Building a Nest of Our Own
Copyright© 2020 by Vincent Berg
Preface
The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper,
and re-imagines the world.
Malcolm Gladwell
A brief word, before the story begins, about some of the conventions used.
Telepathic messages, the dialogue shared between two character’s minds, are denoted with a combination of single quotes and italics, as the following sample demonstrates.
’Zita, I need a little assistance, here!‘
You’ll also notice that many of the telepathic communications begin with a comment about their communicating via Zita’s links—since Zita is the telepathic communications expert, and the only one with the required quantum links the others don’t have. This was a holdover from the first book, The Cuckoo’s Progeny, which originally handled these communications in plain text dialogues (with only the text-based acknowledgments).
There are also frequent mentions of both “homeworld” and “home worlds”. A culture’s original home world is their “homeworld”, while each individual species has their own “home world”, where their people originated on.
Understanding that it’s been a while since the previous books were published, you may feel lost initially. But don’t worry. Although there isn’t a ‘who’s who’ recollection of past events, the particular relationships between the individuals is not essentially in understanding the story. If it is, they’ll be made apparent. However, if you’re confused by who someone is at any point in the story, simply turn to the Character List at the back of the book, as everyone in the book has a short description which should be enough to jog your memory.
The initial chapters make references to ‘Tandorian aids’. These are human aids, but quantum-based aritificial intelligence units that direct how the character’s bodies respond to injuries, illnesses or other emergencies. Though the first chapter glosses over the details, they’re expanded upon as the story progresses, but the first chapter was already difficult to read due to the background details already included.
The epigraphs (the literary quotes at the start of each chapter) need some explanation. Instead of having to jump to the end of the book and search for each quote, I figured few readers would really care whether most quotes were properly validated. But, if you want to use one of the epigraphs yourself, if you see one you like, just click on the name and it will automatically take you to the proper source, and then, when you’ve gotten the information, just click on the epigraph reference and it will take you back to the chapter.
Finally, near the end of the final sequel, I created one intelligent species that doesn’t use vowels, at least in their proper names. Unfortunately, that resulted in most text-to-speech programs for the visually impaired reading them as a string of letters, which significantly affected the ability to read the story and easily grasp and recognize names. Since there is no way to specify how text is read aloud, I went back and added a single i to most terms, which resolved the issue. But if you wonder why the Tissk favor the letter i to the exclusion of all other vowels, that’s why.