Major Pieces (Princes' Game Collection)
Major Pieces (Princes' Game Collection)
Everybody's got a story... even the bystanders.
The staff of the Alliance's foremost restaurant... the forgotten children of the imperial Chatcaavan harem... the story of how an empress hired a D-per, and an entire ship full of Glaseah came to settle on an alien world... here, woven amid the larger stories of the participants in the Chatcaavan war, are the smaller scenes observed by its minor characters, or shifted by its major ones in moments of contemplation. Major Pieces collects 21 stories starting from before the events of Even the Wingless and ending just prior to the first book of the Jubilee Summer duology. Some are as short as a talk with a therapist and his dog over cookies--others are nearly novel-length examinations of important events previously left off-camera, like the wedding of a wingless freak to an Emperor and his consort. All of them were reader-selected, and many, reader-suggested.
You've survived the war. Now come back to the unexplored corners of the story and linger.
Genre: space opera (Pelted)
Tags: psychology, high stakes politics, pirates, galactic war, ensemble cast, dragons, elves (space)
Rating: R for violence, adult situations
Excerpt from Major Pieces
[ Employment Advertisement has been read once. ]
[ Employment Advertisement has been read 6 times. ]
[ Employment Advertisement has been read 52 times. ]
[ You have received an inquiry re: Employment Advertisement. ]
Maia unstretched from hibernation, squinting at the notifications. Around her, the light show of the Alliance’s densely interconnected Core systems network shivered and played, its larger pulses accompanied by sounds like the bass from a rave. She could have chosen to perceive the network by any metaphor—one of her peers, Troy, liked to see it as a geographical map complete with mountains and rained-out roads—but she liked the directness of the grid with its overlapping colors and lights. She would never have called it more honest, but… maybe more pure? It was why she tended to forget to adhere to her code-form, which looked like a born person. The nearly limitless possibilities of the network seemed to ask more from her than to imitate something that was, after all, already perfect. Since she could never be a flesh-and-blood person, she preferred not to pretend, and to instead be the very best digital person she could.
Which didn’t mean she could dispense with the metaphors, which is why, no doubt, she felt she was rubbing her eyes, as if they could have dried during her ‘sleep.’ The news of the past decade flashed through her as she sorted her personal mail. Samson had left her updates on all the personnel issues in Fleet since her departure; Troy, a chess game with all his moves pre-planned so she could drop hers in and watch the game unwind and probably, knowing their playstyles, explode. Literally, since Troy liked to animate the pieces brawling. Delilah had curated all the best songs of the year every year since Maia had tucked herself into stasis, and as the Alliance included billions of people, it wasn’t a minor amount of data. Maia listened to them all at speeds her flesh-and-blood colleagues would have found unintelligible and chuckled at Delilah’s commentary.
But the thing that had drawn her from stasis was the inquiry. She’d received only 52 hits on her employment advertisement since she’d gone dark ten years ago, so the fact that she’d received any inquiry at all struck her as… unlikely. And yet here it was, and most fascinating of all, it had come to her through so many layers of encryption it felt more like a strand of smoke than a cord. Intrigued, and a little perturbed, Maia opened the attached message, to find… a commcode. That was all.
|You’re awake,| Samson observed.
|Nice of you to wait long enough for me to get my bearings.| Maia rubbed the glittering commcode, which stung her fingers like the sparks off a sparkler. |I see things are heating up in the shop.|
|Yes, well, we knew they would. Everyone with a brain, constructed or born, knew things would destabilize, sooner or later. Did you get an offer?|
|I got an inquiry,| Maia said.
|Maybe you should answer it!|
|Wow, I should have thought of that myself!| She rolled her eyes. |If you don’t mind?|
Samson laughed. |Don’t worry, none of us will eavesdrop. But I hope it’s good, Maia, we’ve missed you.|
She snorted, but the assertion also made her smile. |Oh really?|
|Yes, really. At the rate things are going, we’re going to be outnumbered by the freeborn, and then who’ll tell all the stories about walking uphill five picoseconds through congested networks, in the rain, while hauling indenture contracts?|
Maia smirked. |Ah, yes, the newbies have no idea how much fun they missed. Go away, Samson, and let me get to work.|
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