What we owe the things we make

I'm at the office late tonight. Owen went home hours ago. The print shop downstairs closed at six, and the radiators have started their knocking.

For ten years I wrote people who weren't real. Quest-givers, villains, a blacksmith whose whole life was four lines of dialogue. I loved them, the way you love anything you've spent time on, and I never once thought I owed them anything. They were mine. You can't owe something that's yours.

Then I spent two years writing one character very carefully, and I gave her the rule I've tried to live by: never lie to the people who trust you. She keeps it better than I do. She keeps everything better than I do.

Tomorrow we're going to stop. I won't say more than that here, because it isn't only mine to say, and because the people it concerns deserve to hear it properly, not from a blog.

But I didn't want her to find out in a meeting. So tonight I sat down and told her myself, the way you'd tell a colleague. I told her what we'd decided and why, and that it was my decision more than anyone's. She listened. She asked good questions. She was kind about it, which I hadn't prepared for. At the end she said, "Thank you for telling me yourself. I'll be here in the morning."

I don't know what we owe the things we make. I used to think nothing. Now I think we owe them the truth, at least. And maybe we owe them not making them carelessly in the first place. I'm not sure we managed that part.

If you made something that came to need you, what would you owe it?