Rune’s family was dead. It hadn’t taken long at all after coming back to his room and opening up his holo-computer to find the information. It wasn’t too much of a surprise, but it still hurt. Rune still wasn’t wholly convinced that this was reality and not just a video game, but from what he’d seen and the people he had interacted with, he was more inclined to believe this was reality as opposed to a very sophisticated video game. But no matter which option was true, either his family was dead or he’d never see them again—they were gone. Rune could only move forward.

In a strange, melancholy way of finding closure, Rune devoted the rest of his evening to trying to figure out what had happened to his family. Unfortunately, things, for the most part, had not gone well.

His mother and father had managed to do relatively well for themselves. After he’d left, the economy had slowly improved over the course of the next ten years. More jobs had opened up, and just two years after he left to become a VC his father had managed to get promoted from fusion plant drudge to fusion plant operator, a considerably more cushy and well-paid position. Meanwhile, his mother had managed to turn a temporary cleaning job into a more permanent operation that seemed to even extend to managing certain properties.

They’d done their best to save up money to help pay for the kids who made it to college while also saving for retirement. Overworked but satisfied with having secured most of his children’s futures, his father would pass first at the old age of seventy-eight, with his mother following just years later at the age of eighty-three.

That was about where the happy story ended. His parents had been very lucky, missing World War III by a scant couple of years.

Of his five siblings, only two would survive after the nukes dropped. Both Stella and Mabel, the second eldest and youngest respectively, were still in Chicago when the bombs hit. Neither was logged as entering a shelter and both had been marked down as presumed dead nearly a decade later after the government had finished combing the city and rescuing survivors. All Rune could do was sit there, close his eyes for a moment, and pray that it had been quick.

Daniel, his second youngest sibling, had been in New York when the bombs dropped. He’d passed through college and was working as a shrink in uptown New York. Due to where he’d been, he’d had the opportunity to make it to a shelter. His family hadn’t. Things got a little vague from there, but with a little bit of digging, Rune had managed to piece together most of what had happened using archived hospital and social media records.

From what he could tell, Daniel had signed on as a disaster relief volunteer and started combing the city in the the hopes of finding his family. While he hadn’t found them, he had found a lethal dosage of radiation due to faulty shielding, causing massive internal organ failure and ultimately his death after a year of struggle. Even with the benefits of 22nd-century medicine, he hadn’t been able to pull through.

Jade and Finn, the other two siblings, had been dealing with problems of their own, unable to easily arrange travel and dealing with the fallout from the nuclear explosions themselves, trying to pick up the shattered remnants of their lives. They hadn't come to see him in his final months. Daniel had died, in pain, all his friends and family effectively swept away in the wake of the nuclear explosions which had decimated all the major North American population centers. Rune took a moment of silence for him as well.

Luckily, that was more or less where the devastation ended. Finn and Jade, his two middle siblings, twins and both twelve when he’d left, had survived the initial exchange of nuclear bombs, the fallout, and the rest of the war.

It was fitting that Jade had been one of the ones to make it. She had always been the pacifist of his siblings, buying into all that environmental conservation, world peace, and charity UFOH propaganda crap. It was enough pleasant on the ears, for sure, but didn’t really translate into reality. The truth was right there in the mega-slums all around for anyone with eyes to see, with the uptowners watching from their ivory towers as more than half the population of the city toiled in abhorrent conditions just to eke out a living, stabbing each other in the back just to get a leg up in the free-for-all that was New Southern Chicago.

Rune couldn’t begrudge her positive outlook on life though, and things had gotten better for people living in the slums as he’d grown up. Better yet, it was those same impulses that had saved her life, working her way up through non-profit organizations that would eventually leave her in Wyoming working wildlife conservation, hundreds of miles from the nearest bomb strike.

Meanwhile, the other of the two twins, Finn, had taken the gilded road, making it through college to graduate with a degree in business to push on through law school to become a lawyer, graduating third in his class from Columbia. He’d traveled out to New England and somehow managed to build a reputation for himself as a consultant and prosecutor working the odd job here and there before finally getting hired into a big name law firm.

In what could only be described as great fortune, Finn had been in an airplane with his family moving from Boston to New York after swapping law firms when the bombs had fallen. The plane had been rerouted to a rural military base and his entire family, sans furniture and pets, had survived.

What had been the misfortune of millions was the fortune of Finn. With just over 70% of the American population annihilated in the face of the bombs, Finn had an opportunity like no other. The number of high profile lawyers and businessmen had been drastically reduced, leaving hundreds of billions of assets floating and very few left behind to claim it.

When the dust finally settled, Finn had managed to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions, leaving him one of the richest and most influential men in the United States. He’d spend the rest of his life consolidating his power and making investments, securing his family’s power for the next generation.

For her part, Jade would actually opt to leave with her family on a colony ship for Neptune not long after the two-year-long Third World War ended, one of the first but definitely not the last of a mass exodus from earth. She’d never seen eye to eye with Finn when they were younger, and it wasn’t surprising that she might’ve felt alone in the world, what with her family having mostly died and humanity having destroyed most of the earth.

After arriving on Neptune with her husband and four children, those children would all find partners and all leave more children behind than Jade. Ten or eleven generations of propagation later, the Yahuis descended from her had spread all throughout the stars, with hundreds of relatives distributed through the ESA, MES, CSC, and UIS. Rune did a quick query and found that not one of them was on Terrassis and that the closest ones were on Helimgrad.

Rune shrugged at the information. He was their great-great-great-great-great-whatever grand-uncle or something like that. There wasn’t a chance that they’d ever recognize him, even if he was related to them in some small way. It was probably pointless to track them down.

Clicking away from that, Rune finished researching Finn. Unsurprisingly, Finn’s section of the family had done very well for themselves. Finn gave his all to his only child, putting him through the best of the top private schools remaining before finally teaching him the tricks of managing the business. His son would do the same for his sons, letting them help him expand the business even larger, an eternal CEO after the invention of immortality serum. Each successive generation expanded the workings of the past, and within three generations Grey Duck enterprises had grown to be one of the largest corporations in the sol system, possessing several shipyards, thousands of prime asteroids for mining, and several connections to the supply of weapons to Earth’s armada.

It was hard to tell exactly what the extent of his brother’s children’s influence was on earth. But when the Sol war finally broke out between earth and the newly named Coalition of Sovereign Planets containing Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, a decent 10% of their ships had been built in Grey Duck Enterprise’s Shipyards.

Likewise in the End War between the CSC and UIS—a full 14% of the ships built by Grey Duck Enterprises. What’s more, when the MES had finally split off from the CSC, a major faction in the MES was Grey Duck Enterprises, in fact, 37% of their ships had been constructed by Grey Duck Enterprises. And considering that the current CEO of Grey Duck Enterprises was actually just Finn’s son, Jett, who was also a current MES Chairman or ruler of some sort, that meant that Rune was actually the Uncle of one of the current rulers of the MES.

Damn. That was pretty crazy. Someday in the future, he’d try to get in contact with his nephew, but for now, he wanted to study up and age it little. It was super weird, after all, having a nephew effectively being three hundred years old with Rune still having less than twenty years of life experience.

Curiosity sated Rune checked the time and realized that it was almost 11:00. While staying up late was fine and all, Jamis had told him earlier that if he was going to train in Combat he’d need to wake early and stick to a strict schedule. Mentally banishing the projection of a computer, Rune collapsed into his bed, pulling up the blankets around him. He wanted to sleep, but he couldn’t help but keep thinking about the information he’d learned.

While Jade’s story was more or less what he’d expected, Finn’s was nothing short of inspirational to him. While Rune hadn’t been able to make it out of the slums himself if any of his siblings could’ve made it out of the slums, passed college, gotten through law school, and amassed a fortune of billions of digicoins, it was Finn. Out of all of his siblings, Finn had always been the one that was most ambitious.

As kids, Finn and Rune had grown up very differently. When he was just a kid, Rune had needed to fend for himself. He’d gotten into a lot of fights and always finished them alone, earning a reputation as a tough brawler. He hung with kids from the less shady end of the mega-slums, primarily kids whose parents worked in fusion plants, and eventually managed to establish himself as the goto community muscle, something of a minor authority.

And aside from the occasional scuffle and a couple intense years in middle school, the gang kids, and fusion kids kept fighting to a minimum. The unspoken agreement was that the kids in the gangs left the fusion kids alone, and the fusion kids minded their own business. Those kids that didn’t often disappeared, with only their parents left behind to ask questions as to where they went.

Rune’s younger siblings fell into that category of fusion kids simply because of Rune and his reputation. Nobody really screwed with them, and growing up from a young age, Finn didn’t have to deal with all of the harassment that Rune had faced. He was friends with the younger siblings of the kids that Rune was friends with, and nobody really wanted to mess with them and piss off them and in turn Rune.

When he was young Finn just stayed in his room, played video games, watched Youtube, and studied. He had a certain kind of studying hard and working hard grit, but not the tough-as-nails, streetwise can’t hold me down sort of grit that Rune had. He flourished in the safe space right up until about fourth grade. Rune could still remember that whole fiasco very well…

~~~459 Years Previously~~~

The screen outer door slammed open, and then after a brief second of waiting, something in the inner steel door beeped and it swung open. Rune swallowed the last of his curry flavored ration bar, watching out of the corner of his eye as a short shadow with a similarly short haircut laboriously shoved open the heavy door and then maneuvered it closed.

“Hey,” Rune said, “Finn.” It couldn’t be anyone else, not with that hairdo. “What are you doing home? Did school get canceled or something?”

Rune had skipped school to work that morning at a construction site. His shift had ended at 11:00, and he’d come home to grab a meal and chill for a couple hours before he left for the local supermarket to work a cashier and earn another few digicoins. But while Rune had a pretty damn good reason not to be at school, there was absolutely no reason for Finn to be skipping.

Finn just ignored him, stripping off his shoes and throwing them haphazardly on the floor before grabbing his backpack shoulder straps and running up the stairs.

Rune frowned as he watched him run. “Hey,” this time Rune was shouting, “I asked you a goddamn question!”

Thump-thump-thump went Finn’s feet pounding up the stairs to the second floor of their five-room apartment, but no sounds coming out of his mouth. If anything, Rune frown steepened. Finn could be abrasive at times, but never anything like this. He was a quiet, respectful kid, more so than Rune, and he wouldn’t just ignore him after coming home. Something was wrong.

With a sigh, Rune set the datapad he’d been watching Youtube videos down on the worn and torn couch next to him beside a stack of varied flavor ration bars. He then got up and walked past the faded photograph of his smiling grandparents hanging on the wall next to the stairway leading to the second floor, thumping his way up the stairs in slow pursuit of his younger brother.

Frown still on his face, Rune walked down short, faded brown dilapidated corridor and entered the second room on the right, the small bedroom that he shared with the two twins. Rune stepped through the door and sat down on the bed next to Finn who was sitting there on the bed, his fists balled and face scrunched up in anger.

Rune took in the sight of him, bruises on his face, a black eye, scuffed skin on his knees, and cuts on his elbows. Nothing on his knuckles. Someone had beat the shit out of him, and it had been a mostly one-sided affair. Rune’s frown deepened. Anyone who beat the shit out of his kid brother either had balls of steel or shit for brains.

Rune cleared his throat. “Who did this to you.” His voice was flat. Harsh.

Finn looked away, pursing his lips. He shrugged. “No-one.”

Rune scoffed. “Is that what you told your teachers before you skipped class? You had a hot date with the stairwell? Don’t give me that bullshit. Someone beat the shit out of you. Tell me who. Nobody beats up a Yahui and gets away without a few bruises of their own.”

Finn snorted. “Easy for you to say. You’re good at beating people up. And what if I don’t want you to beat him up, huh?” Finn turned to look Rune in the eyes. “What if I wanna do it myself, huh?”

Rune arched an eyebrow and gave Finn a slow, critical once-over before finally speaking with some disbelief, “Kiddo, you’ve got no muscles on your arms and I bet you couldn’t even run half a mile before collapsing. You couldn’t beat up a rabbit, let alone whoever did this to you.” Rune paused, his voice turning serious “You should probably let me take care of it, kid.”

Finn did the sideways glance thing again. Rune frowned. “What is it?” He asked, slightly confused and annoyed.

Finn let out a sigh, and in a petulant voice said, “It was Harry Westman.”

Rune put his hands behind him in the bed, looking up at the ceiling and thinking. Harry Westman. Westman. Rune didn’t know Harry Westman, but he sure knew his older brother, Clive. He ran with the gang kids, in particular, the ones that ran drugs through the school. Clive, in particular, wasn’t really high on the totem pole, but he wasn’t really at the bottom either, somewhere in the middle, a small-time locker room peddler.

Rune stared at Finn for a second, considering. Whether he could talk to Clive and deal with the problem that way entirely hinged upon one thing; “Finn, what the hell did you do to him to get him to beat the shit out of you?”

Finn pouted for a second, his little legs unable to reach the floor as he swung them back and forth through the air. “I dunno.”

Rune’s eyebrows went up. He knew that response. It was the ‘I fucked up and don’t want to admit it’ response. “Kid,” Rune began, traces of frustration in his voice, “you need to tell me what you did to piss him off.”

Finn threw himself back into his bed. “Alright! Fine.” A sulky look crossed his face. “I saw him cheating so I told the teacher and he figured out it was me who ratted him out.”

Rune let out a big sigh, frowning at Finn, who indignantly spoke before Rune could reprimand him. “C’mon, he was so bad at it too. Like the note sheet was in plain view on top of his backpack. There was no way the teacher wasn’t gonna find out.”

Rune fixed him with his sternest gaze. “Then you should have let the teacher find out, not ratted him out. You don’t fuck with the gang kids, Finn.” Finn opened his mouth to speak, likely in protest, but Rune cut him off with a growl before he could even get out a word. “No buts, kid, I’ve told you before a million times, you leave the gang kids alone.”

He kept his eyes locked with Finn’s who finally caved, looking away. “Alright, so what do I do? Can you talk to his older brother or something, call him off?”

Rune let out a sigh. The honest truth of it was that he probably could. The dumpster fire that would result from beating up Clive or his younger brother wasn’t really an option, but he could probably talk him into telling his younger brother to lay off on Finn. But then he’d end up owing Clive a big favor, and owing gang kids big favors never ended well. And besides, this was 100%, legitimately Finn’s fault. Nobody liked a rat. Telling on another kid in the community was stupid, even if that kid was a dick. Finn had dug his own grave, and it was on him to get himself out of it.

And besides, Finn was always getting coddled, shielded by his older brother’s reputation and being academically the best out of all the siblings also the favored child of their parents, told he could do no wrong. No, Finn needed to learn that his actions had consequences and that sometimes he’d need to take care of it himself.

“No, kid,” Rune said, “you made this problem, so you need to take care of it.”

“Pfft,” Finn snorted, “how the hell am I supposed to do that. I just play video games. I don’t even know how to throw a punch. How the hell am I supposed to convince him to stop coming after me?”

Rune shrugged. “I don’t know. You can give him your lunch money, suck up to him. Just avoiding him will work for a time. Or you can fight back, show him that you’re not worth messing with.” He looked at Finn, a serious look on his face. “And don’t tell me that you can’t fight, I know you. We’re Yahuis. We can do anything that we set our minds to. Do you want to beat this kid? I can teach you how to throw a punch and how to take one, how to win. It isn’t gonna be easy though kid.”

Rune wasn’t lying to Finn. If Finn was willing, he’d teach him some basic fighting skills and help him get in shape. Right now Finn was all skin, bones, and blubber, with hardly a single muscle fiber on his scrawny arms after a lifetime mostly spent sitting in his room watching Youtube videos and playing video games. It wouldn’t be an easy road, for sure, but it was definitely doable.

A fist curled up and an angry voice rang out from the other prone form on the bed. “I’ll do it. Teach me. I’ll beat the shit out of him.”

A smile spread across Rune’s face. “Alright. Let’s get started.”

They quickly worked out a deal: Rune would teach Finn the basics of street fighting, and Finn would have to do all of Rune’s chores for him while he taught him. First, they started with some basic fitness training. The first day they ran one mile through the less shady parts of New Southern Chicago, then two miles the next, all the way up till four. Rune ran with him, sometimes threatening him with canceling the training when he stopped, other times taunting him with insults. Rune also had him doing small sets of planks, pushups, pull-ups, and jumping jacks each day.

After roughly two weeks of training, Rune decided it was finally time to teach Finn how to throw a punch. Together, the two brothers went down to the local gym, run by a retired pit fighter who Rune had always called old man Kahn. The place was in what was typically referred to as the fusion sector of New Southern Chicago, next to the fusion plants and also where the vast majority of fusion workers lived.

Most fusion plant workers worked long hours and didn’t have a lot of time or need for extracurricular muscle building exercises, and at 4:37 in the day, the place only had another four or five guys who ignored the two kids strolling in. Rune walked up to old man Kahn, nodded to him, and tapped his phone to the old man’s already outstretched phone. Old man Kahn eyed the screen critically for a second, before a smile lit up his face and he spoke in a gravelly voice, “Pleasure to see you around Rune, you should come by more.”

Rune just smiled and shrugged, gesturing to Finn, “Younger brother wanted to learn how to throw a punch, and I couldn’t think of a better place.”

Old man Kahn nodded, a gracious smile on his face, and he put his hand on Rune’s shoulder. “You’re always welcome here kid. Come back more. Here, as a treat, you can have any of the back rooms you want.”

Rune smiled appreciatively. “Thanks, old man. I’ll be sure to swing by some more. Life’s just been hectic recently.” He gestured to Finn to follow him and started walking towards the back of the small, run-down fitness center.

The pair entered a small room, and Rune took his phone out of his pocket and set them down on the floor in the corner. Watching him, Finn did the same, withdrawing his phone and a slew of writing implements. Rune walked to the middle of the room and spread his arms wide in an open stance.

“Alright,” he said, his voice full of confidence, “come at me.”

Finn frowned, and after a couple seconds of hesitation, drew back a fist, and ran across the room before throwing the punch a near half second before he actually reached Rune. Rune snorted in disdain, pushing his fist out of the way with one palm and backhanding him and sending him spinning to the ground with the other.

“Come on, kid,” he said, his voice full of scorn, “what the hell was that lame ass punch supposed to be? Get up and try again.”

Finn slowly collected himself, pulling himself up off the ground, a big frown on his face, his lips wavering.

“Come on.” Rune was almost shouting at him. “Come at me! Don’t be a chicken. You’ve taken worse falls. I’ve seen them.”

Finn again ran at him, his arm cocked back. This time his punches came strong, but they were slow, sloppy, and uncoordinated. All Rune needed to do was back away to dodge them. After a couple wild misses, Rune grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and slammed him into the wall before letting him drop to the ground with a whimper.

“Owwwww,” moaned a hurt Finn, sitting on his knees facing the wall, “I think you might have broken my nose.”

Rune grabbed Finn’s face, twisting it so that he could see Finn’s face. His nose definitely wasn’t broken. He snorted. “Are you quitting now? I’ve barely even roughed you up at all, kid. You want to head home?”

Finn didn’t respond.

Rune shrugged. “Alright kid. Either help yourself or get buried. He started walking towards the corner that his phone was in. I guess I’ll have to tell Alicia that we’re still on for tonight.”

He was plugging numbers into his phone as he heard the soft sound of pounding feet on the ground behind him, sneaking a glance behind to see Finn running at him. He dropped his phone and his hand scraped across the ground before he spun and hurled a fistful of dust into the eyes of his younger brother, who shrieked and threw up his arms, first failing to block it and then scrubbing at his eyes.

With a single long stride, Rune crossed the distance and shoved Finn hard, sending him stumbling back to fall on his ass, his head thunking off the dusty dirt floor.

Rune walked up as Finn sat up, still scrubbing at his eyes, before yelling at him. “You just going to sit there and take it, huh? You just gonna cry there and hand over your lunch money and then run home and cry some more? Or are you gonna get up and fight and show me who the hell you are?”

A half second passed as Finn scrubbed at his eyes, and then he mumbled something. Rune cocked his head. “What was that?”

This time, Finn was shouting. “I said fuck off.”

He moved one hand back to glare at Rune, fire in his eyes before he tried to sucker punch Rune in the balls.

Rune saw it coming, and the punch struck air as he stepped back. A smile was on his face, however. He knew that fire. It was the same fire that was driving him to try and get out of the slums. The fire that let him burn his way through problem after problem in school and the workplace. The fire that would let him attain ace rank in Whirl of Warplanes the next year. It was determination. It was grit.

“Alright,” Rune said, a grin on his face, “I guess it’s time to show you how to throw a punch.”

For the next couple of weeks, Rune did his best to coaching Finn on some of the basics of fighting. How to throw a punch or a kick correctly and without breaking anything. How to deflect or block a punch. Some basic footwork and stances. Where to hit to take your enemy down. These weren’t huge advantages, but in the world of clueless teenagers wildly throwing fists at each other, these small advantages could easily tip the balance.

A few days after Rune finished showing Finn the basics of fighting, he came home with bruises on his knuckles, yet another black eye, and confidence in his posture. Rune didn’t even need to ask who won the fight. He already knew.

~~~Back to the Current~~~

Out of all of his siblings, Finn had been the only one that he’d truly expected to be successful. He had the right combination of burning ambition and steel will that could really take people places. As Rune twisted and turned in his bed, trying to get to sleep, he imagined what Finn and Jade’s lives might’ve been like if he’d been around. He wished he could’ve been there with the rest of his family, to see them through turbulent times. Unfortunately, that ship had sailed long, long ago.

All the life he’d missed fresh in his mind from having just read about it, Rune tossed and turned for another couple hours before exhausted, he finally fell asleep.