*Click*

6AM arrived. The television turned itself on, the little box projecting an opaque holographic screen from the notch on its top panel, acting as an alarm clock. A blond, bland, handsome reporter sitting at a desk, appeared in glorious 8K resolution.

The reporter wrapped up a story that had to deal with the nation Cerne’s recent issues with its neighbor, Mardon, and whether that would affect Mardon’s stance in the upcoming UN economic conference.

Then the splash page for that story faded out, and the reporter switched tracts. Favoring another of the cameras with a smile.

“On other news today, it seems that we have a few minor updates on the Andrew Quirk story and the status of the formerly-missing scion of the Quirk family….”

Behind the reporter was the picture of a young man. His skin light brown. His hair, and eyes, a dark orange. The boy’s eyes were large in a way that would have made him look almost permanently surprised if it weren’t for the boys thick orange eyebrows. The eyes were covered in dark rings making it look like the last time he’d had a good night sleep was ages ago.

The rest of the boy’s face was triangular. His chin was pointed. His jaw was distinct but narrow. His cheekbones were sharp. Overall, one could objectively call the boy good-looking, but as the banner for the story would attest he was the son of a family of elites.

This was an age where even the average person could afford to take gene-enhancement serums that augmented one’s health, physical strength, and appearance. For the higher-end serums the enhancement was more complete and was often passed along to the offspring of the user.

An elite family like the Quirks would naturally be able to afford such treatments. They would naturally be able to afford even better treatments and serums than those the average person could afford. Thus in a society where most folks were walking around with the unreasonable good looks of the models and movie stars of the age before, it would have been weirder for the boy to not be handsome.

“...According to the family physician young Mr. Quirk seems to have previously suffered a moderately serious head injury effecting his ability to recall what happened on the night of his disappearance and what happened during the last six months while he was gone. Beyond this there seems to be no other signs of cognitive impairment.” said the reporter.

The story went on for a few seconds longer before switching to a recall of robot-dogs whose optical sensors had apparently been hacked by cyber-criminals for the purpose of collecting materials for blackmailing the dogs’ owners.

The bed creaked and then its occupant sat up, yawning and groaning.

“Mhm… Only a five minute blurb this time? Good. Maybe I can finally start showing my face in public again.” said the low, lilting, voice of the former-sleeper. His face, more or less, identical to the one they’d shown on the screen a few seconds ago.

Andrew Quirk stood up and stretched a second time. He walked towards the window of his tiny apartment and gazed down at a city filled with gleaming towers made of glass, crystal, and steel.

Down the below was a network of suspended highways and bridges, and below that was a tangle of streets. Each road, highway, and street lined with a fast flowing line of self-driving, AI-controlled, vehicles.

Up above, was a fleet of dirigibles that would light up as night came around. Floating projectors that would emit hundreds of myriad advertisements and public announcements.

The news was fairly accurate if you ignored the parts of the story that either Andrew or his family had changed, hidden, or pressured the stations to avoid focusing on.

A rough summary of Andrew’s actual story would start with the revelation that the ‘car accident’ that lead up to his disappeared was no accident. The real cause of Andrew’s disappearance was his half-brother Tristan being the kind of psycho-pathic bully that generally only lived in 1980s cinema.

Andrew had been riding along on his scooter. Tristan and his friends had been in their car. Tristan had spotted Andrew and thought it’d be funny to give his half-brother a scare by attempting to run the boy off the road.

This would probably be a good time to mention that outside of the military there was pretty much no one who actually knew how to drive anymore. The laws that made it illegal to drive manually outside of emergencies meant that most people only knew the bare minimum.

The point being when Tristan Quirk wrested control from his sport car’s AI, he didn’t exactly know what he was doing. Resulting in the ‘attempt to scare’ becoming attempted murder. Tristan’s car hit Andrew’s bike and knocked Andrew off the road into a ditch.

The young man’s broken body went skidding across the road, leaving a very visible, very hard to cover up the trail of blood. Considering how far modern science had gotten, things might have still been recoverable if one of three things had happened.

A) If the car hadn’t immediately alerted the authorities to its driver being in danger, Tristan might have been able to just call his father Milo Quirk to handle things.

B)If Andrew’s body hadn’t disappeared they could have just injected the boy with a healing serum and left him to explain the situation and cover for them as was often the case when these youthful “pranks” ended up going to far.

C) If Andrew was just one of the lesser Quirks. A commoner. Merely possessing the name but not actually having any connection to the main family, the whole issue could have been smoothed over with some veiled threats, and a couple hefty bribes, to all relevant parties. The news would have had no interest in covering the disappearance of some nobody.

Alas, life was not so kind to either Tristan who’d had to enroll in a school overseas, or Andrew, who’d had to move out of his home city of Harrow to avoid public scrutiny.

Andrew Quirk was a true member of the Harrow City Quirks. One of the five elite families of the city. Just like Tristan, he was a son of Milo Quirk, but unlike Tristan, he was a bastard. Birthed by some lounge-girl who’d appeared one day with a paternity test in hand. The woman left the baby behind, taking an NDA and several million dollars in hush money with her.

Andrew’s existence ended up becoming a source of embarrassment for Milo because it nearly cost him the role of family head. While promiscuity amongst elites and non-standard families were common, nearly causing a scandal had given the then forty-year-old Milo’s reputation a black eye. A fact that the older man had never quite forgiven the boy for.

This led to Milo treating the boy coldly and the man holding a quiet but very evident animosity against the boy, especially since as a child sired by the Quirk family’s main branch the boy identity was instantly a complicated one. Ultimately, resulting in Andrew becoming the family’s most disfavored son.

The point being that however, disfavored the boy might have been, he was still a proper, Harrow city Quirk. With most of the import and status that the name implied.

The news ate the story of the disappearance up, and for months there wasn’t a single news channel or website that didn’t have at least one story covering the question of what exactly happened to Quirk family’s lost son.

Then things quieted down. Till suddenly six months later, the boy appeared. Naked. Shivering. Wet. Covered in a strange gray-red slime. After numerous tests, the authorities and the Quirk family were able to confirm that the boy was indeed the real Andrew Trafford Quirk, of Harrow City.

This naturally started up yet another media frenzy. A media frenzy that Andrew elected to hideout from. Keeping his head down for five months, until finally almost everyone had forgotten all about him, including his own family, and the only ones even mentioning his name were the Harrow City local news stations which only mentioned him because the Quirks’ status in the city was just that high.

“Nh… Welp, I guess it’s safe to get started on that whole “living the rest of my life” thing.” said Andrew. Yawning and then turning around to head towards the apartments cramped shower.

*************************************************************************************************************

In all seriousness, Andrew was more than relieved to fall out of the public eye. His family hadn’t appreciated the renewed scrutiny. He got the sense that they would have much preferred he’d stayed missing so they could just quietly announce a memorial for him, and their “sincere hopes” that he return some day.

As for Andrew himself, he had his own reasons to not want reporters sniffing around him. While he was no longer the creature that he’d once been he wasn’t human either. Honestly, if it weren’t for his innate ability to manipulate data, he probably would have been outed during that first round of tests.

For those who weren’t good at connecting dots, Andrew was Hoheit. Hoheit was Andrew. This wasn’t some possession, and though ‘some’ shapeshifting ‘was’ involved this was no deception. The creature of the figment-realm had been relieved to regain his true name as he returned to the greater-realms and the larger portions of the cosmos.

Hoheit’s original goal had been to return home to his much saner, much larger, much more inhabited, homeworld. He’d never in a million years believed he’d be able to return to his old life.

While it was hard to tell how much time had passed while he was trapped within the figment-realm, his subjective view was that he’d spent at least a few centuries travelling back and forth through that twisted realm. And that was ‘before’ he’d finally slain the first lord of the realm to free himself from its endless onslaught and escape its dark games.

Unfortunately, the ritual to slay the being for good, ended up turning him into a neophyte Lord Abwickeln. An infant version of the first ruler of the realm. Hoheit was reborn as a young ‘old one’. A transcendental being escaping the common sense of the ordinary cosmos. Like all babies there was an unknowable amount of time where he just sort of existed. A period where he lacked the ability to make reliable memories and was left in the hand of his caretaker, and oldest ally, the attendant.

According to her, it had taken Hoheit, roughly two centillion years for him to be able to sit upright for the first time and thrice that many years for him to be able to regain the power of speech. Never mind how long it took him to be able to be able to stand and walk and feed himself again.

Of course she couldn’t be sure of exactly how much time had passed, because again, time inside the realm had flowed too inconsistency to be reliably recounted. However, to Hoheit’s ears that made it seem that it was entirely possible for him to return to the greater-cosmos to find his home universe simply gone.

Ultimately, no one was more surprised than Hoheit...aka... Andrew to find his planet still in existence and his shitty family still alive. At first he’d been excited, over the moon, because as terrible as the majority of his family was, there were still a few people there he’d been missing like crazy like his adoptive mother, Carmella Quirk, and his little sister Jack.

Of course, every silver lining comes with a dark cloud. Returning to his life meant dealing with the hassle and burdens that came with returning to his life. Beyond having to prove he was still him, there were a lot of questions about what happened during the months he’d been gone and he suspected there were more than a few people who weren’t fooled by his ‘amnesia’ story.

Beyond that, even without the special stress of being the boy who’d been missing, Andrew still had to deal with being seventeen years old again. Despite his supposed family’s prominence, Andrew himself was basically a nobody. He was a nobody living in a world that either expected one to be innately gifted, or highly qualified, if one wanted to succeed in life.

This meant that Andrew needed to go back to school. If he wanted to get back to living the life that had been put on hold after the accident, he had to do what other people his age were doing. Earning diplomas, doing internships, finding work.

“Ugh...Why did I want to come back here again?”