This is also a bit slapdash and in works. Chapter 1 will be from the POV of Theodora. I'm currently working on editing my style to be less wordy but strangely have more dialogue. Chapter 1 should hopefully be ready by next week. Knock on wood. I may at a later date pull a Lost Sun (Revamped) on you guys and completely revise the whole story when my writing skills improve or if I want to redirect the storyline. There's a learning curve here since I'm starting from scratch.

Prologue 2: Neither Child nor Prodigy

Theodora was 10 years old when she received her first doctorate. To the outside world that would appear to be the act of a child prodigy, but to quote a statement she made for Noble prize she received on her doctoral thesis. "This was not an accomplishment of genius, but the product of over twenty years of hard work, determination, and than more a little bit of obsession." Wait, how can a ten year old spend twenty plus years working on a doctoral thesis? It's a long story...

Her parents being a product of their times and environment had done the usual things of their upbringing. Went to college, fell in love, graduated, struggled with getting jobs, dealing with student loans, mortgage, growing up and marrying. They, having had planned parenthood instilled as a virtue waited until they were stable financially with a home and white picket fence and a dog on the porch until they decide to have a baby. Actually that's a lie. They had a nice condo and a cat and a little too much vino on their ten year anniversary trip to Italy. Also it's hard to look up "Where can I buy a condom?" in the Italian/English dictionary when your hammered drunk. So you can say Theodora was a oops surprise baby. Jill was a hard core corporate career woman and upon finding out she was in the family way, pretty much told Jack he was taking paternity leave on his job cause she had work she could not miss. Jack, having survived ten years of marriage replied the only way he could. "Yes dear."

It was during the third trimester when the second surprise was made known. Their unborn baby girl had diagnosed with an incurable chronic illness and would not even survive childbirth save serious medical intervention. Jill, being shark in the boardroom was still all mother and broke down in tears. Only to pull herself together and go on the offensive. Firing question after question, calling in experts and doing her own research.

"Incurable my ass, they said the same thing about polio, smallpox, bubonic plague and on and on. In this day and age even cancer is curable. We just need to hold on until medicine advances to find the cure."

So, thanks to Jill's grim determination a plan when devised to keep her baby girl alive. First, a Caesarean section because normal child birth would be too traumatizing to the baby's fragile state, then a specially made incubator to keep her alive. Unfortunately she would remain in that incubator until the cure was found.

Her parents named her Theodora, which means God's gift, but she always thought of herself as a burden to her family. Which is why when she entered college she decided to find a way to become independent. Easy to say but hard for a five year old girl in box to do. It was not really a box, it was a sophisticated piece of high tech that combined full life support with the latest virtually reality hardware. Why you ask, because Theodora was ill, very ill. To the point where without the box keeping her alive she would die within hours. The VR was hooked up to her life support to give the healthy mind trapped within her immobile body something to so it stayed healthy/sane. When she was a child her "world" was a VR nursery room with a AI nanny for the times her parents could not be with her. A byproduct of VR that directly interfaces with your brain is that everything happens at the speed of thought. For every hour in the real world four hours are spent in the virtual world. This affect on Theodora went mostly unnoticed at first because babies spend a good 16 hours a day sleeping and she was only in her VR nursery eight hours or less. As time went on it became more obvious. Her parents worried but came to the conclusion that as long as Theo was happy and healthy they would not try to suppress her mental development.

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Time went by, both in the real world and inside Theo's box. Theo's world expanded through software patches to a house and a backyard to play in. She was given a pretty normal homeschool education of the times, a combination of AI tutors and online real teachers. Only since her time went at four times the speed on the outside world she speed through school at rate that made her seem a child prodigy. That really was not the case. She did not have to eat or brush her teeth, bath, or go to the toilet. Theo had a very limited world with not much to do, a lot of time on her hands, might as well study. When she turned five her parents deemed her old enough to surf the internet, and even with parental controls it expanded her little VR world to the whole real world outside. It was then she realized how she differed with other children, and with a mental maturity of someone four times her age she took it well and formed a plan.

First was education. Her parents while not wealthy were well off. Though her special medical needs were very expensive at first she was now stable and amounted to retaliative inexpensive daily maintenance. Most families would have been crippled by the medical debts, but Mama was a hard worker. Better yet she was a smart one. Thanks to her the families finacial credit was still good. True to being her mother's daughter, Theo worked the system for all it's worth getting scholarships, grants, and loans so paying tuition was no problem. There were also whole universities that were completely online but older more prestigious ones still had real classrooms. She enrolled in college in the off season online of several different schools. She transferred summer credits and tested out of classes skipping all freshmen requirements come fall of her first year. Since she qualified as disabled was able to get schools to make exceptions in attending classes physically and made use of 3D video chats. Students in classes volunteered to carry her lap top to her classes and set it up on a desk facing the professor so she could attend class. In this manner Theo continued her rapid education and quadrupled majored eventually getting a Doctorate in Computer Science.

Theo's doctoral thesis was a VR research laboratory. It combined health informatics, computational science, artificial intelligence, with Theo's mad software engineering skills to make. Since it was not slowed down to the speed of human thought, but rather Theo's custom made AI it as capable of working 25 times the speed of the real world. The first task she set it.

"Find a cure to my disease."

It took less then a year. Along the way, her VR lab made ground breaking medical discoveries and new techniques. New treatments that saved many people who would have been untreatable before. The patents of which paid back all her student loans as well as her family's medical debts with millions left over. When the program finally announce it had found the cure, it was a bit anticlimactic given all the marvels it had already produced. So at eleven years old, after months of treatment and physical therapy Theodora took her first step outside of her box. It was a wobbling weak baby step but a promise of a full recovery and a new life to come.