Dad
1 Informal. father.
Origin:
1490–1500; probably orig. nursery word
When I was a little girl, maybe four years old, I always had a hard time sleeping. Maybe it was the way I lived my life, or maybe it was just a coincidence. I was very close to my dad, and he loved words. So he decided he would use his words to help me fall asleep. He would pull out a dictionary every night and start reading words from it. The first night he did that, he asked me to pick a word, any word, for him to start with. I was snuggled under my covers, and I grinned. "Daddy!" And so Dad was the first word he started with. He would read the word, the part of speech, the definition, and origin, and he wouldn't stop until I fell asleep.
I never knew what my father did for work. I was only six when he was gone, so I suppose it's not that odd. Now that I know what goes on in his life, I kind of wish I didn't. But that's rushing back to the present too fast. You might want to know what happens next, but too bad. We're going back to the beginning. And if you decide you don't WANT to know what happened to me when I was young, just walk away. You'll just miss a lot, and it will haunt you your whole life. Your choice...
You're sticking around? Good. So where was I? Oh yeah. I remember.
Whenever my father was home, he was working, but I always wanted to spend time with him. I would always barge into his study and demand he play with me. In the end, we had a sort of compromise. I could stay in his study if he could teach me the art of hacking. At the moment it didn't strike me as odd. Actually, it didn't strike me as odd, ever. It wasn't until I found out who my dad worked for that I understood.
So I learned the basics of hacking when I was five years old. I suppose that's how I became such an expert when the time came for the mission. Even after my father was gone, I would keep learning. I used several different methods. Trial and error, books my father had, and I just kept practicing. I thought that it would bring me closer to my dad, though now it doesn't seem like such a good thing.
I wasn't some kind of loner though. I mean, I did have friends. Well, two of them. Alyssa and Evelyn. They were kind of separate, and didn't really like each other, but they both liked me, so they tolerated each other. Alyssa had lost her family, which brought us closer after my father 'died', especially when she moved into my house because she had no other relatives. She didn't really understand my interest in hacking, but she never said anything against it because of my dad.
The two of us talked all the time about what we wanted to do when we grew up, and we had similar dreams. Alyssa's family was killed by our government because her mother had taken extra resources, because they never gave her family enough. I told you things were bad, that they were strict on the distribution of everything. If you worked for the government, you got more. That was always how it worked. So my family was okay, until my father died, even though I didn't know why at the time. I didn't know why we got less food after either. Not for a long time.
No one ever told me what happened to my father, so I came up with my own theories; the majority of which had everything to do with the government. So when Alyssa and I stayed up late dreaming away, we both wanted to make things better for the people. I was convinced my father had taught me to hack because he knew someday it would help me. And Alyssa wanted to be part of the police force, to protect the regular people. She was the kindest person I knew, and I knew she would make a great police officer. Things changed as we got older, for both of us. We both became bitter and untrusting to anyone but each other, and Evelyn for me.
Evelyn on the other hand, was always sarcastic and tough. When people at school made fun of me for not having a father, she would kick and bite them, no matter their age or gender. That was when we were little. By the time we were eleven, people were afraid of her, so they didn't bother me anymore. She didn't seem to care what they thought, and sometimes I wished I could be like her. Evelyn didn't talk about her family, and I never asked, because she never asked about mine. It was a silent agreement. I was always having to talk about my dad, and I just wanted to stop, so we didn't talk about those things.
I guess I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. I hope you didn't get bored by those descriptions. There's more action in my life to come, I promise.
In school, we spent a lot of time learning things like martial arts for physical activity, statistics so that we might one day work and be able to pay the government the amount they said they "deserved" for taxes. We learned the science behind farming, and the two different languages in Frig. Gelshin was the common tongue used by most people, and Moanrani is the language used in by those in high positions of our society. Not everyone was allowed in that class. You had to excel in every other class. The government only wanted the best to work for them. I wasn't one of the lucky few, but Alyssa was. She tried her best to teach me, from when we were eleven.
It wasn't until I was thirteen that I met Amanda. It wasn't until them that my life changed drastically. It wasn't until then that I knew I had to change the world. I didn't know what I would do, but I knew me and my friends were meant for something bigger than farming and police work.
Like this chapter? I hope you did! If you did, please go click that little vote button with the star next to it!
~Shannon
