I’m taking advantage of an influx of new subscribers thanks to the Great Substack Story Challenge to organize what has become a big morass for readers to work their way through! So for newcomers to Martiniere Stories, welcome! Repairing the Legacy updates every Friday-ish, depending on my schedule and any weirdnesses going on In Real Life. As of this date (May 12, 2022), it stands at around 82,000 words and probably has two more full chapters to go. We shall see…meanwhile, the plan is to release Legacy as a full ebook/paperback with the above cover sometime in the summer of 2022. Once that happens, this version will probably be archived to avoid conflicts with distributors after it’s released in full for my subscribers. Or not. Still figuring things out….

Note: what you see here is draft work-in-progress. The final version may well be different. Start with the link below to connect to a section-by-section linkage.

Link to Chapter One, Section One

ABOUT THE WORK

Repairing the Legacy is a transitional work between the main canon Martiniere Legacy series and the worlds of the Martiniere Multiverse. Originally, I wasn’t going to do much more with this story than tie up some loose ends in the Martiniere Legacy between the trilogy (Inheritance, Ascendant, Realization) and the three associated, character-based books (The Heritage of Michael Martiniere, Broken Angel: The Lost Years of Gabriel Martiniere, Justine Fixes Everything: Reflections on Mortality). I also had some notions of using it as a bridge to a later continuation of the series, focusing on the appearance of digital thought clones in Heritage and Justine which hint at future conflicts.

Well. Legacy is a bridge, all right. Just not in the way that I thought, and the story itself did it to me.

About midway through the book, there’s a scene where Gabe and Ruby are putting flowers on the graves of his family—the man he thought was his father, his mother, and his sister. They were killed in a plane crash when Gabe was twelve, which meant he fell into the hands of his psychopathic biofather Philip.

Gabe and Ruby idly speculate about how much their lives might or might not have changed had his family not been killed. Images about what that might have looked like kept tugging at me and…well, the end result was A Different Life—What If?, where Gabe and Ruby still meet and marry, under vastly different circumstances.

But that wasn’t the only “what if” scenario that occurred to me. I have several others in mind. And so the Martiniere Multiverse was born. As Gabe ages, he starts getting more and more glimpses of other versions of his life. Fantasy? Dementia? Or is it tied to his growing awareness that the Martiniere mind-control psychological programming has allowed Philip to recreate himself as a digital thought clone capable of wreaking destruction upon his descendants?

Martiniere Stories will eventually transition to the non-A Different Life Martiniere Multiverse stories. The A Different Life stories (currently What If? and Linda’s Story, with two more potential books) are serialized on Kindle Vella and will be available as ebooks. The other Multiverse stories will be appearing here.

So enjoy! And welcome!