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My Own Game - 4
Aug. 2nd, 2024 11:22 pmA long time in a galaxy far, far away, everything was completely different from what was written in the history textbooks at the demand of the rulers and their rivals.
The teenager received abilities one didn't want. A happy life is destroyed, and survival and freedom can become empty words. But if the world wants to turn you into a toy, you can make it play your own game with you.
***
Note: Self-consolation scribbles. I found a great Star Wars game but couldn't even get past the prologue because the controls were so complicated. This fanfic is NOT like that game. And it is AU for SW. I specifically try not to show who the character is, a boy or a girl, what their appearance is, so that readers can choose all this themselves, like in a video game.
— 4 —
Emil, thanks for the preliminary reading.
I still transferred to the Youth Military Academy. Dad didn't show it, but I knew he was very happy because he and all his ancestors had studied at this school, starting from the moment the family became wealthy.
In essence, the Academy was a school for heirs, the only military elements in it being a few daily ceremonies and a cadet uniform—a rudiment of the years when Kadvir was populated by mercenary gangs. And training the children of a leader of grouping in a military school guaranteed the loyalty of the peasants and artisans who had accepted the guardianship of one of the gangs. Civilians, driven from their homes by a severe economic crisis, could not survive on their own on a barely developed planet, among dangerous predators and unorganised bandit groups. And organised teams needed a source of food and clothing independent of external supplies. Equal cooperation didn't happen immediately, but competition between the groups forced the bandits to respect peaceful people.
There are still two months left before the long autumn holidays, and I will have time to finish the difference in subjects. It is insignificant between the two schools.
Twenty-eight days have passed since the day the tattoo created problems for the first time. And eleven days since that skirmish in the school yard. The Force has not shown itself in any way since the skirmish. I was beginning to hope that it had disappeared completely.
Now I was sitting in the library of the Youth Military Academy and collecting materials on the galaxnet for a research project. Next to me sat a fair-haired and blue-eyed girl with a splint on her leg. She had fifth-year stripes, which meant she was fifteen. She looked quite grown up. But she poked at the computer sensor like a little child.
I glanced at her screen. Ballistics calculations. But no one does them manually!
Oh, judging by the look on the girl's face, I said that out loud.
"No one," she said, "except for the combat AI testers. And if I don't pass the exams to join this special group, I'll have to go home."
Oh... I see. She's here on a grant, and life at home is hell.
"Don't look at me like that," said the girl. "My Mum is very good. She's ready to jump out of her skin and sell her bones, if only I had what she doesn't have. The problem is that I want a completely different kind of happiness for myself. She needs time to be alone, to calm down and understand that I'm no longer the sweet doll in a lace dress that I was ten years ago, and that the army…"
She looked at her splinted leg and sobbed. The girl didn't look like a crybaby; it was clearly the strong painkillers and stress that had sapped her self-control.
"Limping is no obstacle for the army," I said quickly. "You can be a pilot without any legs at all."
"I was only accepted here because of football. So that I could bring prizes for the Academy. But..." she started crying after all.
I was frantically trying to come up with a way out. There was no use in sympathy; here we had to solve the problem. It was not easy to get into the Army College; the municipal school would not be enough. All applicants from ordinary families studied on grants in good private schools. This girl wasn't doing well in math and physics; all the places in eSports were taken, otherwise, she would have started with it…
"A charity fund!" I realized. "You can get a scholarship through some creative project. What troops did you want to serve in?"
"Epsilon Intelligence."
For flights on a reconnaissance module in Epsilon-space, the leg doesn't matter; everything is controlled manually. Physics and chemistry are enough in the volume of a general education course of a municipal school; mathematics is even less needed; the main thing is agility, quickness of thought, and... midi-chlorians. And the latter is needed precisely in microdoses. The only field of activity where the Force makes sense. And then only if it is not excessive.
"There you need to colour the midi-chlorians with the necessary reagents and arrange them in the correct order," I recalled the little I knew about Epsilon-cosmos. "Fractal graphics as a method of navigation and control…"
"What are you talking about? There is very strong math!" The girl was indignant. "Epsilon-Navigator is not a job for everyone."
"Everyone loves stickers with routes through Epsilon-cosmos..." I continued out loud so that stupid prejudices would not distract me from my thoughts. "Managing dynamic space through midi-chlorians, which are correctly located... Colouring is a way to understand where and how many of them are there; the colour is determined by the number... And what if you draw navigation maps using art AI? Like animation for video games."
"I'm terrible at drawing," the girl shook her head.
"And you don't need to do it. There are plenty of AIs that make pictures in different styles based on scribbles on a tablet. Even a primary school student can draw their room so that it can't be confused with a forest meadow and vice versa. And AI will create a classic oil painting or an impressionist creation out of it."
"Flight charts aren't made like that," the girl snapped.
I glanced at the name tag on her uniform jacket.
"Tina Alverist, all these over-aged blockheads are constantly telling us that we don't understand anything about serious things because we're kids. So take advantage of this! A charity will be afraid to deny a scholarship to a child who is so imaginative that he made a navigation route from the capital to the Big Port using art-AI templates and a set of correction commands. Especially if you write that a real manager does not deal with routine tasks themselves; their job is to wisely distribute them between live subordinates and droids. And it doesn't matter how much your imagination works! The main thing is that you pay for the sixth, final year of middle school. And you'll come up with something for high school. A year is a long time."
“I have no idea how to use art-AI,” Tina muttered. "And this subject doesn't fit with the ones I've chosen at all. There could be problems."
"Go to a psychologist and tell him you want to take training in running art-AI as a form of art therapy. It distracts from trauma, calms you down, and all that. And make your own project and apply to the Shaidi Foundation. It'll be the easiest to get a scholarship there. I know this because my family sponsors several foundations."
Tina looked at me thoughtfully.
"It's worth a try, at least." And she smiled: "Where did you come from here, so smart? This is the first time I've seen a fry so rocked out about business. Even if their families run corporations."
"I'm new. I transferred recently."
"Straight to some special group, probably?"
I told her about the essay. And added:
"But I'm not sure that's the issue. My parents donated well to the grant fund of my former school."
Tina laughed.
"You'll definitely be able to run the family company well."
"Why are you here and not in the hospital?" I asked. "It's hard for you to sit, I can tell. And it hurts to move even in the air chair."
"Lying there and thinking that I'll never be able to even run out for ice cream again, let alone play football, hurts a lot more. And the doctor's words that there will be no scars, so I can wear a miniskirt as soon as the splint is removed, and in a couple of years I will be able to dance moderately on a date, do not help me at all. Crutches and ballistic tasks are better. That way, I don't feel like a discarded candy wrapper."
"No," I said. "You're not a wrapper. You're an Intuist-Navigator. Listening to space, perfecting your midi-chlorians sense. If it works for idiots with a lightsaber who can't tell their head from their ass without a tonne of midi-chlorians, an officer of Epsilon Intelligence will do all the better."
Tina laughed again.
"That's a strange comparison. But I like it!"
She glanced at my screen.
"Oh, so you're studying the Order and the Guard. It's clear why you say that.
"Not exactly," I said. "I just want to form my own opinion. One of the teachers at my old school says that Anakin Skywalker was a nobody, just a brainless, spineless bag with midi-chlorians. But I don't think so. Obi-Wan Kenobi tried very hard to deprive him of his personality and freedom of thought; he slowed down his development, and still Anakin tried to be himself, and he did the Jedi job better than Kenobi. It's a pity Anakin didn't leave the Order. He could have become a cool racer to have adrenaline and glory, and with the prize money, open a chain of repair shops to have a guarantee of a comfortable life even for his great-grandchildren. No repairman has ever sat without a bun with a thick layer of butter."
"That's why I don't like Padmé!" said Tina. "She should have suggested all this to Anakin. What's the point of a wife if she doesn't give her husband smart advice?"
A wife needs a good IQ to do that. And I have serious reasons to doubt that Padmé had it. But I can't tell everyone about my conclusions. And I spoke carefully:
"She didn't see that Kenobi was going crazy with envy of Anakin's talents. And the fact that he had a mother. Anakin was separated from her, and he began to enter the age when friends and adventures were more interesting to boys than their parents, but Anakin's life was warmed by memories of the person who blew on his skinned knees, told him fairy tales, and chased the bogeyman from under his bed when Anakin had bad dreams. Anakin knew what family was, and Kenobi had been raised as a tool. Qui-Gon Jinn understood that and tried to be a father to both of them, not a teacher. But Obi-Wan… It annoyed him. However, Anakin was comfortable. I think Qui-Gon would have helped him meet his mother, and would have found a way to save her. If Qui-Gon hadn't died, Anakin's talent would have been able to blossom to the fullest, and his character would have been revealed. But the Jedi Order broke the guy before Palpatine even got to him."
"It's possible," Tina said slowly. And she added, "I think Qui-Gon would have advised Anakin to leave the Order if the self-centred Padmé didn't have the brains to do it. She saw only herself, her ideas and ambitions."
I didn't answer. I didn't want to talk about Padmé. My grandmother and grandfather, who were my Mum's parents, told me a lot about how miners lived on the moons of Naboo. Escaping from there was the greatest success in their lives. And during Padmé's reign and senatorship, everything was much worse. It was not for nothing that miners of that time collected copper coins for a bounty hunter—not at all for nothing. Although the most famous of those who ordered Padmé's death was Nute Gunray, there were still a huge number of people who wanted to see her in a coffin.
I glanced at Tina and thought for a moment. She knows history, she understands business, and her head doesn't seem to be cluttered with prejudices. And I asked the question I couldn't find an answer to:
"Do you think the midi-chlorians really raped Shmi Skywalker? Then why didn't she have an abortion?"
Tina wasn't surprised or indignant, and I continued quickly, until Tina got tired of chatting about the distant past:
"Shmi doesn't look like a religious fanatic or a wacky pro-lifer. And she's not one of those who lose their personality so much that they don't care about themselves or their children, and reproduce even in the most horrible and dead-end conditions, just because that's the way it turned out."
Tina was silent and looked at me with interest. I said:
"There are no gynaecological clinics for female slaves, but all the media write that women on orthodox planets solve this problem themselves. And it doesn't always happen with a risk to their lives. A piece of bent wire is a lot of planets more backward than Tatooine. And even more so, women quickly solve this problem if they get pregnant while drunk, and the lady herself doesn't remember when and with whom it happened. Slaves have a hard life, especially women, and drowning their sorrows in alcohol and drugs is almost inevitable. But no one with even a grain of common sense would leave a foetus conceived in such a state. And even more so, no normal person would foredoom a child to slavery..."
Tina listened attentively and didn't argue. Encouraged, I finished my thought:
"I don't understand! And if midi-chlorians can rape women, then why was Shmi the only victim? Even if they like only tall, brown-haired Scandinavian-type human women, there are many such ones. There must be more victims."
"Don't talk nonsense," Tina chuckled. "There was no father. I carried her, I gave birth, I raised her, I can't explain what happened." That's what my Mum says about me. And I highly doubt she ever read the details of Shmi's biography to know her words. It's simpler. My father was a small clerk at Corporate Alliance. A run-of-the-mill office plankton, but handsome. He convinced my Mum to leave the accidental pregnancy. Contraception sometimes fails, you know... He promised to marry, but before this, he must persuade his grandfather not to disinherit him. But as soon as my mother's belly started to stick out more than her bust, my father's love turned into a zilch. And he disappeared somewhere in the starry distance so that no lawsuit for alimony could find him. With Shmi, it's even simpler: the owner or his son spoke of love, promised to make her free, wanted a child… But as soon as it started to approach responsibility, that is, to childbirth, he sold Shmi far away. In such cases, a woman either gives the child up for adoption immediately after childbirth or decides to raise it herself and tells everyone that there was never a father. And what did the Jedi hear in Shmi's words, and even more so how historians distorted these words... Dude, life is not as romantic as TV series and legendary biographies try to convince us."
"Damn," I was shocked by the obviousness of the solution. "In real life, everything really is much simpler."
"And dirtier," added Tina.
"That's true," I agreed. And Tina said:
"I just hope Shmi had secret love affairs with Cliegg Lars before he bought her. It's a terrible thing to be forced into marriage with a trash who needs an heir but who has been rejected by all the local maidens and widows."
"Cliegg already had a son when he married Shmi," I said, looking at the biography. "And it looks like she married the man she was in love with before the wedding. And by Tatooine standards, Cliegg was well off and respected, not some lowlifer with an appendage who was looking for a cheap housekeeper, nanny, and bedding. Cliegg was a decent option for many widows and maidens on Tatooine."
"I hope so," Tina said thoughtfully. She glanced at me, bit her lip a little, and decided:
"You don't want to work with me on the art navigation project? I understand that you need it like you need garbage, but you're pretty good at it. After all, cool business people often pilot their modules."
"I get seasick even in the lift," I chuckled. "Why do you think I'm here and not in gym class? But..." I looked at Tina. "Can you cook simple dishes? Street food, a product range of an economy-class cafe without a drone-cook."
"Of course. But why do you need it?"
"I want a profession in case of vicissitudes of fate. And the cook at the Academy is trying to teach me something that can't be sold in difficult times."
Tina shook her head.
"You're not like the others. But I don't meddle in other people's affairs. I agree to barter."
I smiled and nodded. The Academy is a boarding school, and I will only be home on weekends now. Mum will cook with me there if she hasn't forgotten how to do it yet. But the main studies will be here.
And I need to ask Tina about other skills of everyday life, practice. It's clearly her first year at the Academy, and therefore she knows a new simple life—the one that Mum remembers is no longer relevant.
We sealed the deal with a handshake, and I returned to my project. Whatever you say, I had to write something coherent about the operation to bring back Luke Skywalker. To me, that was utter nonsense: the Resistance was blowing up Death Stars just fine without that piece of old junk. Luke himself was a very cool guy and a clever person, until he got into Jedi ravings up to his ears and became a loser because of it. And the fact that Kylo Ren was an even bigger loser doesn't change the truth. And it is noteworthy that Leia, having considerable Force and huge ambitions, didn't even think about getting into Jedi. Senator, general, but not a Jedi. A really smart person doesn't choose stupidity. It's a pity I can't write all this…
I felt sad about the brainlessness of the world, and the Force, as if wanting to console me, flew to the ceiling, curled up into a ball there, and exploded into fireworks.
All I could do was curse with words that are strictly forbidden in the Academy.
I'm screwed.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/57638197
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14376014/1/My-Own-Game
The teenager received abilities one didn't want. A happy life is destroyed, and survival and freedom can become empty words. But if the world wants to turn you into a toy, you can make it play your own game with you.
***
Note: Self-consolation scribbles. I found a great Star Wars game but couldn't even get past the prologue because the controls were so complicated. This fanfic is NOT like that game. And it is AU for SW. I specifically try not to show who the character is, a boy or a girl, what their appearance is, so that readers can choose all this themselves, like in a video game.
— 4 —
Emil, thanks for the preliminary reading.
I still transferred to the Youth Military Academy. Dad didn't show it, but I knew he was very happy because he and all his ancestors had studied at this school, starting from the moment the family became wealthy.
In essence, the Academy was a school for heirs, the only military elements in it being a few daily ceremonies and a cadet uniform—a rudiment of the years when Kadvir was populated by mercenary gangs. And training the children of a leader of grouping in a military school guaranteed the loyalty of the peasants and artisans who had accepted the guardianship of one of the gangs. Civilians, driven from their homes by a severe economic crisis, could not survive on their own on a barely developed planet, among dangerous predators and unorganised bandit groups. And organised teams needed a source of food and clothing independent of external supplies. Equal cooperation didn't happen immediately, but competition between the groups forced the bandits to respect peaceful people.
There are still two months left before the long autumn holidays, and I will have time to finish the difference in subjects. It is insignificant between the two schools.
Twenty-eight days have passed since the day the tattoo created problems for the first time. And eleven days since that skirmish in the school yard. The Force has not shown itself in any way since the skirmish. I was beginning to hope that it had disappeared completely.
Now I was sitting in the library of the Youth Military Academy and collecting materials on the galaxnet for a research project. Next to me sat a fair-haired and blue-eyed girl with a splint on her leg. She had fifth-year stripes, which meant she was fifteen. She looked quite grown up. But she poked at the computer sensor like a little child.
I glanced at her screen. Ballistics calculations. But no one does them manually!
Oh, judging by the look on the girl's face, I said that out loud.
"No one," she said, "except for the combat AI testers. And if I don't pass the exams to join this special group, I'll have to go home."
Oh... I see. She's here on a grant, and life at home is hell.
"Don't look at me like that," said the girl. "My Mum is very good. She's ready to jump out of her skin and sell her bones, if only I had what she doesn't have. The problem is that I want a completely different kind of happiness for myself. She needs time to be alone, to calm down and understand that I'm no longer the sweet doll in a lace dress that I was ten years ago, and that the army…"
She looked at her splinted leg and sobbed. The girl didn't look like a crybaby; it was clearly the strong painkillers and stress that had sapped her self-control.
"Limping is no obstacle for the army," I said quickly. "You can be a pilot without any legs at all."
"I was only accepted here because of football. So that I could bring prizes for the Academy. But..." she started crying after all.
I was frantically trying to come up with a way out. There was no use in sympathy; here we had to solve the problem. It was not easy to get into the Army College; the municipal school would not be enough. All applicants from ordinary families studied on grants in good private schools. This girl wasn't doing well in math and physics; all the places in eSports were taken, otherwise, she would have started with it…
"A charity fund!" I realized. "You can get a scholarship through some creative project. What troops did you want to serve in?"
"Epsilon Intelligence."
For flights on a reconnaissance module in Epsilon-space, the leg doesn't matter; everything is controlled manually. Physics and chemistry are enough in the volume of a general education course of a municipal school; mathematics is even less needed; the main thing is agility, quickness of thought, and... midi-chlorians. And the latter is needed precisely in microdoses. The only field of activity where the Force makes sense. And then only if it is not excessive.
"There you need to colour the midi-chlorians with the necessary reagents and arrange them in the correct order," I recalled the little I knew about Epsilon-cosmos. "Fractal graphics as a method of navigation and control…"
"What are you talking about? There is very strong math!" The girl was indignant. "Epsilon-Navigator is not a job for everyone."
"Everyone loves stickers with routes through Epsilon-cosmos..." I continued out loud so that stupid prejudices would not distract me from my thoughts. "Managing dynamic space through midi-chlorians, which are correctly located... Colouring is a way to understand where and how many of them are there; the colour is determined by the number... And what if you draw navigation maps using art AI? Like animation for video games."
"I'm terrible at drawing," the girl shook her head.
"And you don't need to do it. There are plenty of AIs that make pictures in different styles based on scribbles on a tablet. Even a primary school student can draw their room so that it can't be confused with a forest meadow and vice versa. And AI will create a classic oil painting or an impressionist creation out of it."
"Flight charts aren't made like that," the girl snapped.
I glanced at the name tag on her uniform jacket.
"Tina Alverist, all these over-aged blockheads are constantly telling us that we don't understand anything about serious things because we're kids. So take advantage of this! A charity will be afraid to deny a scholarship to a child who is so imaginative that he made a navigation route from the capital to the Big Port using art-AI templates and a set of correction commands. Especially if you write that a real manager does not deal with routine tasks themselves; their job is to wisely distribute them between live subordinates and droids. And it doesn't matter how much your imagination works! The main thing is that you pay for the sixth, final year of middle school. And you'll come up with something for high school. A year is a long time."
“I have no idea how to use art-AI,” Tina muttered. "And this subject doesn't fit with the ones I've chosen at all. There could be problems."
"Go to a psychologist and tell him you want to take training in running art-AI as a form of art therapy. It distracts from trauma, calms you down, and all that. And make your own project and apply to the Shaidi Foundation. It'll be the easiest to get a scholarship there. I know this because my family sponsors several foundations."
Tina looked at me thoughtfully.
"It's worth a try, at least." And she smiled: "Where did you come from here, so smart? This is the first time I've seen a fry so rocked out about business. Even if their families run corporations."
"I'm new. I transferred recently."
"Straight to some special group, probably?"
I told her about the essay. And added:
"But I'm not sure that's the issue. My parents donated well to the grant fund of my former school."
Tina laughed.
"You'll definitely be able to run the family company well."
"Why are you here and not in the hospital?" I asked. "It's hard for you to sit, I can tell. And it hurts to move even in the air chair."
"Lying there and thinking that I'll never be able to even run out for ice cream again, let alone play football, hurts a lot more. And the doctor's words that there will be no scars, so I can wear a miniskirt as soon as the splint is removed, and in a couple of years I will be able to dance moderately on a date, do not help me at all. Crutches and ballistic tasks are better. That way, I don't feel like a discarded candy wrapper."
"No," I said. "You're not a wrapper. You're an Intuist-Navigator. Listening to space, perfecting your midi-chlorians sense. If it works for idiots with a lightsaber who can't tell their head from their ass without a tonne of midi-chlorians, an officer of Epsilon Intelligence will do all the better."
Tina laughed again.
"That's a strange comparison. But I like it!"
She glanced at my screen.
"Oh, so you're studying the Order and the Guard. It's clear why you say that.
"Not exactly," I said. "I just want to form my own opinion. One of the teachers at my old school says that Anakin Skywalker was a nobody, just a brainless, spineless bag with midi-chlorians. But I don't think so. Obi-Wan Kenobi tried very hard to deprive him of his personality and freedom of thought; he slowed down his development, and still Anakin tried to be himself, and he did the Jedi job better than Kenobi. It's a pity Anakin didn't leave the Order. He could have become a cool racer to have adrenaline and glory, and with the prize money, open a chain of repair shops to have a guarantee of a comfortable life even for his great-grandchildren. No repairman has ever sat without a bun with a thick layer of butter."
"That's why I don't like Padmé!" said Tina. "She should have suggested all this to Anakin. What's the point of a wife if she doesn't give her husband smart advice?"
A wife needs a good IQ to do that. And I have serious reasons to doubt that Padmé had it. But I can't tell everyone about my conclusions. And I spoke carefully:
"She didn't see that Kenobi was going crazy with envy of Anakin's talents. And the fact that he had a mother. Anakin was separated from her, and he began to enter the age when friends and adventures were more interesting to boys than their parents, but Anakin's life was warmed by memories of the person who blew on his skinned knees, told him fairy tales, and chased the bogeyman from under his bed when Anakin had bad dreams. Anakin knew what family was, and Kenobi had been raised as a tool. Qui-Gon Jinn understood that and tried to be a father to both of them, not a teacher. But Obi-Wan… It annoyed him. However, Anakin was comfortable. I think Qui-Gon would have helped him meet his mother, and would have found a way to save her. If Qui-Gon hadn't died, Anakin's talent would have been able to blossom to the fullest, and his character would have been revealed. But the Jedi Order broke the guy before Palpatine even got to him."
"It's possible," Tina said slowly. And she added, "I think Qui-Gon would have advised Anakin to leave the Order if the self-centred Padmé didn't have the brains to do it. She saw only herself, her ideas and ambitions."
I didn't answer. I didn't want to talk about Padmé. My grandmother and grandfather, who were my Mum's parents, told me a lot about how miners lived on the moons of Naboo. Escaping from there was the greatest success in their lives. And during Padmé's reign and senatorship, everything was much worse. It was not for nothing that miners of that time collected copper coins for a bounty hunter—not at all for nothing. Although the most famous of those who ordered Padmé's death was Nute Gunray, there were still a huge number of people who wanted to see her in a coffin.
I glanced at Tina and thought for a moment. She knows history, she understands business, and her head doesn't seem to be cluttered with prejudices. And I asked the question I couldn't find an answer to:
"Do you think the midi-chlorians really raped Shmi Skywalker? Then why didn't she have an abortion?"
Tina wasn't surprised or indignant, and I continued quickly, until Tina got tired of chatting about the distant past:
"Shmi doesn't look like a religious fanatic or a wacky pro-lifer. And she's not one of those who lose their personality so much that they don't care about themselves or their children, and reproduce even in the most horrible and dead-end conditions, just because that's the way it turned out."
Tina was silent and looked at me with interest. I said:
"There are no gynaecological clinics for female slaves, but all the media write that women on orthodox planets solve this problem themselves. And it doesn't always happen with a risk to their lives. A piece of bent wire is a lot of planets more backward than Tatooine. And even more so, women quickly solve this problem if they get pregnant while drunk, and the lady herself doesn't remember when and with whom it happened. Slaves have a hard life, especially women, and drowning their sorrows in alcohol and drugs is almost inevitable. But no one with even a grain of common sense would leave a foetus conceived in such a state. And even more so, no normal person would foredoom a child to slavery..."
Tina listened attentively and didn't argue. Encouraged, I finished my thought:
"I don't understand! And if midi-chlorians can rape women, then why was Shmi the only victim? Even if they like only tall, brown-haired Scandinavian-type human women, there are many such ones. There must be more victims."
"Don't talk nonsense," Tina chuckled. "There was no father. I carried her, I gave birth, I raised her, I can't explain what happened." That's what my Mum says about me. And I highly doubt she ever read the details of Shmi's biography to know her words. It's simpler. My father was a small clerk at Corporate Alliance. A run-of-the-mill office plankton, but handsome. He convinced my Mum to leave the accidental pregnancy. Contraception sometimes fails, you know... He promised to marry, but before this, he must persuade his grandfather not to disinherit him. But as soon as my mother's belly started to stick out more than her bust, my father's love turned into a zilch. And he disappeared somewhere in the starry distance so that no lawsuit for alimony could find him. With Shmi, it's even simpler: the owner or his son spoke of love, promised to make her free, wanted a child… But as soon as it started to approach responsibility, that is, to childbirth, he sold Shmi far away. In such cases, a woman either gives the child up for adoption immediately after childbirth or decides to raise it herself and tells everyone that there was never a father. And what did the Jedi hear in Shmi's words, and even more so how historians distorted these words... Dude, life is not as romantic as TV series and legendary biographies try to convince us."
"Damn," I was shocked by the obviousness of the solution. "In real life, everything really is much simpler."
"And dirtier," added Tina.
"That's true," I agreed. And Tina said:
"I just hope Shmi had secret love affairs with Cliegg Lars before he bought her. It's a terrible thing to be forced into marriage with a trash who needs an heir but who has been rejected by all the local maidens and widows."
"Cliegg already had a son when he married Shmi," I said, looking at the biography. "And it looks like she married the man she was in love with before the wedding. And by Tatooine standards, Cliegg was well off and respected, not some lowlifer with an appendage who was looking for a cheap housekeeper, nanny, and bedding. Cliegg was a decent option for many widows and maidens on Tatooine."
"I hope so," Tina said thoughtfully. She glanced at me, bit her lip a little, and decided:
"You don't want to work with me on the art navigation project? I understand that you need it like you need garbage, but you're pretty good at it. After all, cool business people often pilot their modules."
"I get seasick even in the lift," I chuckled. "Why do you think I'm here and not in gym class? But..." I looked at Tina. "Can you cook simple dishes? Street food, a product range of an economy-class cafe without a drone-cook."
"Of course. But why do you need it?"
"I want a profession in case of vicissitudes of fate. And the cook at the Academy is trying to teach me something that can't be sold in difficult times."
Tina shook her head.
"You're not like the others. But I don't meddle in other people's affairs. I agree to barter."
I smiled and nodded. The Academy is a boarding school, and I will only be home on weekends now. Mum will cook with me there if she hasn't forgotten how to do it yet. But the main studies will be here.
And I need to ask Tina about other skills of everyday life, practice. It's clearly her first year at the Academy, and therefore she knows a new simple life—the one that Mum remembers is no longer relevant.
We sealed the deal with a handshake, and I returned to my project. Whatever you say, I had to write something coherent about the operation to bring back Luke Skywalker. To me, that was utter nonsense: the Resistance was blowing up Death Stars just fine without that piece of old junk. Luke himself was a very cool guy and a clever person, until he got into Jedi ravings up to his ears and became a loser because of it. And the fact that Kylo Ren was an even bigger loser doesn't change the truth. And it is noteworthy that Leia, having considerable Force and huge ambitions, didn't even think about getting into Jedi. Senator, general, but not a Jedi. A really smart person doesn't choose stupidity. It's a pity I can't write all this…
I felt sad about the brainlessness of the world, and the Force, as if wanting to console me, flew to the ceiling, curled up into a ball there, and exploded into fireworks.
All I could do was curse with words that are strictly forbidden in the Academy.
I'm screwed.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/57638197
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14376014/1/My-Own-Game
