Wow, thank you, I'm glad you liked it and I love your wonderful summaries of the different endings.

Abstract, written in five minutes, was my gift to the die hard shippers who put up with my attempts at writing, the ones who only want happiness and love and ..well, I find it all rather unrealistic, but I mentioned dreams and nightmares quite a bit, and because of that, this ending was sort of possible..and there it is.

Irreconcilable, well you said it better than I can..she's repeating that cycle. This was actually the only ending I was initially going to post. I'm so glad I didn't.

Oh my, Perdition is... well it's something else but it almost didn't happen. I didn't want take the story back to that insanity but we've really seen Jarod (in the series) push the limits and I couldn't help but explore the "what if's?" If absolutely power corrupts absolutely, what happens if and when a Pretender is corrupted absolutely by the all powerful Centre? And my answer is Perdition.

I'm so glad you like it, really thought I'd be stoned for that one but it just seemed to work so well and was so similar to Jarod in my mind, he's out there on the fringe, really. 

Well, thank you so much, M. Rose, for reading and reviewing. It's been a pleasure to read every single review.

I will try and crank out another chapter by the end of the weekend, then there might be a bit of a break because I'm travelling around Thanksgiving.

Glad you liked the chapter ;-)

Freedom is a relative concept. Is Original Jarod free? Sure he's no longer locked in a cell, but he can't stay in any one place long enough to develop normal friendships/relationships either. Miss Parker, Broots and Sydney probably all think of themselves as free, and they're all obviously better off than pre-escape Jarod, but they can't exactly walk away even when doing evil. I doubt Miss Parker thought she would end up as she did, chasing someone down for *years*, back whenever she agreed to go work for her father. (One thing that worries me about the new young-MP-at-training-camp novels is that they might make the mistake of portraying her as being brainwashed, which would remove all agency from the character and ruin the great banality-of-evil thing they have going. But I digress ...)

Also the Centre has more options, because both Jarod and Sydney do not realize that some of the sims are being used for evil purposes. He must have done a ton of legitimate good ones, or they never would have been able to keep him captive until his mid-30s.

Uh-oh, keep reading. You might not like the ending.

Freedom is a relative concept. Is Original Jarod free? Sure he's no longer locked in a cell, but he can't stay in any one place long enough to develop normal friendships/relationships either. Miss Parker, Broots and Sydney probably all think of themselves as free, and they're all obviously better off than pre-escape Jarod, but they can't exactly walk away even when doing evil. I doubt Miss Parker thought she would end up as she did, chasing someone down for *years*, back whenever she agreed to go work for her father. (One thing that worries me about the new young-MP-at-training-camp novels is that they might make the mistake of portraying her as being brainwashed, which would remove all agency from the character and ruin the great banality-of-evil thing they have going. But I digress ...)

Also the Centre has more options, because both Jarod and Sydney do not realize that some of the sims are being used for evil purposes. He must have done a ton of legitimate good ones, or they never would have been able to keep him captive until his mid-30s.