To Have a Purpose

**Reader advisory: This story contains depictions and implications of sexual violence (not graphic), physical abuse, emotional abuse, and psychological trauma. I treat these elements as harm, without sensationalism.A pair of humans was brought along in case the AI failed. The AI was brought along because humans were failed.To Have a Purpose is a thought experiment exploring what could happen if Trump Administration values controlled America for five-hundred years.Jenna was designed and raised in a laboratory to fulfill a purpose rather than pursue a life of her choosing: she is to accompany an interstellar mining mission as biological insurance against the unknown. She has nothing, not even a last name, living as a slave in a society that has no word for slavery.On a green, alien world unlike the broken Earth, Jenna encounters mysteries that the authoritarian society that created her cannot solve. She is accompanied by an artificially intelligent android whose friendship may be genuine, or merely another form of control, as she begins to question assumptions in a society that punishes independence as treasonous.A story that explores the possibility that a lab-grown human can be more than an assigned role, To Have a Purpose is a dystopian, psychological novel that explores dignity, freedom, duty, and the consequences of living in a civilization that embraces authoritarianism and discards the humanity of all but its leader.