The Story So Far

This page contains a chapter-by-chapter synopsis, That mean it is full spoilers, natch. It is, however, a pretty good place to start if you want to jump in with the most recent chapter. I will update this page as I release new chapters so you don't have to worry about spoilers about events that are yet to come. In addition to chapters, the novel is divided into episodes, which contain major story arcs. The entire novel will unroll over the course of six episodes. Each episode will contain a varying number of chapters.

Clicking on the chapter titles will take you to the entire chapter body.

Episode One

Chapter One

Aaron, his wife Tabitha, and their daughter Asandra (also called Andra) are three Atropans living on the planet Kepler Lyra Prime. Asandra suffers from a disease known as the shuddering, the victims of which are called shudders. As the name implies, shudders experience violent seizures. The plague is highly contagious and has been sweeping the Atropan population of the League, affecting mostly children. To stem the spread of disease, these children are taken into Cold Storage. This is a form of suspended animation. People in Cold Storage are allowed out for one day a year so they may socialize with their families.

A year after Asandra first goes into Cold Storage, she returns to her family for her free day. They engage in many activities. These include chess, Andra's favorite game. During one game, she reveals that she plays through chess games in her head while in Cold Storage. People are not supposed to be conscious during this time. This reveals to Asandra's parents the horrors of her confinement and inspires Aaron to insist that his daughter stay with them rather than return at the end of the day as she is scheduled to do so. As the transport ship arrives to take his daughter back, he hatches a plan.

Chapter Two

 

This chapter takes the form of a letter written by the Reverend Martin Thomas to future generations. He introduces us to the lay of the land. The human race stretches out among the stars, getting from point to point using ridge space. The center of ridge space is the planet Pirayus. Humans are the only known civilization and most are citizens of the Delian League. The dominant population in the League are the fabriles, which include Martin Thomas and the family from chapter one. Fabriles are genetically engineered and those fabriles who belong to the Atropan religion, which are the vast majority, believe in the guidance of the Sorter. The Sorter is a super computer intelligence that can predict the outcome of human behavior and thus serves as an oracle guiding people's decisions.

There are natches, too. They are naturally born and most of these people belong to the Meropene religion. The Meropenes believe that there used to be another form of intelligent life in the universe, but that humans wiped them out centuries ago. They also believe this civilization may have left behind another way of living besides that offered by the Atropans. Many Meropenes are in search of a mythical lost city which was built by these ancient aliens. The Reverend Thomas believes that Meropene are a threat to the stability of human civilization and wants them wiped out. 

Chapter Three

Lisette is a Meropene natch living on the planet Pirayus with her father. She currently works for the museum that is preserving Pirayan history, but she used to be a revolutionary who fought against Atropan hegemony. She quit this movement after the death of infant child years ago. She blames this death on the Atropans and still harbors a lot of animosity towards them. Lisette goes out to meet with a cell belonging to a new wave of revolutionaries. Though she has her doubts, she is ready to get involved again. She reveals that, thanks to her research on the history of the planet, she has figured out how to build a powerful weapon.

After returning home, Lisette sees her father watching a news feed from Kepler Lyra prime. He reveals that it is about a man named Aaron, a man that Lisette's father aparently knew when Aaron was a child. Her father says that Aaron's actions may change the course of history in the galaxy.

Chapter Four

We return to Aaron's home, where he has hatched a plan. When the transport arrives to take his daughter away, he climbs aboard instead.

Chapter Five

Tabitha, who is Aaron's wife and Asandra's mother, goes to visit an old friend. This turns out to be the reverend Martin Thomas, who was more than a friend. They engaged in a relationship when they were young, before the Sorter set them on their separate ways. Tabby often comes to Thomas for advice and consolation. Today she wants to tell him a secret that she's been carrying with her for some time. Asandra, like all fabriles, is generatically engineered. Tabby created her herself. Usually the process involves included elements of both parents and then making modifications. Tabby did not include very much of Aaron, using Thomas as a model instead. This is because she can't use Aaron's genetic material, for reasons she does not yet revea

Chapter Six

Aaron, having hijacked a Cold Storage transport ship, arrives at the storage facility, which is orbit around his home world of Kepler Lyra Prime. He is greated by a retinue of robotic guards and two humans. The first is a police Lieutenant named Flint, who defers to the authority of a woman who introduces herself as Myers. Aaron recognizes Myers as the Cold Storage representative he often spoke by comm link, though he never knew her in person. He always thought she was just a low level functionary, but it appears that she is much more.

Myers and Flint take Aaron to a small room with a window that overlooks the planet below. Myers shows Aaron a red chess queen that he had brought with him, but was removed in transit. The Lieutenant had confirmed that it was not a weapon, so Myers gives it back and asks Aaron what he intended to do with it. Aaron removes his Bodhi Chip from his spinal cord. This chip records human experiences so that they can be loaded into the Sorter for analysis. The records are encrypted and it is illegal for anyone but the Sorter to access them. Aaron explains that he and Asandra discovered a flaw in the chip security that allowed them to wireless download its recods. The chess piece it a hiding place for this receiver, which is also a transmitter that can load experiences into another Bodhi Chip.

Aaaron proceeds to push the piece around in a pattern known as the Turing Gambit. This is a code that activates the device. As he is explaining this, Myers theorizes that Aaron has created the device so that he could communicate with his daughter while in Cold Storage. He confirms this, but also that there is more to it. Myers asks Aaron if he notices the anomaly in Asandra's signal and Aaron is puzzled. He had never gotten the opportunity to download her data. He had something else in mind. He complete the activate code and taps the queen on the table, causing it to receive the suffering of all the children in Cold Storage and transmit that into the Bodhi chips of Myers and the Lieutenant (Aaron had removed his chip previously).

As they writhe in pain, he tells them that he wants safe passage for himself and his daughter to a haven world. Upon being released from the grip of Aaron's device, Myers explains that there is much more that Aaron needs to know. As she reveals before, there was an anomaly in Asandra's signal. This anomaly may represent a bigger threat to her life than the shudders and it would be unwise to take her away. Myers offers to show Aaron what she means.

Chapter Seven

Back on Pirayus, Lisette and her father, who's name is reveal to be Auris, are discussing Aaron. Auris is a doctor at a natch hospital. Years ago, some people brought in an infant that they had found in one of the canals. When he sequenced the child's DNA, he found that he was a natch, but that he had many of the genetic characteristics of a fabrile. It appears that by chance alone, a natch was born that was just as good as anyone that had been genetically engineered. Auris decided to get the child adopted into a fabrile family so that he could live a more privileged life.

Upon finishing this explanation, Auris gets a call from Senator Herrodis of Kepler Lyra Prime. He shoos Lisette out so that he can hold this conversation in private, but later explains to her that Senator Herrodis is coming to Pirayus to see Auris's work. It turns out that Auris has been secretly, and illegally, researching a cure to the shuddering disease that is sweeping the fabriles. The Senator is an Atropan, but he is a moderate and a practical man. If a natch doctor has a solution to the problem, Herrodis is all too willing to explore that options. Auris believes that this if he can cure the shudders, that will go a long way to healing the conflict between the Meropenes and the Atropans. He advocates this as a better way than the sort of armed rebellion that Lisette was involved in and may be involved in again.

Lisette's father leaves and she goes to sleep. She has a dream about the day she was last involved in revolt, when she was in her late teens or early twenties. She is dressed as she was then, though her face looks as old as it is in real life. In her dream, she meets up with her old boyfriend Luke, who was also the father of the child whose death Lisette blames on the Atropans. Luke is joining in with a mob that has started a riot. The riot is in responses to an act call "the isolations". Their city is built on a collection of massive tiles that float on a lagoon. The seams between the tiles make the canals. It was created this way so that Meropene sectors could be separated out into ghettos. This is exactly what is happening now.

When the dream Lisette asks Luke why the Atropans are isolating them, he says that the Sorter told them to. The Sorter calculated a great risk of their being a riot. This has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everything is happening the way it had before. Lisette finds out that she is pregnant again. Luke talks about wanting to kill the Atropans and Lisette says he's never killed a human before. Luke protests that it isn't killing humans because the Atropans are basically machines. They're manufactured according to designs and allow themselves to be programmed by the Sorter. He throws a bomb and the Atroapns capture him. Lisette sees blood on her hands and she is no longer pregnant. The baby has been lost again.

Lisette's father arrives in the dream and takes her to an underground cavern. There she sees creatures in long robes that obscure their faces and her father explains that these are the ancients, the last remnants of the alien civilization that Meropenes believe humans wiped out centuries ago. Meropenes also believe that the ancients are the secret to living a different sort of life than the Atropans offer. These ancients communicate by singing, and their songs are layers with many different feelings at once.

Through Auris, the ancients explain that Lisette's baby did not die after all. They rescued him. She is presented with a bassinet and pulls the baby out to comfort it. After a few minutes, however, the infant stops moving. Lisette is worried that something is wrong. Her father offers her a wind-up key. At first she is confused, but then Auris removes a pair of glasses that he had placed on her eyes earlier. Lisette sees that her child is in fact a mechanical device. 

She sets the doll down and complains that her father and the ancients are playing a cruel truck on her. Auris winds up the baby and it starts crying again. He explains that it shouldn't matter that it is mechanical. It can clearly feel pain and want its mother. It is alive in every way that we can tell if something is alive. Eventually, Auris prevails on his daughter. She picks up the baby and comforts it again, but then it starts to shake violently. Auris says that it has come down with the shuddering. Lisette's son shakes to much that it starts to come apart. Eventually, it pulverizes itself into a pile of dust. Lisette is left alone, without her father or the ancients around. She cries with a despair she has never felt before.

Lisette wakes up. She eats breakfast outside and the man from the resistance cell she had met with the previous day comes up. He explains that they are ready to accept her and want her to build them the bomb she promised. Lisette is not so sure she wants to continue. She doesn't see the Atropans as she had before and her father's message of moderation has weighed on her. What she wants to know is that the attacks will be targeted and not involve the indiscriminate killing of civilians.

The man from the resistance cell assures her that they do intent to make precise attacks and gives her an example. Secret intelligence has revealed to them that Senator Herrodis is arriving through ridge space to Pirayus later that morning. They intend to kill him. Lisette is worried about the safety of her father, who is going to meet the Senator, but doesn't want to reveal this. She asks why they would target Herrodis, who seems to be a moderate. The man says this is just a ruse. His top advise to Martin Thomas, who wants to eliminate all Meropenes. How could he be in that position of the Senator isn't of the same mind? Besides, Thomas is probably traveling with the Senator and thus make the opportunity irresistible. 

Lisette goes back to her house and prepares to warn her father of the danger.