Code Names

Upside down

The next morning, I woke up to my mom screaming. I immediately ran downstairs to see her, "Mom! What happened?!"

"We lost everything, Alicia!"

"What do you mean 'lost everything'?"

"The bank is taking away all our money. They're taking the house, the car, everything!"

I stood there stunned for a moment. What was happening? How was this happening? Why? This was all so sudden, and no matter how much I asked mom, she had no valid explanation. She was panicking really badly. I didn't know what to do. I thought about the power shortage last night. Could these two things be related? No...there's no way...

 Mom's blood pressure got really high and I had to take her to the hospital. The doctor told me that the shock was too hard on her body and she might need to be hospitalized for a couple of days. 

When I went to see mom again, she just told me one thing: Find a rich man, Alicia. This sentence was getting really annoying. All she cared about was marrying me off. But in that moment, I felt like she did have a point. I had to pay the medical expenses and I also had to pay for college. And with the bank confiscating everything we owned, marrying a rich man did sound like the only solution.

Eventually, I got back to my right mind. This was no time to fool a stupid rich boy into loving me. I decided to take a break from college for a while, I also started working at some Tech store to earn money. I was still trying to figure out how all of this happened to us, but I didn't seem to have an answer for now.

I worked all day and stayed with mom in the hospital at night. This was honestly so new to me but I had to just hang on until I could figure out what was happening. Until one day when a weird message appeared on one of the devices in the store where I worked. Since there was no one around, I decided to take a look. The message said that I had been chosen to work at some private coding company. This was definitely a dream come true to me so I pressed on accept. And before I knew it the device alongside the whole place exploded.

I laid there on the floor staring at the fire around me. I was fading in and out of consciousness. The world seemed blurry. And the last thing I saw was this tall person walking towards me before everything went black.