Sophia Jackson
Stories
11
Chapters
5,834
Words
1.6 M
Comments
0
Reading
5 d, 14 h
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Another two weeks blurred past. Neha’s schedule filled half of Alden’s days, and his own side projects more than filled the rest of his time. He had his first of three interviews at CNH. It was in-person but just ten minutes long. Only B-ranks had to attend the first interview, and Alden had the strong impression that the whole point of it was to discourage them from applying. The questions had all walked a razor’s edge between professionalism and insult. “Do you think your disadvantages will…-
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“Are we going to pretend like your big sister wasn’t sitting on you three seconds ago?” Alden asked in Artonan, watching in fascination as “That would be my preference,” Stuart said primly. He took his tablet over to his standing desk and set it up at eye level. At the periphery of his vision, Alden could see the Artonan boy’s hands casting a short repetitious pattern over what looked like a metal block. He felt himself smiling in amusement. He tried to keep it down to a reasonable amount.…
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128 •
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Just as his second week on Anesidora came to an end, Alden had an hour-long planning session with Neha. He met her in the counselors’ shared office space after breakfast one morning. It was just one of the apartments, with the beds in the rooms replaced by desks. “I have She smiled as he took the binder. “I’m also sending you a copy through the System. But paper has its charms.” “You’re an organizer?” “I’m a lot of things at my age,” she said. “Not your average slouch who never…
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128 •
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Alden enjoyed a week of peace and anonymity before he chose to bite the bullet and attend a Meet the New Residents event. The neighbors were getting interested in him. Natalie Choir was worried he’d been left out because an apartment full of new Rabbit boys was being filled on the floor below. Her roommates had been hinting that they wanted access to the coffee machine. And the guys in 912 had invited him over to hang out with them tomorrow and “watch our rock garden do something, Frankly he was so…
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128 •
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Alden sent his list of links off to Stuart. And after some contemplation, he decided if he was going to try sharing human culture with somebody, he should probably start engaging with it again himself. He stood in front of the fridge, staring at the community activities calendar for the day. He had a more detailed version pulled up on his interface, too. They went all-in on the programming here at intake; virtually every minute from six o’clock in the morning until midnight curfew had something on the…
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128 •
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On his fourth night in the intake dorms, Alden’s eyes snapped open at 3 AM. He barely resisted the urge to scream and throw his comfortable pillow across the room like an angry child. He was tired. But not tired enough to ignore He was beginning to see that this was going to be a chronic problem, not something that he could just shake off. He felt almost as bad as he had the first day, only now his brain was slightly less busy with the ten thousand things it had been juggling since he came back home.…
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“So,” Alden said at the conclusion of a very long voicemail to Boe, “Jeremy is an angel among men. And I can’t believe you thought you could He ended the call and waited a minute just in case there was going to be a reply. When there was none, he flicked off the kitchen lights and stepped out of the apartment. As the door shut behind him, he heard the bolt slide into place automatically. It opened in response to a command he could give through his interface, too, so there was no need to keep…
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. . . It hurt too much for words. . . . Dear Royal Road Awesome Tech People, this is my attempt not to circumvent your lovely system for nefarious purposes but to have a single sentence chapter in my book for artistic reasons. It's something I would like to do, but it's not strictly necessary so I asked for permission first. Thank you for giving it! If it becomes a problem at a later date, please let me know and I'll delete it. Thank you very much for letting me write stories on your site.…
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CHAPTER SIXTY: Mother, pt. 2 “This is fun,” she said, waving a hand to make the sigil that represented Alden’s skill disappear from the television screen. “Normally, even if you were learning to use your authority, I wouldn’t talk to you about the original Avowed skills. I would have to violate some rules to direct you toward them these days, and you haven’t yet earned an extraordinary measure like that. But Alden was sure there was a picture of Joe somewhere in the universe with the words…
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Alden was stuck in the teleportation bay for so long that he finally took a seat on the floor of the phone booth-sized space and rested his back against the wall. About every five minutes, the security lady updated him and apologized again for the wait. They’d asked him if he was claustrophobic before telling him he’d need to be here for a while. The problem seemed to be his very long stay on the Triplanets combined with his age and his lack of a psychological profile. They’d wanted to know if…
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