Hopeless Romance

PART ONE: ALUME, LAND OF THE DEAD LIVING. Chapter One

I slammed the door on my way into my apartment. I tripped over my dog, sitting right on our entry way mat, wagging her tail.  She’s a miniature schnauzer, a few years old.  She barked at me, a howl that sounded like “weeelcome hoooome”.

“Watch out Pod!” I yelled at her.  I was in a really bad mood.  She slinked away.

I went back to texting Bry,”Home”.  

“Where’d you go Mic? Me? Homebound 1 year!”  My name is Michael; Bry is actually Bryan. No, we didn’t choose to abbreviate our names like we do everything else.  I now live in Ral. (Rache combined its name with our country’s prewar name: Alume). Rache’s kind compromise after they won the war allowed us to keep our Alumen names, but they must all be three letters or less. 

“TTYL”, I replied, although I knew we wouldn’t. 

“K, cya in WMC.” WMC, World of Mythical Creatures, is the computer game I play most often.  It is online, multiple players.  I’ve got a level 60 cerberus, a tough 3 headed hound of Hell.  Level 40 wizard. Level 30 minotaur, you know the bull/human creature. 

We wouldn’t talk about it because there was only one thing you couldn’t get at home, one reason to leave: an “interview” with the Military Police, always conducted in their offices with darkly tinted windows.  It was the first time I had left my house in over a year.  Of course, even before the war I rarely left my house.  I’d chat with friends online and in games, text them, all of that jazz.  I was in a new program at high school, an online learning program.   I thought it was epic. I only had to go into the actual school to take tests!  As long as I finished my work and my scores were high, I could sleep in, choose when to work and when not to.   I thought it was sweet until I really had nowhere to go and loneliness was my norm. 

Today I had been at the MP office. I’m sure Bry had guessed that’s where I had been.  The MPs could read any texts you sent.  We would never talk about it.  He was just playing dumb, and checking to make sure I was okay.  Not that he could or would have done something to help me if I needed it.  I knew I was lucky.  Most people called in to the MP Office didn’t come out.  Maybe they would someday.  Right now they were considered POWs: prisoners of war. 

I don’t really dig the news.  It’s a waste of time, not like you can change anything that happens in the world. I know Rache controls what I see anyway, on the TV, on the internet. I don’t understand much about the war or why we lost it.  I mean, I’m only 19.  A lot of what I know is just what Mother has told me since the war.  Before and even during most of the war I was playing computer games like 10 hours a day, chasing girls and trying to get straight A’s.  Way too busy to care about what was happening in the world.

By the way, “Mother” is not my birth Mother.  Both my parents were soldiers and died in the war with Rache.  The Raschesie government assigned peace keeper soldiers as “parents” to war orphans.  Nice right?   I don’t know if our “parents” job is to take care of us though.  People I game with sent in game mail messages talking about their “parents” being spies, and that their true job is to keep an eye on us as our feelings of loss, anger, desire for revenge could make us susceptible to the REV movement. Players who had sent those messages disappeared from the game shortly after.

Our Rachesie Mothers and Fathers would live in the same house as us for our whole lives.  We were required to refer to them as “Mother” or “Father”.  If we chose not to, we were sent to MPs and one guy I used to game with said he was put in prison for 30 days as punishment.  After typing about prison in a chat, he disappeared from WMC too.

 I had grown close to my Mother over the last year or so as life became somewhat normal again.  She seemed to like me too.  In the last few months she had begun hugging me, and I would hug her back.  Every time I felt myself have fond feelings toward Mother, I felt traitorous to my real parents.  Then I’d try to remember that I really hated her.