Chapter three

Real World — Ten Years Ago

I wish I could say I hated what happened. That I resented the chain of events or blamed someone entirely for what happened the day I found my father lying lifeless in his lab. But the truth? I couldn’t. Not completely. It's complicated.

At first, I was skeptical about all of it. I tried to see the situation through my father's eyes, more times than once actually. And that was my mistake. I wasn't him and he'd never be captured as stupidly as I.

 A man of logic, detached, always buried in circuits and screens. I thought maybe if I understood him, it would hurt less. It didn’t. But somewhere between the bruises and the silence, I began to see the twisted beauty in the mess I had fallen into. I just had to squint my life a little to see the world through my own eyes, and it wasn't that bad.

We don't just lose things in life, we gain some along the way.

The beatings weren’t the worst part. Sure, getting struck with the butt of a weapon for every "I don't know" was miserable and hell but, like most things in life, I got used to it. Pain has a rhythm. A routine. So does abandonment.

My father left. Again. But this time there was no soft-voiced mother to explain away his absence with hopeful lies. This time, it was just me and the silence he left behind.

He didn't bother to say goodbye.

That silence was its own kind of violence. One that said louder than words ever could: You weren’t worthy enough to stay for.

They moved me into the lab, 'for security reasons', they said. It didn’t take long before they figured out I was useless. A ghost of his genius. A forgotten afterthought.

My father never trusted me with his work. The only real conversation we ever had was at my mother’s funeral, and even then, he spoke more about the new life in the virtual world than Mom. So when the kidnappers asked me questions about the project, all I had were blank pages. Mr. Wesley, my kidnapper, ended up explaining the project better than I ever could.

But strangely, captivity wasn’t the hell I expected. People fed me. Talked to me. Answered questions. In a twisted way, I felt more seen and understood than I ever had roaming the big, empty house alone. I was more alive in chains than I ever was in my father’s home. At least in captivity, I ate four times a day.

Eventually, things changed with the help of Mr Wesley and my father's genes... The project, his precious legacy, began to make sense to me. Fast. I absorbed it, molded it, evolved it. Before long, we weren’t captor and captive anymore. We were collaborators. Exploited, sure — but efficient. Dangerous, even. The game launched. And the world welcomed it like it was the Second Coming.

Who knew that there were more people out there who wanted a change of their worlds? It wasn't just my Dad who wished for something more, something to remind him of the past generations, Some place they could create and dominate. Some place they could live without consequences of their actions. A place they could change.

That’s when I saw him again. Through the system logs.

My father.

He was smiling. Genuinely. Living his perfect new life: a beautiful wife, three sons, an empire built on virtual kingdoms. Watching him on screen, surrounded by everything he chose instead of me... it hurt. But it also set me free.

I made my peace with it.

If I couldn’t be part of his world, I could at least protect it

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