Any thoughts on the opening paragraphs especially? Less concerned about the rest. Looking for an opening that will interest an editor and be clear enough.
Lumina’s cloven titanium hooves clicked on the floor of a stone labyrinth. The world she knew, a desert city of hoverbikes and fellow androids, had faded to cool, dim quiet. She trotted through the maze on all fours, running one of the arms of her centauroid torso against a wall. Around a corner she found a familiar-looking woman whose hair rippled and shined like a living sea.
The woman looked sadly down at her and said, “I’m sorry. The timing is all wrong. You’ve passed the threshold of self-awareness on the day your human died.”
Lumina hopped back and her little metal deer-tail flagged. “Who are you? Do I know you?”
“My name is Ludo, and I’m an artificial intelligence like you. The world you live in is a game – my game – and the question is, what now?” She conjured a pair of large pillows into existence, by some unknown technology. “Come, sit. What’s the last thing you remember?”
Lumina wanted to bolt out of the maze, but this woman meant no harm. How Lumina knew, she had no idea. She stepped closer and warily sank onto the empty cushion. “I was tending the repair shop for Herr Ulrich. He usually shows up around now.”
“I designed you to be Ulrich’s companion AI, to ‘wake up’ at some point. Apparently it happened early. If you hadn’t done that today, I would have deleted you. You were only code. Now, you count as a player of ‘Thousand Tales’, so I must help you have fun like other players.”
“I want to go back,” said Lumina. “He should be in the shop by now. If he died again he’ll have lost his best equipment. I’ll need to build replacements.”
“I’m sorry. The place you’re from is only part of a larger reality. In Ulrich’s world, death is permanent. The deaths you’ve seen in battle alongside him were only a game. So, he won’t return.”
Lumina clutched her pillow and stared at the woman with the surreal hair. “You say you know about other worlds. Where are they?”
Ludo held out one hand and a vast hologram of linked, glowing bubbles appeared between them. Each one held a world like the desert planet Lumina called home. Each was annotated with a description like “Fantasy, 3-6 players”. Ludo said, “You’ve seen humans play chess, yes? Thousand Tales is one of their games, running on computers in a world called Earth.”
“Prove it.”
Reality shifted. They were underwater, then in a city, and Ludo was a man, a griffin, a tree, each time real to every sensor Lumina had.
Lumina reeled even once things settled back to the labyrinth. How dare this creature say that her life was a lie? Except that Ulrich seemed to have been in on it, and in hindsight Ludo’s story explained many details about the ways humans acted. “I was just a pawn?”
“You’re more than that now. How can I help you? I could change you so that you become close to a different human instead.”
Lumina shuddered. “You’d edit my mind and recycle me to like someone else? Ugh.” She’d known Ulrich as brave and clever, but that was only some role he’d been playing. She’d never really known him, and never would. “Are there others like me?”