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The scene opens on a jagged crystalline landscape. The sky is black, and heavy with stars. A howling wind is the only sound, until we hear footsteps. We zoom in on a figure running through an alien mining quarry and into a natural cave, performing artful and acrobatic leaps across a desolate and ancient landscape, she reaches the entrance to a half buried and ancient building and after pausing to take in the view, enters.

Inside, she raises her hand, and a light shines out of it, illuminating massive shattered statues, ruined masonry, and murals of a civilization long lost to time. She blinks, and a camera shutter clicks, saving and analyzing the forgotten languages. She climbs a set of worn stone stairs and moves deeper into the cave.

In a crevice, something catches her eye. Shining the light back over it, she sees it. A carved jewel or artifact of some kind is hidden in a collapsed antechamber. Using tremendous strength, she shifts a large stone that blocks the way, but in the process she shifts the stones above her in a disastrous way. The cavern’s ceiling begins to rumble. In a flash she bounds into the newly opened chamber, grabs the object, and dashes to the mouth of the ruined building. Planting her feet on a slope and bracing herself, she slides down, preparing to leap to the entrance just as the building collapses. She leaps, but the massive ruin collapses just as she manages to jump, and the rumbling crescendo ends in a massive crash.

The dust clears, and she is almost unharmed, except her arm, which is shattered to pieces underneath a massive flagstone. She raises her head from the dust, unaware at first of the state of her crushed limb. Then, she sees it, and utters a horrified scream into the wasteland. Then, another. And again, she tries out different inflections of screams of terror into the quiet night. She wrenches her broken limb from her shoulder, rolls over and begins to laugh to herself. She looks at the jeweled artifact in her other hand and tosses it aside, then with great effort, raises up the stone and pulls out the mangled remains of her arm. “Goddamnit” she says to herself. “It had to be right before yearly review too. Oh well”. She dusts herself off and begins her long walk back.

-

It’s some time later and we’re in a comically large conference room with a massive bay window that overlooks the quarries from the first scene. Alyx is there, one armed. The far doors open up and two men enter, one of whom is a young human, and the other is a formant. They introduce themselves as Lukas (the human) and EX-490 (the formant). Alyx is a little uncomfortable. She asks where her old caretaker Malcolm is, and they inform her that he passed away in the past year, and so her yearly review will now be conducted by Lukas. EX-490 is going to be managing it’s own quarry soon and Lukas is showing it what the company’s most successful mining operation looks like in action. EX-490 doesn’t look entirely human, (more like the robots in iRobot) but Alyx does. It’s established that this is because she’s used to showcase the mining process to investors. Lukas explains that Alyx is the consistently the highest performing remote mining overseer that the company employs, and she’s once again set a new standard of productivity this year.

After her review, EX-490 is asked to leave the room. Lukas asks her how she injured her arm and she explains it was damaged in a mining accident. He chastises her for using her “formal” body in the field, as it gets worn out very easily and is supposed to only be used for when she’s presenting to investors or meeting with her bosses. He treats her like a child almost, which is sort of silly since she’s over 800 years old. He then mentions that she’ll have a replacement arm installed after their talk.

In a flashback I guess (not sure how to do this) we see her old yearly performance reviews with her old caretaker, Malcolm. Malcolm was very kind to her and talked to her like she was another human being and not just a piece of machinery or even a co-worker, but as a genuine friend. We see them at the same table, sitting back and watching a movie on a projector screen. Alyx is enthralled in the movie. In this scene, however, Alyx looks like EX 490, in a featureless robotic body. On the screen, we see a woman who looks like present day Alyx. Alyx points to the screen and asks, “Who is she?”. Malcolm answers “That’s Zelda Hayworth, she used to be a big name actress in these old movies. Beautiful woman, and so talented! She could charm the stars right out of the sky”. We hear a camera click and a shutter in Alyx’s eye flashes.

Time skip forward a few years. Malcolm is older now, and Alyx and him have forgone the pretense of a performance review and now meet every year to watch old movies and talk. Malcolm leaves her with a big stack of old movies and books and other media that she consumes religiously when she’s not working. We see scenes of her re-enacting the movie scenes by herself and using old mining equipment as props. Eventually, during one of their performance review/movie nights she asks Malcolm “Do you think I could ever be beautiful like her?”. On the screen, we see a young Zelda Hayworth sitting on a balcony in a melancholy and majestic scene. Malcolm thinks for a moment. “You know, formant technology is getting more and more advanced by the day. I know you probably don’t know much about all that being stuck out here and all, but we can make human-like formant bodies now. I could talk to someone higher up about it. Don’t get your hopes up though”. Alyx looks back at the projector screen even more intently.

-

Another time skip. This time an older Malcolm is walking off of the tram car that serves as the mining outposts only connection to the outside world. Alyx is there to greet him. She waves at him from a balcony, in a motion copied almost exactly from a movie the both of them have seen. She leaps down to the ground floor effortlessly. Malcolm stops her. “I have a surprise for you”.

In a montage sequence, she lays in a pod-like chamber and her featureless robotic body is stripped away by a machine, revealing her mechanical core, and other, humanlike body parts are applied in their place. The machine beeps, and she awakens in her new body. She raises a hand to her cheek, feeling the soft synthetic flesh and gasping, filling newfound lungs with breath. She sits up, approaching the world tentatively and with newfound wonder.

“Here, you might want to put these on.” Malcolm says, giving her a folded pile of clothes. “I had to pull a lot of strings to get the board to even consider this but due to your excellent work they want you to be the face of frontier mining operations for off-planet investors. It’ll be more responsibility, you’ll be putting on investor demonstrations, which I know you have done in the past, but now you’ll be solely responsible for them.” She heard his words, but she was focused on looking at her hands, her fingers, her fingertips, how her knuckles bent and flexed, exactly like her old ones did, but these… these felt more real, more like they were hers and not a machine’s. Fade to white and smash cut to the present. Alyx looks down at her lone, scarred, and dirty hand.

-

Lukas chastises her again for her carelessness with her formal body, and uses language that refers to her body as an investment by the company instead of, well, her body. She is visibly angry at him and grieving at Malcolm’s death, but keeps a professional face. Before Lukas leaves, Alyx mentions that he’s not the first of her human supervisors, and that she has outlived all of them.

Lukas turns to leave but mentions there’s one more thing he wanted to mention. “Malcolm left this for you” he says, placing a small box on the table. He leaves.

Alyx gets her arm replaced and Lukas and EX 490 leave. Now that she’s alone, Alyx opens the box that Malcolm left her. Inside is a data disc containing the complete works of Zelda Hayworth, and a Mesh network extender.

Plugging the Mesh network extender into the back of her neck, she begins to sense the data stream of the Mesh bleeding in from the fringes of her senses. The sensation is at once, alien, exciting, and overwhelming. With practice, she begins to learn how to control the flow of information, and pick out concepts from the mental static, and she begins to research all the things she didn’t know about Arian culture. And as she does so, she is struck with a sudden and pervasive wanderlust unlike any she has felt before. The static hum of the eastern horizon beckons, and the railway that leads to the nearby Imaria city feels like the doorway to a beautiful new dawn.

However, she is interrupted by another voice, calling from the west, from deeper within the Glitchwastes, above them in fact. It’s someone named Avanna, and she’s the captain of a starship, a starship that’s set to crash directly into the wasteland.

-

As soon as she receives the distress signal, she rushes outside only to see the ship crash in the distance and escape pods eject from the side of the ship and whiz past overhead. She leaps into action, heading towards the crash site as fast as her robotic legs can carry her (fast). Reaching the massive wreckage, she heads to the central navigation computer. There, she finds an older woman taking the neural data core from the ship’s computer. Before the woman can escape, she’s nearly pinned underneath some wreckage. Alyx catches the falling beam and helps the woman escape. The old woman tells her that she was the only one who didn’t get into an escape pod. Once outside, Alyx asks her “Are you Avanna?” to which she replies “No honey, this is.” and gives her the data core before she collapses.