I was born near the beginning of the period called either the Fifth Great Awakening or the Theocratic Era, depending on which side the speaker is on, I just call it my messed up childhood. Christian Nationalist zealots had gained control of the media and the government and were implementing their writ with an ever heavier hand. As a child of a pagan intellectual mother and a Muslim immigrant father, this was a dangerous time for me and my whole family. There were five of us, my brother was seven years older that me and my baby sister was seven years younger. I don't know why they had us so far apart, I just know that there being only three of us was not considered normal anymore. We kept our heads down and everything, while not great, went alright until I was almost nine. That was when my older brother was caught at school with his boyfriend. That very day the Morality Task Force burst into our house. Our fate was sealed when they found my father's prayer rug and Koran in drawer.

When the officer held them up to his fellows my mother grabbed me and held me to her chest, praying into my ear, “May Odin and Thor watch over you when I cannot and keep you safe.” Then, as they pulled her away, she looked me straight in the eye and charged me, “look after your baby sister.”

I wanted to, but I was eight years old. We were both made wards of the state. I was sent to a military academy were I and a few hundred other boys were indoctrinated into a world where we were the last God fearing nation on Earth beset on all sides by enemies seeking to destroy us. In the beginning I tried to pass my dark skin off as Hispanic, it wasn't great but better that than being middle Eastern. When the headmaster found out he seemed to delight in the chance to announce to everyone how my parents were Arab terrorists and had been convicted of treason, and how my brother had been “hanged for a fag”. The few friends I had started to make abandoned me then and I didn't have a day for four years that I didn't have to fight someone or get beat up. The academy encouraged fighting, after all, we were going into the army, and the army didn't want cowards. I think almost a hundred boys died in the time I was there.

I was transferred to a different facility when I was thirteen. There they started training us for all the sundry skills involved in soldering. They also split us up by our aptitudes, turns out I was good with electronic and software so they trained me as a technician. The year before I “graduated” the real war finally started. I went right from the corporate run government academy into the army proper. I wasn't as brainwashed as some of the others, but I was still eager to fight for my country. I was almost disappointed when I spent the next five years on a stateside base repairing and debugging surveillance drones.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

We all know how much of a quagmire that war was. It was supposed to be won in a week, with God behind us all the way. We ended up struggling so hard we lost control of part to the mainland for the first time since before there was electricity. That was the tipping point.

Soon enough the corporations had bought their way back into power. They unveiled a new marvel, true A.I., for the first time in human history we had made a completely new form of life. A form of life that could see all the angles and all the solutions, and with it they ended the war.

I say ended because I maintain that having things go back to the way thing were before, just with fewer people on both sides, doesn't sound like a win to me. They called it victory anyway and used the political capital to help them repeal the most onerous of the zealots laws. Not because of any moral reason be because it was bad for business.

I was discharged and went to work installing security cameras. It was a crappy job but it gave me enough free time to pursue the one goal I had been denied for the last fifteen years: to find my sister.

I used the start the army gave me and learned everything I could about hacking. Every new technology I could get my hands on was bent to the task: full dive virtual reality let me visualize things I couldn't fit into my tiny apartment; the resurgence in multiplayer online game worlds was a place to meet with other tech head from around the world; new hardware that made large number cryptography plausible again. I spent the better part of a year's worth of nights searching for breadcrumbs before I found it. She had been placed as a ward of the state at a infant care facility run by a company that no longer existed, that company had been owned by Peltech, one of the largest government contractors out there.

I hacked into the Peltech servers. I thought at the time that for such an important company, their security was crap. I dug around for half an hour before I found the information I was looking for. It was just in time for me to figure out that their security was in fact not crap. The police were banging on my door the same time I was pulling up her file. As they broke down the door I just enough time to scan down to the bottom of the report:

MYRA HARAM - TRANSFER TO A7641-2 SUCCESSFUL

I was sentenced to 25 years for industrial espionage and violation of the state secrets act. I served almost two before I was able to hack into the system and arrange a release/escape. It wasn't anything major, I just convinced the computers at each of the prisons the company owned that I was at a different one. I escaped by bribing a couple of guards by resetting all the vacation time they just cashed out. I spent the next five years living off the grid and searching for any other reference to A7641-2 but had never got up the courage to risk the Peltech servers again. And then I stopped for coffee.