Jen Kallis never forgot the night her father vanished into a strange, white light from inside her closet. Even though no one believed her, Jen knew what she'd seen and refused to accept that her dad had abandoned her and mom.
Ten years later, Jen, n...
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Asher stepped outside of his favorite pub and took in a deep breath, not minding the stench of sewage and metal in the city air. Blue City, his glorious home, was founded in 2189, right after the invention of the hover bug, the world's first flying car. It took over a hundred years, trillions of dollars, and millions of robots to build it into the city it had become: a blue paradise that everyone wanted to visit. There was no other city in the world quite like Blue City. Other cities didn't have skyscrapers that soared past the clouds so high that the naked eye couldn't make out the top of the building when standing on the Bottom Ground, the lowest street level. Other cities didn't have human-like robots working in restaurants and stores, doing all of the manual labor, while the rich men fattened themselves up on expensive lobster and caviar. Nor did they have a sea of tourists crowding the Bottom Ground, bringing even more money to the city by visiting the many attractions.
Blue City was a vacation city, similar to the old Las Vegas, with large casinos, hotels, amusement parks, and theaters filled with show girls and magic shows. All of the attractions that lay within the skyscrapers were advertised on the glass windows, creating their own light shows at night.
Asher thought the best part of the city was the night sky view, when hover cars zoomed past in the sky on transparent, neon blue streets, which glowed brightly against the dark backdrop. There were multiple layers of streets that started from the Bottom Ground and continued into the sky, all heading different directions, all extremely complex to those who had never driven on them. From the ground looking up, it seemed as if the neon streets intertwined. The intricate, overlapping streets suggested the possibility of a hover bug accident waiting to happen; however, the streets actually kept people from crashing into each other and falling out of the sky to a certain death.
The neon lights were merely an illusion, an image coming from strong projectors built into the surrounding skyscrapers. At one point, the government thought about building high roads, but found it to be too costly. Instead, they perfected the projectors, making the blue streets seem real and quite lovely at night. The light show in the night sky was something that Asher never got tired of as he stared up at its beauty from the Bottom Ground.
Asher followed in the footsteps of his father, Commander Thomas Moore, and worked for the government as third commander in the army. At the age of nineteen, he was the youngest commander and took pride in his position. However, getting to such a high ranking had come with a big price.
Asher was raised by a man who never showed any affection and constantly taught him that emotions were a weakness. He was disciplined with beatings and harsh punishments, once having to stand for twelve hours on thick, sharp pegs because he'd talked back to his father. Asher had been able to carefully position himself in a way that didn't cause the pegs to rupture his skin.
He didn't understand why his father punished him so harshly knowing that, had Asher fallen, the pegs would have caused him to bleed to death. There had been a few times when Asher had almost fallen, his twelve years of life flashing by in his mind, but luckily he'd found his footing. And although he had hated his father's disciplinary methods, he could attest to it being the sole reason that he was fierce and strong.
