alteregon.livejournal.com

Title:  Nowhere near home
Fandom: None; Original story
Rating: G
Length: 1259 words
Content Notes: No warnings apply
Author Notes: With a prompt and no fandom specified, my brain defaults to this. Peter was my first roleplaying character, as well as the one character who has been with me most consistently for the last 16 years. When he's not busy playing with me, he's living about 800 years in the future. A few years ago I started chronicling his life in a series of short episodes. Here's one of them.
Summary:  Peter ponders a sudden and highly unwelcome change to his living situation.

The room was easily three times the size of my own.

It was also entirely impersonal, impeccably clean and boring. And it wasn't going to me mine no matter what.

For sixteen years, I had been mainly raised by the computer and my parents' staff. No one had cared that David and Caroline hardly spent more than a few weeks a year planet-side while they were alive. Now all of a sudden the previous arrangements were no longer good enough.

At sixteen, I had two years to go before I was deemed old enough to live on my own, unless my legal guardian consented. There was not much of a chance that this specific legal guardian would.

My uncle thought he was doing me a favor in bringing me into his household and introducing me to the 'modern world'. I didn't need any introducing. I was certainly introduced to it enough every time I left my parents' premises. Mine, now, even though I could not yet dispose of them as I saw fit.

"Now that your parents are gone…" he had started his little speech about how my life was going to change all for the better now.

Gone. What an interesting way of putting it. They had been 'gone' for most of my life, dropping by now and then for a few days - or weeks at most - to play at being parents or to amuse themselves with their Terran friends. Then one morning I'd get up and they'd be gone again, with just a note for me left on the computer or with either Thomas or Alicia.

I didn't see the point in avoiding the facts, though. They were dead, killed in a grav-jetting accident because there was just so much more thrill in it when circumventing the safety mechanisms. Not for the first time did I wonder if I should have felt more at those thoughts than the vague irritation that I did.

My uncle and his family certainly seemed to think they had to resort to euphemisms when it came to that specific subject. That was interesting as well, in its own way. Mostly, these days, death was welcomed when it finally arrived. With the ability to keep a body alive near-indefinitely, it had turned from necessary evil to choice. The unalienable right to death ranked right up there with the right to life, the right to basic resources and the right to work.

Obviously, there still were those occurrences when choice did not figure into the equation, and this was one of them. Accidents that reminded people of their mortality were not a pleasant subject.

Regarding my uncle, I wasn't entirely sure if he was grieving for the brother he had lost, or for the property he had not inherited. If I had ever wondered whether he begrudged his older brother the wealth he had, I was certain after the day he and his wife came to collect me. Still, it wasn't that Gerrard had inherited a smaller portion of the family fortune when their old man had died. David had simply made more of his share of the inheritance.

He also wasn't precisely poor. The apartment he lived in was large enough for his wife, son and daughters. Going by the standards that I was used to living by, it could have easily accommodated three or four more.  

Which brought me back to the most acute problem at hand.

Once again, I looked around 'my' room. To make it anything like mine, it would have needed complete refurnishing. Considering that my uncle was planning on modernizing me, I didn't think he would be very susceptible to the idea.

He had given me a perfectly modern bed that to my eyes looked like hardly more than a bare cot, for all that it could be set and adjusted precisely to the sleeper's preferences in texture and hardness; a wardrobe that dispensed disposable clothing that, as always, felt much too light and entirely unreal on my body; gravity shelves that would hold things on all sides. He had actually gone to the effort of explaining them to me. I wondered if he thought I'd never been to a shop or another person's house before, and hadn't ever encountered them in a holo either.

At least they had, albeit grudgingly, agreed to set up another closet so I could keep some of my usual wardrobe with me. Natural fiber may have been horribly dated and considered uncomfortable to the point of being hazardous by many, but that didn't change the fact that I abhorred the feeling of being naked that wearing synthetic clothes that were engineered to interfere as little as possible with the wearer's sense of touch and unrestricted movement gave me.

The room's walls had the telltale glow of a holo-foil, suggesting that I could adjust the room's appearance to my tastes and preferences, within the scope of the programmed themes. The only thing vaguely reminiscent of my real room was the computer alcove, containing a screen and a chair. Still, this one also had sliding walls that could enclose the user in a dome for all-round display. Why anyone would want part of a display behind his back was beyond me, though.

My window at home gave onto the outbuildings and the woods.

This room had a window, too – if more evidence was needed that my uncle was not a poor man, here it was. The view it offered made me feel as if I was looking out through the side of a canyon. All that was visible was another huge, grey building with small, evenly spaced windows, across the chasm that was a street. Looking down, I could make out the ground below. This was a good position – high enough to not be bothered by low-flying traffic, but low enough for a window to actually open without letting out all the good air.

"You can put a mask on that, you know," an entirely too patient voice said from the door. Stupid sliding doors that didn't even have the decency to make any discernible sound when they opened. I had to find out if there was any way of putting a lock on those.

I hadn't gotten more than a glance of my cousin the night before, as he cut introductions short to return to his current holo, in which he was just about to master some particularly difficult level, as he vaguely muttered before diving out of the room again. If the time since then was anything to go by, I wouldn't see much of the holoroom I was supposed to share with him.

"I know," I answered in the same forced patience.

He considered for a moment. I hadn't paid any conscious attention to his name, felt no desire to check my 'chip for it right now and wasn't even sure it mattered. He probably went by something else entirely when not around his parents. He looked like every cliché of a holo'dict that I could think of, but the concept that someone might not put a mask on the window by choice seemed utterly beyond him.

His smile was the kind of expression one would put on because someone – such as parents – had issued an order to be nice. "Would you like me to show you how?"

With a sigh, I laid my head against the smooth synthglass of the window. The next two years were rapidly gaining in potential for becoming the longest ones in my life.