GEOVRU: IV

Chapter 1

Thomas Gathway was born in 2020. He was twenty years old when he created the Atomiton. You would think that this special occasion would bring him and his wife Rebecca closer than they had ever been before, therefore giving them a child. However, due to massive legal trouble, and problems acquiring revenue from the creation and heavy rejection of such a computer, Thomas and his wife could not support a child. It took until Thomas' obsession with education, and his acquiring of land in Iceland for his money to truly pull in. By this time, people had begun to use atomitons, generating a constant income for Thomas to build his dream. Within a few years, buildings began to grow on what was once a group of rolling hills, and in 2060, Thomas opened the campus of the Global Educational Online Virtual Reality University. People immediately flocked to this campus, with the first generation of Atomiton users coming of age; it was the perfect timing to have an education built around them. With Thomas' dream finally realized, he and his wife were finally ready to raise a child. The two of them were pretty old to be raising a child, but they knew what they wanted to do. Due to his age, Thomas wished for a son to carry his family's legacy, knowing he most likely wouldn't be able to have another child. However Thomas didn't get a son, but a daughter. At the age of forty, Rebecca gave birth to Michelle Elizabeth Gathway. Thomas was forty four at the time, and while disappointed by the gender, he loved his daughter nonetheless.

Thomas was much indulged in his work, especially with the legal trouble that was still going on with the new model of the Atomiton that fixed the lethal issue with the AB- blood type, so he didn't have much time to interact with his daughter, who to his surprise had taken up to the video games created for the Atomiton. However since she was still excelling in school, he did nothing to stop her. During her senior year of high school, Michelle had begun to grow interested in championships and enrolled in the 2082 Forman Online Championship. To Thomas' surprise, his daughter placed second in the finals. In a hunch of pride and happiness, he gave all top four finalists full rides to the college.­­­­ This began a domino effect that changed Thomas' life forever.

As many know, Thomas' daughter was involved in a surgical procedure that led to her death. Since, Thomas has seldom left his office. Relations with his wife, Rebecca have been sinking, but they have managed to stay together over the years. However, things have been going bad ever since Thomas got sick. Last year, around New Year's Thomas was under a lot of stress from the killings in Beijing and Tokyo, which accelerated the maturity of his cancer. Now Thomas is bedridden pretty much the entire day in his office. He can't do much without leaving his room, so he simply manages the player base at the college, occasionally logging on, and even playing the game with other players. There is one player however that he has purposefully been avoiding.

Caedes lvl. 121

Thomas wasn't avoiding him out of hate however, on the contrary, he loved the kid like a son. Caedes was the person whom Michelle's surgery saved. The two of them hadn't spoken since immediately after the surgery, in fact, they hadn't even seen each other. The only form of communication the two of them had was Thomas reach out to the boy at the beginning of his second year, and Caedes' emergency message to him the year before. Thomas had grown to be pretty proud of the kid; he and his friends single handedly stopped a hacker from destroying the entire campus. Thomas just regretted that he got so caught up in legal problems that Caedes had to deal with the problem himself. Luckily for him, no problems had sprung up this year, at least no massive problems. No more attacks had occurred, no more premature deaths. Thomas was happy that things might be back to the way they were before all this violence began, before the war started and everything became so complicated. Now Thomas had to constantly be watching the news, seeing what's going on. What else had his invention caused? How much death had occurred because of his ambition? There had to be hundreds of thousands of people that died, fighting for the freedom to use Thomas' invention. It was exactly what Thomas didn't want to happen, he always thought that his invention would unify the world, and bring a new age of progress, when in fact, that unification only lasted a few decades, and now it felt like the world was falling apart.