Ch1 Another Life (1)

With a flick of my wrist I brought up the augmented reality display that held my phone. It was much more entertaining then class. How long had it been since I thought about my father and that old story? I think he had to of made up the story, just for me. To explain my strange purple eyes, and the strange name he gave me. "Hey, She-u, digitally avoiding class again?"

I responded with a twitch of my fingers as I picked up the textbook pretending to care about what the adult at the head of the class said. "You know it, Anrya. Can these classes get any worse? It is 2120 and they still don't have digital books, for crying out loud."

"Well it does let them keep us distracted if the terrorists take out the power grid, again."

My phone flashed to let me know who was responding to the group message. "They haven't hit here in years. We are on good terms with Mars right now." Typical Hero.

"Hero! Why did you go bringing that up?!" It had been almost ten years, I almost don't remember my family anymore. The last casualties in the Mars liberation front. Mars proved it would be willing to blow away the earth if we didn't let them choose their own path. They did it by taking out the city with the biggest banks on earth. Dropping the third ever nuke to be used on earth. Freedom or death they had declared and earth was smart enough to give them freedom after they proved they would bring death even if that meant earth would retaliate and do the same to them.

The whole old country had been wiped off the face of the planet. It was all the more tragic because they had been neutral in all wars for as long as anyone could remember, yet now they were all gone. Mars had declared there were no neutrals in the last war with that bomb. The only reason I had survived?

My parents had shipped me off to visit my grandparents in the states. The rest of my family had been too busy so a maid and my father's personal guard had flown with me for the one month summer trip. One month.

I shook my head and went back to reading the aug display. "Oh, right sorry, She-u."

"See you have driven her away Hero, you are such a butt."

"I know you are but what am I?"

"Really, were you dropped on your head or something?"

"Oh, come on, Anrya. We know She-u is fine." Fine was double underlined just in case you missed the old reference.

I rolled my eyes and wiggled my fingers, "Yes, I am fine. Though knowing you Hero, you think I should have gone herring off on some 8-bit quest to find 4 mysterious dragon warriors and avenge my family. You watch too much old timey anime."

"No, it could be seven glowing stones that let you wish them back to life. You don't know. Or maybe king Arthur returned and was just waiting for you to find him to help him raise an army as his Guinevere."

"Didn't that end with his son killing him and his wife running away with another man?"

"Sigh, at least they got married."

"Marriage was stopped in 2050 for good reason. Once artificial wombs were perfected it makes much more sense to just order a child when you are financially stable enough to afford one. Only you would reminisce about having to do as a spouse told you, Hero. Besides, if any of those old myths were true, and humans could cause enough pending death and destruction to bring them back, they would have come back during the last cold war? Or WWII? Or because of the black plague? Or Spanish Flu?"

"Except, all those heroes could see the future so they would have known we could handle it on our own without them."

"So what? Aliens would have to be real and the dead will come back to save us then?"

"All the myths talk about the heavens, Aliens are real."

I jumped as a hand slapped down on the textbook in front of me, "Welcome back, Miss Swan. Maybe if you spent some time in this reality you would know the block size of the old DES encryption and its key size and type."

"Sorry, got caught up in reading. Cyber security without using a computer is so fascinating after all. The block size is 64 bit, the key is 56 bit, and it is a 1990's to 2000 symmetric encryption. It was augmented with 3DES and eventually replaced with AES. Neither are used any more as the computing power in my phone could break them in about 2 hours. If you want to prove I don't know my 21st century computing information, you are going to need to pick harder questions." The rest of the class groaned at me.

I had gotten so much of a reputation for being a smart ass around school that when students registered for classes they specifically asked not to be placed with me as the teachers made all the test harder and more other students failed. Even my friends were careful not to take any of my classes. Even the teachers that didn't make their tests harder ended up failing more students because I killed the curve. More than once I had been forced to retake a test by myself with five adults watching every angle to be sure I wasn't cheating because I scored so high.

It wasn't my fault everything felt like I had done it hundreds of times before. Most of any science or math I just knew. I had already mastered five languages without the aid of a computer. My hardest subject was history, but it was mostly because I didn't agree with the people who taught it, especially ancient history, I was sure they had so much wrong. Yet I got by after I learned to just tell them what they wanted to hear back. Even though they were wrong!