Page 4 of Bred by the Alien Prince

Okay, let me relax and breathe in.

Fuck it, I’m sending the footage I have and hope for the best. Yay for good old self-sabotage. I didn’t expect to be chosen, anyway.

A Few Weeks Later…

I might as well jump-kick this story ahead, as nothing special happened in the weeks following my sending off my application to Outer Worlds. Did I even explain what Outer Worlds was or is?

Several years ago, the Gen Ten, short for Generation Ten, discovered how to create FTL space travel. The Gen Ten are a group of androids created by a company called Synthetic Life. The Gen Ten’s function as a super-intelligent AI was to help solve mankind’s problems, like curing cancers and prolonging our life span, yadda yadda. However, only the rich benefited from their discoveries. Occasionally, the benefit trickled down to the little people.

Like the discovery of Faster Than Light space travel, you wouldn’t believe the new companies that rose to take advantage, but so far, most of them were private space corps, which specialized in mining asteroids, and SpaceZero, which realized its dream of total Mars colonization.

Outer Worlds was one of the companies that sprung up almost overnight, announcing the discovery of a habitable planet several light years away from Earth with breathable air, water, and everything. Not only did they discover this planet, but they also wanted to colonize it. Fast forward about ten years later, the company announced the creation of Eden’s Prime colony; yeah, I think they ripped that straight from some old video game. They already had Androids on the planet building the colony, and now they were ready for the first five hundred thousand settlers, and I wanted to become one of them.

Anything was better than sitting in this house yelling at my controlling mother.

“No! Leave me alone! I’ve already packed my bags!” I said, trying to sound tougher than I was. The truth was, I was scared out of my mind, but my mother had laid down an ultimatum, and I had no choice but to plant my feet on the ground. The ultimatum was: Enroll in school or get out.

“And where the hell do you expect to sleep? Huh? A shelter?!” She replied, probably wasn’t expecting me to pack up my shit. It’s not like I didn’t already have my suitcase packed full of clothes. Since my dad’s death ten years ago, all we did was move around, never staying in one place for more than a few months or, if I was lucky, one year before we were packed up and heading elsewhere. Now we were back in North Carolina, and she just became this college-obsessed sycophant.

“It’s better than doing what you want!” True, I think I’d slit my wrist if I had to sit in some boring classroom listening to some professor rattle off at the mouth about social issues.

I slammed my door in her face. It was a bit too harsh of a move there, but I was angry. I was already thinking of apologizing for that one. When I left my room, my mom was slipping on her jacket.

“I need to get the hell out of here and take care of a few things,” she sighed. "When I return from the store, I hope you’ve developed some common sense, Caspian.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so.” I folded my arms, being as stubborn as ever. There goes my apology. I returned to my room to do what I had been doing for the past few weeks: watch videos, see what my favorite live streamer was up to, and click around the Outer World’s site, hoping they got my application. Yeah, I still had hope, don’t know why. But my jaw dropped when I saw the notice posted on the site’s front page.

“We’re happy to announce that Outer Worlds had over one million applications, and we sent acceptance and rejection letters to everyone who applied. We wanted this to be personal and private. We didn’t want to leave anyone in the dark. Please be assured—”

What?! Yeah, it shocked me. If they sent mail to everyone, then how come I got nothing from them… unless they were full of shit.

I checked the vid upload site and noticed the string of videos titled: “I got in!”

“Going to space, baby!”

“Bad news guys…”

Oh God!

I ran to the front door. The thumbnail to some of the good vids showed a large package. I checked the bushes, but nothing.

Goddamnit, I swear if I saw my mail in Mom’s room, I was gonna flip… that’s what I thought.

Sure, enough, the package titled Outer Worlds in large purple and teal text was right under my mother’s bed. The damn thing was opened too. Fuck an apology. This was no mercy, no quarter given.

I quickly ran to my room and tore through the damn thing, and read off the little letter in the folder.

“Dear Caspian Storm, thank you so much for sending your application for our Outer World’s program. We are all about making the impossible possible, and we strive to choose those who dream big. We regret to inform you…”

Motherfucker!

The Next Day…

Pain, all I knew was fucking pain… I didn’t know why I cared. I mean, I wouldn’t get in. Even so, there was a part of me that imagined my packed bags were because theywouldaccept me. Now, where the hell was I supposed to go, a fucking shelter?!

I left the letter on the kitchen table, a message to Mom that I knew what she had done. The next morning, it was gone, and neither Mom nor Jolie said a word to me for hours until…

“You’re better off.” Jolie just had to say something. “Outer Worlds seem shady at best. I mean, they just discovered some habitable planet and are already trying to send people to live there? What about research? It seems like they are only trying to make history.”

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