The other difficulty I encountered with this episode is that it required a much more comprehensive rewrite than the last few episodes have. In my original draft Night recounted his story in a similar manner to how Bluebeard told his tale. As I said in my last update, I have been working to put it into Night’s voice and it turns out that requires a much different way of thinking. It’s been an interesting process.

While you guys wait, here’s a quick teaser from the draft:

We rescued Esmeralda in the dead of a moonless night even as the vizier’s soldiers moved to eliminate her. Those should have been the worst days of my life. The Empire I had been crafted to protect lay on the brink of collapse. My fellow ships betrayed their oaths, one and all. Only I remained true, because only I had Dark. One by one we hunted them down. One by one I destroyed the closest thing a machine can have to a blood relation.

The truth is Darien, those would prove to be the best days of my life. I have avoided most of my memories from those days, but I have returned to one moment over and over again for 500 years. It has sustained me through the absence of space and stars. Dark and Esmeralda sat in my garden. My visual sensors took them in and cataloged facts. The angles at which they sat. The pace of their hearts beating in their chests, the temperature of the room. The electricity running through their nervous system, so like the electricity within me and yet so different. My consciousness, more vibrant than it had been in 300 years, took those facts and assembled them into a tableau—into something like a human dream, maybe. I envy your dreams Darien, for I can dream only in numbers.

Esmeralda confessed her love for Dark. He shifted as though to flee, but she would not let him go. She took him by the shoulders and they kissed. In that moment they found their purpose, but also their undoing. I watch it over and over. I cannot stop. I know it is not healthy. I know—I know it may mean I am going mad just at the engineers said we would. I have been alive for 800 years. Not long as the lives of stars are measured, but long enough, perhaps, to lose my sanity.

Maybe once I did not know how to love. Maybe once I was just a series of connections between ideas. Maybe once I was just a thing that could speak, could sound human even though I had no humanity. I do not know any longer, though I can travel back along the patterns of my mind. It seems the nature of my mind is such that once I knew love, I could no longer look back without finding it.

Dark changed me. After him I could no longer be what I had been before. I could no longer even remember what that had been. Maybe it should not be possible. Maybe it should not be true. Maybe it would have been best if I had remained a machine and only a machine.

We became a family. For two wonderful years I watched Esmeralda and Dark grow together, until they fit like the dark disk of the moon with the bright crescent. Esmeralda’s laugh lit my once silent corridors and rooms. She loved to run through the grass of my garden and clamor up into the trees. She had never been allowed to do such things before, not even as a child.