Once Upon a Wormhole

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I don't belong here. I've known this ever since I could remember. Which actually started the day I was born, so there's that. 

Maybe it first hit me when I built my first weapon at the age of seven in my brother's ramshackle Steve-Jobs-wannabe workshop. The book my brother had been using lay abused and unused on his desk as I'd tinkered away on the cement floor of our family's garage-turned-storage-turned-workshop. 

I'd stayed home from school that day with a bad fever, though where I got it from, nobody knew. None of my siblings had been sick, none of the kids in my class at school had even had a sniffle. But when you have a hundred plus degree fever, it's time to stay home.

I'd grown incessantly bored throughout the day. Mom had been working on her second doctoral "masterpiece," so I knew I wasn't supposed to go in the office and bother her. I'd read two books already, and L'Engle and Huxley were getting to be too much. Rising to unsteady feet, I'd tiptoed out of my ghastly purple bedroom and wandered through the house. Eventually, after searching fruitlessly for something interesting to do, I'd made my way into the garage.

The garage was usually forbidden to me by my older brothers and sisters, who were five to eleven years my senior. I was the accident—sorry, the baby of the family. I was, what you would call, unplanned, especially after my parents had already had seven kids. One after the other. For seven years straight. 

My mom popped out one long Bianchi baby after another, which could be considered the eighth wonder of the world. I believe I was the result of a long put-off honeymoon, which I believe was also well deserved especially after all those kids. In any case, the garage was where my much older siblings would all go to talk about their one true love: THE fandom.

My family was a bunch of different nerds rolled into one house. My dad was a robotics fanatic. He grew up in the era when Star Wars, Star Trek, and later Voltron came out for the first time, and he fell in love. He participated in team and individual competitions all through his public school days, then entered the field in college. Every so often, he would bring his schematics back home from work to develop over the weekend. Those had intrigued me since I was small. Well, small-er.

My mom was a researcher for a biology lab, and she loved her work. But her true passion was bio technology. Blending biology and technology together to see if they can work in a chaotic harmony. Those were her side projects. The greenhouse adjoining the back of the house was where she kept all of her plant-based experiments.

My mom and dad's mutual love of science wasn't what brought these two oddballs together, though. No. What finally brought these two together was a movie. Not just any movie either. It was called, BioTech: Robots and Roses. By the name, you'd think it was a cheesy scifi romance movie, and you'd be right. This movie was where my college-freshman dad spilled his entire box of popcorn all over my college-intern mom's lap and apologized so animatedly that my mom knew he was the one. They hit it off, got married two months later, and stayed happily in love with each other ever since.

As a memorial to the movie that brought them together, these two lovebirds watched this 80's scifi rom com religiously. And I mean it. The first movie I remember watching was this one. By the time I was five, I could recite it, word for word. Theories for underlying subplots and how the technology worked constantly rounded the dinner table as I grew bigger; if you looked in the dictionary for "Cult Following," you would see in the definition "Robert and Adriana Bianchi and their eight children."

My siblings were just as bad as my parents, if not worse, in their obsession with the movie. Michael, the eldest, was the first to hear of roleplaying--also known as cosplay--and the first to implement it. As the eldest, he took the role of Ijan, the "knight in shining armor." Like, for real though, Ijan's armor glowed, and so did his sword. And his forcefield shield. And his face. Gosh, his face glowed. Even as a child, I could tell that Ijan was a cutie. The perfect Prince Charming of an alien planet. He was a human though, which was odd for an alien planet.