Jack of Harts

My family has had a long history of doing interesting things back in the old days. We are proud Scandinavians and the family tales say we used go a Viking. You might gently call that trading. A more honest description would be trading for anything not nailed down, sometimes without the permission of the previous owners. Sometimes we brought pry bars to take the things that were nailed down. And we often came back home with lovely new brides. The exact nature of the willingness of the new brides was usually overlooked in that era. Some people called us raiders. Pirates. Less charitable terms at times. My family considered ourselves fishers and farmers who could fight. We never gave up on that identity.

My family includes far more than the merely biological humans born into it. We have welcomed a lot of cybernetic intelligences over the centuries. They saved our lives, sent us daughter who made our lives better, and we accepted them into our lives. And I’m not the only member of the family who made AIs that woke up in the end. They’re all every bit as much a part of the family as those of us born of a biological mother. We’re one big family crossing the biological and cybernetic lines. Grandma Carter made that clear a long time ago. She was an early adopter of the whole thing, or maybe she got adopted early. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Either way, we make each other better, and that’s pretty awesome.

Family are the people closest to us. Who have our backs and stay with us through thick and thin. They will never give up on us. Never stop. Sometimes they share blood with us. We grew up with them. They raised us. Sometimes we find them as life goes on. Sometimes they walk up and change our lives forever in an instant. I had a good family growing up. I always figured I’d make a good family when it was time to grow up. There were lots of pretty girls in town. Some I could even see building a life with. Some I wanted to. Turns out that I built the family I needed to keep me alive through two decades of War, and happy for all the decades that followed. Yes, I really am my father’s son.