Travis Lucia Hamilton-McQueen is trapped in strange circumstances, awakened from a coma, her life's out of control, and she's trying get a grip. Her Grandfather is a mass murderer, her fathers a convicted killer, and she's a clone suspected of terrorism because she's been illegally bouncing in and out of JumpSpace. She's angry, confused, and alone. Not all her demons are in her head and she'll have to face them all if she wants a life.

 

   It's the parasites, which interact with JumpSpace entity, that have created a majority of the problems in her life. She'd love to get rid of them except that there might be a fine line between these parasites and what make her what she is. These entities and their parasites have somehow written all of her father’s memories into her head. She's frightened of acting against them because from all that she can tell if they leave and take the memories with them there might be nothing left of her except an empty shell. She has no recollection of her own life. She's afraid to die and has a worse fear of being alive and thrown into a darkness of nonexistence perhaps a bad as the coma she'd just come out of.

 

   Travis has been able to survive only because of all the knowledge her father's memories have brought her. But, they have brought her some trouble also. One problem is that the memories don't contain anything about the person she is. For all intent and purposes he father knew nothing about her until his consciousness woke her up on the Medical Space Station Perl. What scares her more is that the people responsible for her creation, The clone colony collective, Special Service and League Jump Guild have some sort of agenda associated with her creation that has some sinister purpose involving the JumpSpace Entity.

 

   Despite her misgivings she finds herself inducted into the League Jump Guild; they are the ones who control and regulate how JumpSpace is used. She has gone from being a loner to starting to surround herself with her own familial group of teachers and friends. She still has a long way to go. The temptation to let the tide of chaos around her dictate her actions is something that she's finding frustrating and difficult to fight. She must begin to take control and make her own decisions, but each step in that direction brings her in possession of more of a real life and that raises the stakes and heightens the consequences.

 

   For Travis the question of who she is, takes second place, to should she exist? What some take as fundamental truths about the psyche and the soul are things she has to struggle with Insidious larger issues are looming ahead as she realizes that the very technology used to jump through space may be a cloned form of a living being that's much more than just an AI. If that's true then she has much more in common with it than she could ever have imagined. She'll have to ask herself would the possession of this technology by the League Jump Guild constitute slavery. That strikes the fundamental core of what Travis Lucia Hamilton-McQueen believes and she'll be faced with a decision that will impact more than her own fate.

 

 

J.L. Dobias