My encounter with the ASA bureaucracy hadn’t worked out well for anyone involved, even if the changes in my life had done wonders to reinforce that I’d made the right choice in the end.In the end. “ Your Alpheratz Sports Association medical evaluation confirmed the genetic relation,” Wallace - I wondered if he was one of the senior partners in the firm’s name, or a relative - said.ĭespite myself, I winced. “ My firm has been retained as executors of the will and estate of the late Sieg Rostig, Count Guanahani.”Ī moment’s mental check turned up where I’d heard that name before - my, younger-me-that-was-from-this-universe, mother had mentioned the name once as being her best guess of who my father was. “ Ah, I apologise for waking you, then, Miss… Blackwing?” The chill of the fake wood paneling against my completely bare bottom woke me up enough to add, “S’rry…” A yawn interrupted me before I could finish, “.was asleep.”

“Mmmm,” I affirmed, and let myself slump down the wall to the floor. “ Have I reached the number of Asha Blackwing?” Hello, this is Raleigh Wallace, with the Law Office of Pierre, Watson, Wallace and Watson,” the voice on the other end of the line said, after a moment’s nonplussed pause. Actual verbalization wasn’t going to come online for another thirty seconds or so. I sat up, tossed the traffic cone at the hotel room’s door, and stood carefully to shamble over to the nearer wall, and the phone hanging from it. Future of the eighties, go fuck yourself. The now-younger me, me-me, had been unwillingly dragged to enough wakefulness for the memories to merge together into a vaguer and probably more competent gestalt ‘me’, and incidentally to recognize that infernal breebling as the phone rather than the alarm clock. The once-younger would be living a comfortable-ish, quiet life with a loving family in twentieth century Earth, able to make both a critical technological revolution and a massive fortune with an engineering degree a thousand years in advance of the times… And of doing a perfectly good job taking care of, loving, my-our family there. The younger had four years of hardened party experience and was capable of rating this hangover as a 4.6, plus-or-minus 0.2, on a 1-to-10 scale of ‘Are you sure you didn’t just oversleep?’ to ‘Allow the doctor to explain just how close you came to dying of alcohol poisoning’. The older me had never drunk more than a glass or so of champagne in a given year. In the liminal space between sleeping and waking, it was easy to check the streams of memory, laid out in separate elements for consideration for the first and perhaps the last time. A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at

Thrill of the chase a rocky riverbed