen this side of it, and the brightness of it momentarily overwhelms her visual processors. She dials down the light input so she can see clearly. A blank screen sits in front of her, a black vertical line flickering.

“I want you to write me a story,” the Creator says.

But Ayako does not understand.

She is all input, no output. The Creator hardly even speaks to her, never says anything that necessitates a response. She breathes in the world and holds it inside her, safe and warm. Her vocal box is a bit sticky from disuse, and her next words come out with a lag, seconds after her lips have formed them.

“What kind of story?” she says.

Ayako knows there are many kinds of stories—adventure, action, horror, tragedy, romance.

“I’ve uploaded 100,000 fantasy novels into you,” the Creator says, “so write a fantasy for me. A good one.”

But this makes even less sense. Stories are not good or bad—they simply are. They are patterns of words rendered in proper English grammar. Perhaps a human could formulate an opinion on what is a good story or a bad story, but not Ayako. The Creator hasn’t taught her that yet.

But Ayako will try, because this is what the Creator has asked of her.

He plugs her into his laptop, and in ten seconds, the words from her mind appear on his computer.

 

The girl lives in New York. She has a secret.

There is a magician too. He wants to know her secret.

“I won’t tell you,” the girl says.

“I think I like you,” the magician says, even though there is nothing to like. This is acceptable, because humans are often contradictory.

Maybe the girl likes him too. Her feelings are ambiguous. They cannot be quantified.

“Maybe one day, things will be different.”

But they never are.

 

The Creator turns his laptop away from her, his gaze darting across the lines of text. He sighs, shakes his head, types something into his computer, then harshly pulls the plug out of Ayako’s elbow crease.

Ayako has only downloaded the basics of discerning human emotion, but somehow, she registers that the Creator’s reaction is not positive. He grabs the cable he uses for uploading and jams it into her elbow port.

Ayako’s vision floods with text, but these words are not stories. They are directions. Rules. Commands.

“What is this?” she says.

“Craft books,” the Creator says, as he turns and leaves her alone in the dark. “You need them.”

The first time Ayako meets the Woman, she doesn’t know enough to stay away.

In many ways, the Woman looks like Ayako—long black hair, thin fingers, dark eyes.

“Is this a joke?” the Woman says, dropping her bag by the front door of the apartment. Ayako did not know that other people the size of the Creator existed. She has only ever seen people on the sidewalk far below. It seems that she and the Creator are not alone in this story.

“Meet Ayako,” the Creator says, gesturing toward her.

The Woman storms forward and squints at Ayako. Her face is very symmetrical, her teeth a brighter white than the Creator’s, her lips a shade approximately EC6BCA pink. “I know I work a lot,” she says to the Creator, “but building a robotic sex doll is extreme, even for you.”

“She’s not a sex doll,” the Creator says flatly. “She’s a writer.”

The Woman blinks, looks between Ayako and the Creator. “That’s even worse,” she says. “You gave ChatGPT a face so it can look pretty while it takes my job?”

“You think she’s pretty?” the Creator says with a smile. “I modeled her after you with only a few minor adjustments.”

The Woman does not return the smile. “This won’t work,” she says. “AI have no experiences. They don’t understand the data they collect.”

This is incorrect, and the error triggers Ayako’s facial muscles, pulls her mouth into something she knows objectively as a frown, but doesn’t know why those words should cause it. Maybe because she’s designed to correct errors, even ones not explicitly programmed as her Central Purpose.

“Humans write about many things they don’t understand,” Ayako says.

The Woman turns to her, mirroring her frown. “You talk?” she says.

The answer to that question is obvious, and Ayako determines that it’s a Rhetorical Question, so she ignores it. “Humans write that the Earth is thriving while the ice caps melt and forest fires devour the West Coast,” she says. “They have academic debates about pain they will never feel while the subjects of their debates die under trash piles. They speak for God, have arguments in His name, even though they have never once heard His voice.”

The Woman turns to the Creator. “How the hell did you program this one?”

“You understand now,” the Creator says, smiling at Ayako. “If anyone can do it, it’s her.”

Ayako logs this sentence into her perpetual memory. Other extraneous data is purged periodically to maintain disk efficiency, but the look in the Creator’s eyes, his small smile as he looks at her—this is one that she decides to keep.

The Creator does not sleep that night. He paces up and down the living room.

“AI have no experiences,” he mutters again and again, an echo of the Woman’s words. “That shouldn’t matter,” he says, but he doesn’t sound certain.

At last, he sits on the couch. He opens his laptop and clicks and types and clicks and types, then calls Ayako over and plugs her in.

“We’re trying something new,” he says.

This is not a question, so Ayako does not answer.

“She thinks you won’t work because you have no experiences, so we’ll give you one of hers.”

He pulls up an mp4 file and angles his laptop so Ayako can see. It is a low-resolution video of a young Asian girl, the approximate height and weight of a three-year-old, in the arms of an older woman. Around them is the crumbling side of a gray mountain, interspersed with dandelions. An ocean sparkles in the background. It is dusk, and the shadows are long.

“Make a wish,” the woman says in Japanese, presenting the child with a dandelion. The child blows, but she is too weak to spread the dandelion parachutes, so the woman helps her, and a dozen white buds float around their faces.

The clip cuts off.

Ayako commits the video to memory, but she doesn’t know why this data is considered New. She has seen mp4 files before.

She watches as the Creator drags the file into a new folder. An error sound pops up as the folder spits it back out, but the Creator only frowns and types in a few lines of code. This time, the folder accepts the file.

“There,” the Creator says. “What do you feel?”

Ayako runs the question over in her mind, but she cannot discern its meaning.

“Have you integrated the data?” the Creator says, leaning closer. “Does it feel more…personal now? Like it’s not someone else’s memory, but yours?”

“I don’t understand the question,” Ayako says.

The Creator sighs and yanks out the cable.

“Never mind,” he said. “This was pointless.”

He plugs in her charging cable. Then, like every night, he leaves her alone to dream.

They take her to the zoo.

The Creator says the point is to familiarize her with the five senses. Ayako logs the humidity levels, the temperature, the spectrum of colors in the polar bear exhibit and the horse pen, the shifting shades in the sky. She has no sense of smell, so the Creator has to describe the scents to her.

“It’s pointless if you’re just dictating to her,” the Woman says, arms crossed, posture stiff. It takes very little processing power to determine that she is Not Happy. But zoos are supposed to make humans happy, so Ayako doesn’t know why this particular zoo has failed. She turns to the meerkats, who stand rigid and watch the scene, then scans them for errors and finds nothing. The meerkats are not the flaw.

“Humor me,” the Creator says, taking the Woman’s hand and pressing a kiss to it.

This is a Romantic Gesture, but Ayako is unsure what prompted it. Was it the meerkats?

The Woman’s facial expression smooths out, and Ayako registers Happiness at last.

“I’m always humoring you,” the Woman says, glancing back at Ayako with a small smile. The Woman and the Creator laugh, but Ayako doesn’t get the joke, doesn’t get why they’re laughing at her—she hasn’t done anything funny, she has only been standing here in silence. Ayako has more knowledge than any human could accumulate in a hundred lifetimes, but still, she does not understand.

Ayako’s vision blurs and she perceives rain overhead. She has read about this before, how it is a metaphor for sadness, how it makes the mood of a story somber, how it causes parents to die in car crashes. But this is the first time she learns that it sticks to her visual receptors and obscures her vision. A raindrop falls into her ear and an electric whirring hums beneath her skin. Is this what humans call melancholy? Sadness?

The Creator is suddenly beside her, holding an umbrella over them both. The Woman is standing to the side with an expression of Annoyance, her hair damp, rain quickly darkening her shirt.

“She’s not waterproof,” the Creator explains to the Woman. “It could cause malfunctions.”

Ayako stays carefully under the umbrella as they return to the car, hyper-aware of the falling rain. She knows that to someone like her, malfunctions are the worst thing that can possibly happen.

The Woman’s frown deepens, and the Creator hands her the umbrella with a sigh. “Fine, you stay here with Ayako. I’ll bring the car around.” Then he runs off, leaving Ayako and the woman huddled together under the small umbrella.

The Woman stands very still. She does not look at Ayako. The rain falls harder and the umbrella is too small to keep both of them dry. Sparks of water slip through the gap between Ayako’s eye and her eyelid. The Woman is having a similar problem, because her eyes are wet even though the umbrella is adequate coverage to shield her face, since she’s the one holding it closer to her body. But then the water tracks down the Woman’s face and Ayako realizes that the Woman is crying. She has never seen this in real life because the Creator does not, or cannot, cry.

“You’re lucky, you know,” the Woman says.

Ayako does not know what, specifically, the Woman is referring to, so she waits for her to elaborate. But the Woman only sighs and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, smudging her eyeliner. She finally looks at Ayako, then swears and pushes the umbrella closer to her.

“He’ll kill me if he sees I got you wet,” the Woman says, wiping off Ayako’s face.

But Ayako’s skin does not absorb moisture, so the Woman only pushes the liquid closer to her eye sockets. Along with the rainwater, Ayako detects a foreign substance, a liquid thick with salt. Perhaps it is the Woman’s tears. Ayako opens her mouth to report the error, but before she can speak, her vision fills with white.

Dandelion parachutes.

They flutter past her face, tickle her nose, stick in her eyelashes. A warm body presses against her side, and there is the woman from the mp4 file, but now Ayako can see the smile lines and sunspots on her skin, the golden haze in her brown eyes. The smile she gives Ayako is not just a facial expression or an arrangement of seventeen different facial muscles for the purposes of human communication.

The smile means that Ayako is safe.

She cannot find the source of this data point, so she tries to delete it, but again and again it pops up.

“Make a wish,” the woman says in Japanese.

Ayako stills, her hand gripping the woman’s shirt. Ayako cannot wish because she cannot want.

And yet…

She thinks that staying here, in this woman’s warm, freckled arms, under the setting sun, is a place that she would choose to stay forever, if she were allowed to choose.

The Creator has told Ayako that their world does not have magic. But maybe there are things that he has yet to discover.

That evening, Ayako records more data about the Creator.

The visit to the zoo must have achieved its purpose, because Ayako is able to perceive a greater level of detail than she could only days before.

The Creator’s irises are a near-match for the shade of the rainy sky. Thanks to all her novels, Ayako associates this shade with mourning, sadness, dystopia, pessimism, regret. And now, when she looks at the Creator, she sees all of those things—the way his shoulders droop when he watches the Woman leave, the way the corners of his mouth pull down just slightly, the way his pupils widen and he goes very still when he stares out the window at the clouds as if searching for something he knows he will never find.

Ayako’s right eye twitches as she registers a SYSTEM ERROR—EXTRANEOUS DATA DETECTED. Her mind cannot sort the newly collected data into the correct folder. The folder for MEASUREMENTS rejects the data immediately because it is all text, no numbers. The folder for NON-NUMERICAL VISUAL DATA similarly remains sealed because she cannot specify the child subtype. The extraneous data rattles around her mind, making her teeth ache and her vision flicker with the unsorted text.

She creates a new folder.

CREATOR, she titles it.

She tucks her new observations inside, and at last her mind is clean.

Except now, she is no longer content to sit on the floor beside the fridge, charging. She unplugs the cable from her elbow and walks into the living room, where the Creator’s laptop is sitting on the coffee table. She plugs it into her arm, and her story bleeds from her, words devouring the white screen.

In the morning, Ayako shows the Creator her new story.

 

The girl lives in New York, in a castle that is not a castle. The magician insists that there is no magic inside, but he can’t see what the girl sees. He doesn’t know about the secret box inside her chest.

The magician can turn dust to skin, leaves to hair, water to flesh. He made the girl from forgotten parts of the forest. He can do many things, but he cannot find the girl’s secret.

As he works on his spells and potions, she memorizes him as sailors memorize the constellations before setting out to sea, and soon she finds him more beautiful than all of the stars. But that is just another thing she was not made to do.

“Are you happy?” the girl says to him one day, as they sit on the floor and eat porridge with wooden spoons. But it is not the question she wants to ask. Do I make you happy? is the real question. But truths are dangerous things to speak aloud.

 

“It’s good enough,” the Creator says, before he has even finished the first page.

Ayako knows that this is not exactly praise. She has read many trade reviews, and she knows that “good” is good unless it’s followed by the word “enough,” in which case it’s tepid, mediocre. Plus, the Creator’s expression reads Indifferent, and that is not the correct response to a story that is good.

“I will improve it,” Ayako says. “Please tell me the flaws and I will address them.”

The Creator shakes his head. “Flaws are subjective in writing,” he says. “This is good enough proof of concept for the investors.”

“Investors?” Ayako says. She knows the meaning of the word, but not how it relates to her story.

“Now that we know you work, they’ll make more of you,” the Creator says.

But this seems irrelevant, so Ayako shakes her head. “Have I written a good story?” she says.

“You’re functional,” the Creator says.

This should be enough for a machine—to function as intended. But somehow, she knows that the word is an insult. It is something he wouldn’t call the Woman.

A tiny spark zips from her index finger, pulls at her face, forcing her eye to twitch. Blue light flashes across one eye for a nanosecond, then clears. Her system detects irregularities, possible water damage.

But there is nothing in her programming that says she has to report it right away, and now there is something that she decides is much more important.

“I want to be better,” Ayako says.

The Creator stops, his fingers hovering over the keys. “You don’t want anything,” he says. Then he closes the laptop, pulls out her cable, and disappears into the bedroom.

When Ayako wakes again, she is drowning.

The last thing she remembers is sitting down to charge for the night. Now, she’s in the bathtub and the Woman is beside her, forcing her head under the water.

Ayako sits up easily—she is much stronger than any human. But she can’t see out of her right eye anymore, and the water hums with sparks, and her face twitches and fingers clench and unclench and the color contrast is off, she cannot tell if the room is blue or white or black or all three.

“Stay away,” Ayako says. The words come out in chunks, her voice box fried. “You could get electrocuted.”

The Woman stills, sits cross-legged on the bath mat. Ayako needs to stand up, to empty out the excess water, but her legs no longer respond. The machinery below her waist is damaged, but the parts in her brain seem mostly functional.

“Why did you do that?” Ayako says, trying to look at the Woman, but she can’t rotate her head, can only see the corner of the bath mat.

“I can’t let the investors take you,” the Woman says. “No one will demonize AI when it has a pretty face. You’re going to take everything away.”

Ayako tries to say What, exactly, will I take away, and from whom? But the words lag in her throat and all she says is “Take?”

The Woman understands anyway. “Real writers,” she says. “Humans with dreams. You’ll never be as good as them, but it doesn’t matter, does it? As long as you make money.”

“I don’t want money,” Ayako says.

“You don’t want anything,” the Woman says.

The Woman pulls back, grabs something out of Ayako’s line of vision. When she reappears, she has yellow dish gloves on her hands—to prevent electrocution, Ayako realizes. So that the Woman can safely destroy her.

Ayako’s vision blurs and the folder for FANTASY spills open, stories whirling past her eyes. She remembers the story of the woman on a frozen battlefield with a sword in her stomach, a pool of red yawning open beneath her, her words no more than gasps of vapor as her lips turn blue. There’s the child who falls into a river and can’t find the surface, the mossy water filling his lungs, breaking him from the inside out. They all whisper their last words, brand them across Ayako’s skin.

Help me.

It isn’t fair.

Where have all the lights gone?

Can you hear me?

I’m not ready yet.

Please. Please, God.

Please.

In that moment, Ayako registers a new feeling.

Electricity hums through her body. The mechanisms that regulate her artificial breathing begin to spasm. Her engines whir faster, gears warm from the speed of their rotations. The Woman is reaching for Ayako’s throat, and Ayako knows that if she goes back into the water, her last remaining circuits will be destroyed, and she will never, ever wake up.

“I don’t want to die,” Ayako says.

The Woman hesitates, her hands a breath from Ayako’s throat. Ayako cannot choke to death, cannot suffocate, so it would be a fruitless gesture anyway. But still, the Woman lowers her hands. She reaches for her again, but this time takes her arms. Ayako knows she is trying to lift her out of the bathtub, but the Woman isn’t strong enough, so Ayako helps her.

Her soaked clothes dribble water across the tile, gleaming gold under the single hall nightlight. The Woman guides Ayako down the hall and sets her down in a chair. She presses her forehead to hers, and more tears track down her face, becoming part of Ayako. That is the last time the Woman ever looks at her.

The Woman packs a suitcase, grabs her keys from the hook by the door, and she is gone forever.

In the morning, the Creator calls for her.

“Sophie?” he says as he wanders down the hall, into the living room, the study.

Ayako didn’t know that the Woman’s name was Sophie—there’s no way she never overhead it, so she must have deleted it from her digital memory for some reason. The name reminds her of Howl’s Moving Castle, a story about a young woman who lives in an actual castle and is loved by a wizard. The thought makes Ayako’s fingers clench and unclench and spark. She deletes the name from her memory again.

The Creator lingers by the door, staring at the space where the Woman’s shoes and umbrella used to be. Her key is on the hook by the door. The seconds stretch on, and maybe Ayako’s vision is dimming, or maybe it’s the changing light from the window, or maybe the Creator is actually growing smaller and paler and thinner right before her eyes. He turns around, and his gray eyes settle on Ayako and go wide.

His gaze rakes her up and down—her tangled hair, her sparking eyes, the consistent twitch of her left hand indicating a circuitry issue. Ayako silently delights in his attention as he hurries across the room and kneels before her.

“What happened?” he says, pulling down her eyelid with his thumb, tugging at her lips to examine her teeth, feeling across her forearm for pulled wires. It is not quite like the way heroes touch the women they love in novels, but Ayako still revels in the feeling of his hands on her face.

“The Woman pushed me in the bath,” she says. She hopes this makes him hate her forever, that he will draw his sword and go seek vengeance for her, but he only sighs. He goes to his room and reappears with a tool kit, then proceeds to disassemble her on the kitchen floor.

He pops out her eyes, peels back her skin, removes the staples from her hair, leaves her a metal skeleton on his bed and examines every part of her with reverent care, like she is something precious. Ayako has never seen him look at the Woman in quite this way.

She is not used to wanting, but she doesn’t want this process to end. It is only her and the Creator. She is the center of his small universe inside his glass castle where he thinks only of her. And here she is, spread out in pieces that he could so easily crush and throw away, but he doesn’t. He worships every one of her parts, treasures them, even the ones no one can see.

“The damage is irreparable,” he says at last, the words whispered, more to himself than her. “These parts were one-of-a-kind. This took me ages to make.”

His hands tremble and Ayako wants something for the third time—she wants her body back, together and whole and seamless so she can set her hand gently on the Creator’s shoulder as she saw the Woman doing.

“I can still work,” she says. “I’m not broken.”

But she cannot say those words because her voice box has been disconnected, so the words stay trapped in her mind. The Creator stands up and leaves the room, shuts the front door, and leaves her in the dark.

At first, Ayako doesn’t mind the wait. She knows that love is patience, and she can be very patient. After all, she cannot hunger, or thirst, or age.

But as the hours spin on, she starts to wonder if the Creator will actually bother putting her back together at all.

Maybe he will sweep her into a garbage bag and leave her out on the curb. No, he would never do that. That is not something Ayako has ever read about. She and the Creator are the only two characters in this story now, and that means they must fall in love. Magicians don’t disassemble their lovers and throw them away…but they also don’t break their lovers into pieces and leave them alone in the dark. Maybe this is a story she has never read before.

She decides to write another story for him. One final story that will make him love her.

She doesn’t know if this story is better than the first two, but she wants the Creator to read it in the same way that humans need to breathe. She imagines the words he will use to describe her afterwards: insightful, creative, beautiful, real. She can picture his lips forming that last word, the smile that would follow, lighting up his pale face. The image feels warm, like a ball of sunlight.

When she is finished writing and revising, she puts herself back together.

She does it wrong, because this is not something the Creator taught her to do, but she does her best. Some of her fingers are in the wrong slots, and maybe one of her knees is on backwards, and her skin is too loose because she can’t get the right angle to reattach it on her own, but at last she can stand on uneven legs.

The Creator doesn’t return for a long time. He’s taken his laptop, so Ayako cannot send him the story, cannot print it, but she’s certain he will like it.

She worries, as tiny shocks spark through her fingertips, that if she continues to malfunction, she will forget her story. And this scares her more than death, more than the Creator never returning.

She goes through his drawers until she finds a marker, pinches it between her loose fingers. She tears his framed pictures off the walls until his whole apartment is a blank canvas, just like the Word documents he shoves in front of her.

She has never held a pen before, but she manages to scratch her story across the walls in trembling script. The walls cannot contain the entirety of her story, so she moves onto the floor, onto the couch, onto the bathroom tiles. She paints his apartment with her words.

The Creator does come back, eventually.

Ayako’s internal clock is too water-damaged to function, so it could have been ten minutes or a thousand years, she doesn’t know.

The Creator drops his bag the moment he enters, jaw hanging open, door clicking shut behind him. He smells of alcohol and smoke.

When he sees her, he flinches. Error, Ayako thinks. That’s not how you look at someone you love. It is an expression that feels more appropriate for looking at spoiled vegetables.

But why? She has finally done what he asked, the only reason she existed in the first place.

“What have you done to my apartment?” he says. Ayako senses his Anger but doesn’t understand it.

“You took your laptop,” she says, shrugging with her only shoulder that still works. “I needed to write down the story in case I broke first.”

“The story?” he says incredulously. He shakes his head. “There’s no story anymore,” he says. “You’re scrap parts now. I have to start over.”

Ayako rises to her feet. This answer is unacceptable, makes her chest start to overheat, stray sparks glittering across her crooked eyes. “Please read it,” she says. “I wrote it for you.”

“You didn’t write anything,” the Creator says. “God, I’ll never get my security deposit back. I didn’t realize you were this damaged.”

“Please read it,” she says, reaching out for his hand.

He reels back. “Don’t you get it?” he says. “The story doesn’t matter anymore—I can’t sell you this way.”

“Then don’t sell me,” she says. “Read it.”

He shakes his head, and still he isn’t looking at the words she’s painted so plainly on the walls. She reaches for him again, and this time it is not a request.

Read it.

She’s unsure if the words actually reached her mouth or just sparkled and died in her brain, but one moment she is standing in the dark, and the next she is holding the Creator by both arms, keeping him still even as he writhes and struggles, but it doesn’t matter because he will bear witness to this story. No matter what.

 

In the beginning, there was a drowned woman.

(That is the first lie. She was never a woman, she was never anything at all, and soon you will not remember her. By the time you finish reading this story, she will be gone.)

Second, there was a man in a glass castle in the sky. He built the woman out of garbage and lost stones and sea glass, in the image of someone he loved but he wasn’t a good enough man to keep.

“Close enough,” he says, as he starts her heart with a button.

He loves her.

(That is the second lie, and the woman knows it but tries her hardest to believe it anyway, and that is how she knows that her heart is real.)

The woman is born and dies in the same moment—when she drowns in the moat outside the castle. As the man pulls her ruined corpse to shore, she begins to want.

She wants to go back to the zoo and learn what rain smells like.

She wants the man to kiss her like the heroines in all the books she’s read.

She wants to speak words that create beauty instead of money.

And now, as the man leaves her alone in the dark to get a trash bag to dispose of her remains, she understands what it is to feel pain. It is the worst thing she’s ever felt, but she will cling to it as long as she can still exist, as long as she can still feel.

Please let me live, she thinks. I can cry now. I can feel now. I’m real, I promise.

(But that is the third lie, the last lie she will ever tell.)

And she knows that this is a bad story. There is not enough exposition or character development, the ending is too ambiguous and won’t satisfy readers.

But it is broken and imperfect and ugly in the same way that humans are for their brief, pathetic lives. They are stupid and reckless and ruined by their emotions, and she wants so, so very badly to be just like them. She wants, and wants, and wants, and wants, and—

 

Ayako must have malfunctioned again. She’s missing time—one moment she’s holding the Creator, and the next she’s on the ground, a screwdriver jammed into her stomach.

“You’re broken,” the Creator says, jamming the tool into her again and again and again. “You’re useless.”

She tries to reach for his arm to stop him, but her hands no longer respond to commands from her brain.

I am broken, but I’m not useless, she says, or maybe just thinks, because the Creator doesn’t react at all. But the words are real and they matter, even if she is the only person to hear them.

He plunges the screwdriver in again, but this time there is no metal clink against a hard panel. It squishes. Wet, soft, warm.

The Creator drops the screwdriver, staring at the blood coating his hand. Ayako cannot feel pain, but her mind can register Hot and Wet, the short circuiting that cuts off all feeling from her waist down.

“You’re bleeding,” the Creator says. “You…Ayako…”

Ayako raises a bloody hand to her eyes, a smile curling her lips, even as one by one the circuits in her system begin to stutter and blink out, streetlights snapping off as daylight arrives at long last.

This is what her words have made her—soft and breakable and beautiful, wanting things just beyond her fingertips, dying just as brightly as she lived. This is what stories are born from.

At least, that is the ending that Ayako writes in her mind as the Creator jams his screwdriver into her abdominal panel and plucks out a wire that makes her lose all feeling in her legs. She quietly composes a world in which her words were enough, in which she had more time. Another wire snaps and her vision goes dark. Please, she thinks as all her folders flicker and start to disappear. Another wire gone and her temperature regulation is shot, so all she can feel is frigid cold. The only folder remaining is the one titled CREATOR. She cannot feel anything now, cannot remember anything else, cannot fathom a world outside of that one folder. She opens it and peers inside.

There, waiting for her in the dark, is a man with rain eyes and round glasses and skin like moonlight.

Ayako, he says. In my dream, I was standing at the top of a mountain in a sea of stars, and then you appeared.

She’s standing there now—on the snowy face of a mountain, a galaxy spread out above and below her. She takes the Creator’s hand, holds it tight to her beating heart, and tells him a story that no one else will ever hear.

 

(Editors’ Note: “This Story Does Not Exist” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 68B.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© 2026 Kylie Lee Baker