Cyber Bounties

Throughout the ages, royalty has always been protected. Those who served to shield the greater beings were obviously more successful than others, but still had some faults. A king in the middle ages, for instance, had several guards and knights in waiting, but they could easily be distracted. The time progressed and soon weapons became a slightly more important factor within the profession. Then how one decided to use them, how much one would spend on one, whether or not it would withstand certain scenarios, until finally protection itself was near perfection give or take a tiny malfunction here and there. Anyone who stood prestigious amongst the common folk was highly valued in this era and extremely restricted from day to day activities. Unfortunately, that included myself.

I have been boxed from society since I could remember. From the age of five to ten I was home schooled due to my name and holding. My grandfather didn't cure cancer, nor did my aunt find the solution to world hunger. No, nothing like that at all, really. My very own father started this crazy business years ago that made robots for busy families. That's right, robots. Walking, talking and all knowing machines that could do anything from cleaning your garage to washing the dishes without short circuiting. Dad's always loved technology. My mother was an all out geek in her days as a teen, and that's what attracted my father to the lifestyle in the first place. To be with her he had to have her smarts, if not more so. He use to be quite the party animal before he met her, but she introduced him to a new world of machinery and mathematics. Obviously inspired he started creating little bots for minor competitions at his school, then bigger ones that were included in state championships, and so on. With the help of his beloved wife and some close college friends, he started Galaxy Industries, a mass producing robot company that shipped off robots to those who needed them. For a price, of course. Droids of all sorts of functions were created. The fee would increase with the upgrades it was programmed with. Technically, and do forgive the pun there, the more applications one bot had, the more expensive it was. The average junk bot that did everyday things such as dishes and laundry came to about eighty dollars or so. Of course with the sleek designs my father was throwing out every other year made them a bit pricier than normal. Nine in ten families owns a bot from Galaxy Industries. The other owns one from a less popular company. No matter the family's condition, each one owned at least one droid, and ninety percent of the time those droids were from us.

When my mom died, everything changed.

She had left for a world conference with my father over in China. They were holding a ceremony which planned to award my father for his technical advances. I stayed with Grease back home on account of my parent's anxiety. In the richer part of China, a little farther down Hong Kong, was Family Bots & Co., a the second biggest android producing company in the world. Fambots, as they were called, were prestigious robots with elegant design, often faster and twice as accurate than any of our Galaxy Droids. The major trait they lacked however was the application to process and emit emotions. Without such a program robots were much faster to produce and less expensive to create, but they did little sales in anywhere other than China. The head of the company, aging Yuzuako Takenaga, was once an idol of my father for having started the ideas for androids and human interaction long before he even considered technology. Mr. Takenaga had given my father various offers on merging into one super company, but he declined politely each time. He said that partnerships often broke off when not between relatives, and that the business was something he wanted to keep personal between wife and friends. A little dejected but respectable, Mr. Takenaga refused to send any more offers to him. A few nights after their arrival I received word that my mother was being held ransom by an unknown group of thugs, who claimed to work for the Mr. Takenaga. I was not told of how she was put into such a dangerous placing, but I was informed that my father was unaware of her long absence. He refused to tell me anything about it. The fellow android creator he said knew nothing of the men who captured my mother and did his best to help him, but the amount of total ransom was simply mad. I was not allowed to leave my estate. I was young. I was confused. News reports on the television showed blurry shots of my captive mother, while my father tried to reason alongside the Chinese police. My father refused to pay the ridiculous amount due to mom's persistence to find another way. They let her speak at times, I learned, but only so many words. Reasoning did not set well with the criminals, and by Thursday evening, at exactly 6PM, it was already too late.