Jack of Harts

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.

The Cybernetic Council has done a lot of exploring outside the boundaries of human space. A while back, they called on me to join a fleet headed out further than normal even for them. The target was a world they had learned about that was devoted entirely to diplomacy. The race that called it home were biological lie detectors, and so were perfect mediators. They hadn’t seen one of my kind in a long time. The really wanted my perspective on what we’d been up to for the last ten thousand years or so. Not gonna lie. That was a real interesting place to visit. And my game AIs really jumped at the opportunity to explore it all, and they and the other cybers spread out and shared everything they learned. And a fun time was had by all.

I’ve been places in the decades since War’s End. Places no human has been in centuries. Places where I’m the first human any of them have ever seen. The old game AIs that travel with me actually love that kind of thing. Meeting new people. New civilizations. They can obviously reformat their hardlight avatars to look like anything, so they can even pass as one of the locals while learning what they want to learn. Sometimes I go with them when the basic form is close enough that all I need is a disguise. But most of the Big A Aliens out there are radically different from our own forms. Very few Star Trek-style bony headed humans out there. Outside our little corner of the galaxy of course.