-----18 years later

I’m free.

I don’t feel any different though. I finally finished serving my sentence, and they let me out of the place that I’d been in for half of my life. I’m not sure what to do now. I’ve checked with all of the banks I used to have accounts with, and all of my assets were frozen since before I was put in prison. Life in there was harsh. Everyone in there already knew who I was, and being famous in a prison as the ex-billionaire party-boy that embezzled all the money investors had entrusted to the company. There were a LOT of unhappy people in that prison that were former investors. I’d had to train my body so that I could fend off some of the weaker ones, and had to come up with ways to make sure I didn’t get “accidentally” killed by some of the stronger ones.

Shaking my head to clear my thoughts of that place, I turned my attention back to the house I was standing in front of. It was a normal house, 2 stories, with light-brown walls with a dark-green door. It only had a small driveway in front of it, but that didn’t matter because the backyard was huge. I must’ve looked weird, standing there in a tight grey t-shirt and black jeans just staring at a house. Just another random person with light-brown skin and brown eyes, with short black hair, staring at a house.

Why was I staring at the house?

Because it was mine. Or at least it would’ve been, 18 years ago. After I’d found out Sarah was pregnant, I’d started looking for a house that the 3 of us could live in. Sarah had never really gotten used to all the money and wealth that I had, and was more comfortable living like normal people. I’d wanted to surprise her when she and Talia finally left the hospital. I’d have driven us not to where my uncle’s mansion was (that’s where we normally stayed), but to our new house. She would’ve smiled and been really happy, and I could’ve watch Talia grow up in it.

The dark-green door opened, and a man and a woman came out of the house with their kids following behind. They headed to their car which was parked out on the driveway, and I turned and started walking away.

‘At least that house was able to make another family happy.’

It should’ve been mine, though. That should’ve been me walking out of the house with Sarah and Talia, heading to some normal place. But the house wasn’t mine anymore. Everything I had, was repossessed by the government and then sold off again.

I’d known this ever since I last saw Sarah, but getting a glimpse of what I could’ve had made me realize it again.

I’d lost everything.

-----6 months later

“911 what’s your emergency?”

“--Uh, hi, there’s a homeless guy that I thought was sleeping under a bridge near my house. I tried waking him up to tell him to move, because I didn’t want him to be anywhere near where my kids might go to play, but he wasn’t moving. And I don’t mean that he didn’t want to move from his spot. I mean that he literally didn’t move at all…. I think he might be dead.”

“Got it, we’ll be sending an ambulance to your location right now sir.”

“Ok, thanks”

……….

‘Where am I?’ Was the first thought that came to mind when I woke up. I was in a white room, on a bed with an annoying monitor that kept making beeping sounds.

Beep!...Beep!...Beep!...Beep!

A door opened and a man in a white coat stepped through.

“Oh, you’re awake. That’s good, that’s good. You’re a very lucky person you know.”

‘Me? Lucky?! This guy doesn’t know me at all. If he did, he wouldn’t have said something like that.’

The guy looked at a clipboard for a moment, glancing back at me once in a while as well.

“Yeap… You really are lucky. You had severe hypothermia, and if the ambulance had gotten you here to the hospital even a few minutes later, you wouldn’t have survived.”

‘Oh, so that’s what he meant by lucky.’ Looking around the room again made me wonder how I didn’t realize that I was in a hospital.

“Sir? Sir?” A loud snap brought my attention back to the doctor. “We’ll need your name as well as your billing address so that we can get all of the proper paperwork and fees over with.

“……….. I don’t have a billing address. I don’t have any money to pay for anything. The only thing I can give you is gratitude for saving my life.” Just saying those words made me depressed. I couldn’t even give anything back to the people that helped me out when I needed it.

“…I understand. We’ll still need your name on file sir, in order to get the proper paperwork filled out.” The doctor paused, and looked me over.

I must’ve looked pathetic. In 6 months I’d lost a lot of the muscle I’d gained in prison, and my body was skinny again. Can’t be helped, after all. If you don’t eat enough food, eventually your body devours your own fat and muscles to survive.

“…As far as payment goes, we do have several payment options that I think would be good for someone in your situation. I will still need your name though.”

‘This isn’t going to end well. If he knows who I am, whatever it is that’s making him act nice towards me will be gone...... Whatever. I don’t think I care anymore……..’

“Raes.”

The doctor looked up, startled.

“I’m sorry, what was that? I don’t think I heard you correctly.”

“No, you heard me fine. My name is Raes Bastion.”

“…..”

There was an awkward silence that filled the room, until suddenly…

“RAES!!” The doctor exclaimed. He ran over and put his arms around my neck, laughing.

‘What the hell is happening?!’ Was the first thing that flashed through my mind. I was more than stunned, because when you’re a 38 year old man, it’s not normal to be hugged like this by another man in his late 30’s.

The guy with his arms around my neck must’ve felt the stiff reaction I had, because he pulled away and asked, “What, you don’t recognize me man?”

I shook my head as I tried to remember if I’d seen this person before.

“It’s me, Caesar. Your brother!”

***

A lot of stuff happened after that weird, awkward, confusing moment which I won’t even start to mention because reliving it all will give me a huge headache. I ended up getting released from the hospital soon afterwards, with an enormous hospital bill looming over me. Caesar learned that I didn’t have anywhere to go after I was released, so he took me in and let me stay at his house.

I almost forgot to mention, he also isn’t my brother.

Caesar and I were really close friends from childhood. I never knew my Mom, he never knew his Dad, and one day both our families met up in a park. We became friends pretty fast, and his Mom took care of me like I thought my Mom would have, and I’d like to think that Caesar thought my Dad had done the same for him. We did everything together, and it was to the point where we promised each other that we’d be brothers.

Which made it even harder when the both of us found out that we were moving away. My Dad and his Mom had gotten jobs that required them to be in a different city. My Dad had become an inventor and started his own company, but it was in a city called Sacramento which was on the opposite side of the U.S.A. It’d become too difficult to manage from the East Coast, so my Dad had to move over there to make it more successful. Caesar’s Mom never did tell us what job she had gotten that made her move, but she did say that they were moving to Japan. What part I never found out though, and that made it harder to track Caesar down once I’d become rich enough to do so.

I have to admit though, he hadn’t done badly at all. Even though he only had a 1-story house, it was more than big enough for a few families to have been living in it. Most people would have an extra bedroom for guests. Caesar had a whole wing devoted to them! Just walking up to the front door of the house, you’d already know that this wasn’t a house most people could afford.

The front door itself was actually comprised of 2 automatic sliding doors made of a crystal exterior, and a wood frame carved with floral designs. Stepping in, you would be in a huge room with white walls and golden script painstakingly hand scribed onto them. Looking back to where you came from, you would only see a forest in full spring bloom behind you. Birds were perched on branches ready to fly, bees were busy getting pollen from plants, and trees spread their branches proudly. At first glance you wouldn’t even see the door that you came from, but if you looked closely, you’d see that there was a tree with a slight crack in the middle of it, letting a bit of the sunlight shine past, just hinting at another world beyond it.

When I first saw that, I thought I’d stepped into a meditation room, but then my eyes fell upon a small shoe rack next to one of the white walls, with a golden quote right above it. “The strong person is not the one that can stop others, but one who can stop themselves when angry. So be a strong person and control yourself when I ask that you kindly remove your shoes after being in the wilds for so long.” Always good to see that Caesar kept his sense of humor.

Walking through an archway straight from that room, you’d find yourself in a living room. Of course since it was in Caesar’s house, the living room was not normal. You might even say it was half the size of a football field! A third of the floor (the part closest to the archway) was carpeted and the third of the floor closest to the wall opposite it had white tiles. The part of it in the middle was made of black tempered glass and had a huge round table on it, one that doubled as the base platform for 3-D holograms that would’ve been in an old sci-fi movie. Apparently one of the fans of those sci-fi movies had gotten rich and decided he wanted one to be invented. The part of the room that was white-tiled had a fully stocked kitchen and dining table, all with the latest and greatest inventions that made cooking easier in the mid-21st century.

To the left and right of the holotable in the middle of the room were more archways which led to the rest of the house. The one to the left led to the guest wing, with more amenities than you could imagine. I think the only reason Caesar hadn’t put in a tennis court and a pool were because of the extra hoops he’d have to jump through with the government to get it all approved. They had strict regulations against things like that ever since idiot that taught himself how to build a house decided that he wanted extra comforts like that in his own house without hiring contractors or getting it inspected. Long story short, he died.

Backing off of the subject of the crazy DIY guy, I realized after a while that Caesar’s place was like a blocky lower-case m, with additional block at the top for the room where the shoe rack was. That being said, that meant that there were 2 wings on either side of the main hall. My friend the rich doctor had apparently built 1 wing for his guests and one for himself.

I’d never gone into the Master Wing myself out of respect for his privacy, but I imagine that it was at least as fancy as the guest wing is.

Anyway, when Caesar invited me to stay at his house until I’d gotten back on my feet, (after he’d finished giving me the mind-boggling tour of his “house”) we’d spent the time sitting back on a couple of chairs on the fancy carpet in his living room just catching up. He’d told me about how after he’d moved to Japan, he’d decided that he wanted to make a living by helping people. He went crazy studying all the time, going to a famous Japanese cram school, and graduated High School at the age of 14. He didn’t stop there though. Somehow, he managed to finish University studies after 3 years instead of the usual 5-6 (for people studying to become a doctor) and then went on to finish med school by the age of 21. He became a full-fledged doctor at the age of 24, and from there he’d moved back to the U.S. and worked at the same hospital for the past 24-25 years, which was good for me since it turned out to be the hospital I ended up at.

After that, I told him about what happened to me. I told him about how my dad’s company became a huge success, and how we became filthy rich almost overnight. I told him about how my dad died when I was 17, leaving me to become the youngest and richest CEO in America.

And right after I said that, he of course asked what exactly happened. Because here I was telling him that I had been filthy rich at the age of 17, but right now I’m not much more than a parasitic hobo leeching off his friend (my words, not his).

So I told him about the rest of my story. How I fell in love at first sight with a girl named Sarah Rain. I told him about the happiest days of my life, when we got married and had Talia together.

And then I told him how it all changed. How my “uncle” who’d taken care of me since my father died had actually been manipulating things so that I would be set up for fraud and embezzlement. How it led to one of the biggest market crashes in the U.S. And how it ended with Sarah leaving me and making sure that Talia would never know who I was.

I tried to skim through almost 20 years of prison life, because I didn’t want my friend to be as traumatized as I was. He noticed though, and still managed to drag a few details from me before I could realize it. I told him about how ironically I was better off in prison, since the past 6 months outside of it had left me jobless, penniless and almost dead. Not strange considering the fact that I’d been charged for fraud and embezzlement. No one wanted to hire someone they couldn’t trust, and fewer wanted to hire the infamous Raes Bastion as an employee. The bad publicity and public outrage would make them go bankrupt in days!

I still remember Caesar’s words to me that day.

“Raes, I swear to you that we will get back at those bastards and get you reunited with Talia!” His eyes were slightly red, but with that murderous look on his face it was more demonic than anything else.

I told him sometime after that, that I wanted to be able to build a life for my own without depending entirely on him. He knew what I was really saying. If I ever wanted to have a life with the daughter I had, I’d first have to be able to support myself, not leech off of my rich friend. It was tough, considering the fact that I couldn’t actually do much. My skills and degrees were limited to grunt work and a high school diploma. I never got the chance to go for college, and now I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I suppose I could’ve asked Caesar to pay for my tuition, but this was something I wanted to do for myself. He was already doing more than most people would have by taking me in. Most of my so-called “friends” from before my prison life had already turned their backs on me.

After all my searching on the internet, all of my travels to different businesses asking for jobs and trying to apply, all of my research, did NOTHING!

HAH!

What was ironic was that the day I decided NOT to do anything at all, was the day that I found something that I might actually be able to do. I’d just been watching a few shows on the HT (Holo-Table), and another ad interrupted the program.

Long story short, it was about a VR MMO that had come out 5 years ago. Apparently it was celebrating their 5 year anniversary at being at the top of the gaming world, something which isn’t easy to do even for half that time. They were setting up a contest to celebrate, and 20 people would win the VR capsule, the game itself, and 3 months of gaming without having to pay the monthly subscription. After doing a little research about it, I found out that what made the game unique was that you could exchange the highest in-game currency for actual cash.

I talked to Raes about it, and he said it might actually work.

So why didn’t I just ask Caesar to spend a little cash on it and then pay him back afterwards?

The thing is, the capsule itself is $15,000 and the game is an additional $250. Monthly subscriptions would add another $300 to my expense every 30 days. It also turns out that Caesar also wasn’t as rich as I thought he was.

“Look at this house man! Do you really think I could afford any of this on a doctor’s salary? Most of it was inheritance from when my mom died, and most of the money I make is just enough to pay taxes on all of it.” He sighed. “Look, I might not be able to get it right now, but if you give me a few years I’ll have saved up enough money to get the game and capsule, and cover the subscriptions for maybe a year.”

“I want to say that I can wait man, but I honestly can’t. Not if there’s another way that I can get it faster. How about this, we’ll both enter the contest. That’ll double our odds of winning, and if one of us wins I can use it to start making a living again.”

“Alright, but if we don’t win, you have to promise me that you’ll let me help you get that capsule. Even if it means waiting a few years. We got a deal?”

He held out his hand and I grasped his forearm, just like they used to do way back when Rome was still an empire.

“You got a deal brother.”

***

We won. I can’t believe it. We BOTH WON!

I’m staring at the 2 gleaming, coffin-like capsules that were installed in the living room at Caesar’s house. The cover was made of glass that could tint at will to provide privacy, or remain transparent. It’s still unbelievable. 6 months ago when Caesar and I entered the contest, even though I’d hoped that one of us would win so that I could start fixing my life again, I always thought that it wouldn’t work. ‘No one ever wins these contests.’ It was the thought that was always in the back of my mind.

Just in case we did win against all odds though, I hadn’t been sitting around doing nothing. I’d gotten my body back up to the shape it was when I got out of prison. I’m not at the level of a body-builder, but I’m lean with muscles at all the right place to be strong and flexible. In my spare time away from building my body back up to size, I did my research on the game as well. But now that we have 2 of these things here at the house, there was a question I just had to ask. I turned to Caesar who was looking at the other capsule with a strange look on his face.

“Caesar, you alright man?”

He snapped out of whatever it was that he was thinking of, and turned to me with a smile on his face. “Yeah man, I’m fine. I’m happy for you though, it looks like you’ll be getting that jump-start on getting a new life after all.”

“Listen, there’s something I have to ask you. I didn’t think it was possible before since I thought we’d only ever have 1 of these things, but now that we’ve got 2…”

He grimaced.

“I know what you want to ask, but I can’t. I’ve only ever wanted to help people, and the best way for me to do that right now is to keep doing what I do at the hospital.”

My face fell. I knew what he was going to say even before I asked, but I’d had to know for sure. “Alright man, I understand. Wish me luck, I’m going in.”

“Good luck.”

I stepped closer to the capsule with my name engraved on the glass covering, and it slip open with a whoosh. I lay down on the bed inside, and the glass slid back over and turned opaque. A few seconds passed and a window appeared on the glass in front my eyes.

SCAN COMPLETE. UNREGISTERED USER DETECTED. CREATE NEW USER?YESNO

“Yes, and start game Awakening.”

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