Bot

Title: Bot Written by: Robin Stones Synopsis: In the aftermath of a second American civil war, a new nation has risen: the Second Union. Brutal, militarized, and corporatized, it thrives on war and spectacle. Its crown jewel is WarTorn, a massively popular, live-action military simulation game where elite players—fame-chasing influencers—battle for dominance in fully immersive, real-world arenas. For every Player their is a Bot. Paid to die and be re-animated with the help of cutting edge medical technology. Anonymous, expendable. They are cannon fodder. Never allowed to win. Editha Gardner was once one of the best. A survivor of war, a veteran Bot, and a soldier sculpted by trauma, she escaped the game and rebuilt a life as a therapist with her husband Jay, a fellow Bot, and their two children. Jay, still playing, now bears the physical toll of years in the arena—his body a patchwork of revivified tissue, with just enough original parts left to stay alive. Then everything falls apart. During a semi-final match, Jay is brutally executed live on stream by Phobos, a notorious influencer and sadistic player. Jay had already been incapacitated—defenseless. But Phobos unloads round after round into him for the entertainment of his and his team’s millions of subscribers. The game, the audience, and the corporations cheer. Revivification, the system that brought Jay so many times before fails this time. Jay’s death leaves his family in tatters. WarTorn Corporation immediately distances itself. Insurers freezes all of Jay’s pensions and benefits, pending any litigation Editha can afford against Phobos. Editha is left grieving, furious and now broke. Deciding to fight Editha enlists Fionn Ó Foghldah, a sharklike attorney who sees the public’s obsession as leverage. They launch a lawsuit—not just for justice, but to destabilize the Crazy Crew, Phobos’s team, in the court of public opinion. Editha wants accountability. But while she prepares to fight back through legal means, someone else is already moving faster. Jaya, Editha’s seventeen-year-old daughter, has been playing WarTorn in secret. Known only as Skanda, she’s a rising star in the underground rankings—agile, relentless, and masked. She was in the same semi-final match as her father, and didn’t even know it until he was already dead. Now, armed with skill and fury, Jaya makes a public vow: in the upcoming final, she’s coming for Phobos. Editha is horrified. She knows firsthand the cost of the game. She knows Phobos won’t hesitate to destroy her daughter the same way he destroyed Jay. She begs WarTorn to intervene, to bar Jaya from playing. But the system sees only opportunity: Skanda’s audience explodes, engagement soars, and Phobos, now playing the villain in a perfectly viral story, fuels the fire. A reckoning is scheduled for primetime. Meanwhile, Shaker, a disgraced former member of the Crazy Crew, steps out of the shadows to mentor Jaya. He claims to have once been Jay’s friend. Together, they train. He tells her about the “God Box”—a hidden objective in WarTorn’s final round that, if found, grants a bot or player an unbeatable win condition. It’s legend. It’s myth. And it was what Jay was chasing before he died. Desperate to protect her daughter, Editha faces an impossible choice. Once again, she becomes a Bot. Not for the fame. Not for the money. But to protect her child from the inside of a game designed to kill her. As the WarTorn final approaches, so does a collision course: Jaya, determined to kill; Editha, determined to save; Phobos, eager to destroy. All within a rigged, corporatized battlefield where brutality is currency, and loss is content. With death looming on every side, Editha must navigate a battlefield filled with killers, sponsors, cameras, and ghosts. But she’s not the same woman who left the arena years ago. She’s older. Wiser. And she’s not here to play. She’s here to finish what her husband started. She’s here to save her daughter. Or die trying. Set in a world where pain is profitable and grief is gamified, Bot is a high-stakes, emotionally driven sci-fi action drama about family, sacrifice, and what happens when the spectacle forgets the people behind the blood. In coverage from The Black List and We Screenplay it has been described as: “...a commercially viable, sci-fi-adjacent action-thriller with strong roles. This could certainly find a path to production with a package of a talented filmmaker and charismatic cast. The writing is professional and the dialogue is also worthy of note as well.” “...exemplary originality to your project, with creative universe rules that elevate the audience's experience. At the same time, you deliver a familiar and emotional story, which becomes universal due to the family relationships.”