Chapter Text
"I don’t wanna go tomorrow!" a red-headed teenager bellowed, clenching his fists at his sides at the family dinner table. The young man planted his left elbow on the table, resting his head against his left hand while he vacantly twirled the silverware fork in his other hand on an empty plate. Mild clanks reverberated. All together, a family of four, or five if you count the household dog, sat gathered under the contrasting backdrop of deep blue nightfall and the warm, ambient lights of the kitchen and dining room.
A lofty and brooding father with short, spikey blond hair glared at his elder son pointedly through his black rectangular glasses.
"Erl, how many times do we have t' tell you?" Berwald's voice was deep, low, and steady, far from the crispest words yet never wavering or losing his temper. "The matriculation exams this week... will prepare you for your future," he insisted.
"Geez... Listen to your pappa," Erland's other ever-shining, soft-eyed father Tino exclaimed, sighing between sentences and almost straining his voice. "The exams would break loose like a grandma's tooth for you!"
"Just because they're easy doesn't mean I should be taking them!"
"It's just for this week," Tino continued, exhausted. "You can retake them in autumn if you don't do well this time around."
"Who cares then if I can take them later?"
"Erl, we know what you're capable of. You fiddle with that laptop all the time. You got us a visit from the KRP for petty hacking!"
Erland rolled his eyes and held his left arm with his right hand before fidgeting with the dull, concrete-grey buttons on a swan white double-breasted uniform jacket. Like most weekdays, he had drudged it out of the closet and slid it on with shivers of revulsion and a gag reflex earlier, as if he were putting on a snakeskin, when he dragged himself to school. While mostly intact, it was graced with a few scratches from fist fights that he got into only to be sent back to counseling in an insipid weekly cycle.
It was true, though. Erland never struggled with the learning itself. He was otherwise a bright kid, but his energy dissipated as destructively as a launched grenade.
"That's different," he argued as he brought a glass of water to his mouth to sip and calm down.
Tino and Berwald's pleas, as usual, bounced off their son like a tennis ball on a racket. What was the point of heading to school and doing the same-old just to pretend that this routine was anything noteworthy? To him, it was all so stale... and fake. There was nothing exciting to explore when everything that they were learning had already been figured out by some other mind before they even stepped foot into a classroom. In the stories and around him, people always talked about creativity and pushing the limits, but when push came to shove, most of them would shrink from any adventures for a good cause. Everything was safe, and it made his skin crawl. He didn't want to be led down the same conveyor belt life as the adults in his life.
However brash and impossible, he just had do something different.
"Erland, quit being difficult. It's just for one week."
"It's not just for one week! I'm signing my life away!"
"University is not 'signing your life away.' It's helping you get a secure job."
"To do what after? God forbid I don't wanna end up like the square and the interior decorator!" He lost control of the glass as it slipped out of his hand and slammed into the ground, shattering and spilling across the floor. Their Finnish Lapphund, Hanatamago, started barking out of shock at the noise, bending down paws first in front of the broken shards to examine them from a safe distance.
"That's enough. You need to chill out. Go to your room, now!"
"Quit treating me like I'm 5 years old!"
"Quit acting like you are first!"
Without further comment, Erland stood up from the table and grabbed a broom and a pan, passing by his bushy-eyebrowed, younger brother Peter. He shoved the broken glass onto the pan and shoved it into the hazard bin before rubbing the ears on Hanatamago's side-tilted head. He stormed down the hallway and marched up a flight of stairs in thunderous stomps towards his and Peter's bedroom. On each carpeted step, he made sure to crash his feet like they were as heavy and blunt as titanium hooves on a moose. At least moose got to roam the forests of Finland and Sweden, his and his pappa's former home. When was his chance to escape into the wild?
"Minun isi and his stupid Pentecostal private school. That thing's a fricking scam. Why my parents joined troglodytes that only hate people like them, like me, still beats me..." he grumbled to himself about the bizarre entanglement of his poor parents in a religious circle promulgating outdated, at times medically unsound views and creepy recruitment tactics, in Finland out of all places. Swiftly he twisted the door handle to his refuge from immediate company and swung the wooden door open.
"Do they just want to be seen as normal? So why couldn't we go to a normal school?" Turning his back to the wall, he shut the door with a thud. He sighed a relief of air that he didn't sense was trapped in his lungs.
"Poor Peter. He's stuck with those crazies. The same ones I rebelled against and got expelled over."
Erland flopped onto his bed and pulled out his laptop. Once the GRUB bootloader started up after the laptop was suddenly powered down earlier in the day, he logged into a decked-out customization of Arch Linux running Hyprland. An anime boy appeared in the next opened custom app for the aesthetic, although he recently got hooked on the adventure anime Single Treasure. Only on the internet could he showcase his hacker persona to the rest of the world and the disjointed chaos of projects that he's started on GitHub. Only there, did it feel like he put on a stunning spectacle for other people who were not part of the religious group that had infiltrated his family's corner of Lapland. He reveled in his fans and haters alike, with no one who knew his age to mock him for it.
He went to his favorite hacker news forum for the latest events to entertain himself, but not much that evening stood out. He scrolled past a bunch of unspecified drama and what seemed to be shameless self-advertisements, not that he was judging. Someone was reunited with their dog thanks to a tracking chip, a lot of small software updates were released, someone joked that they failed the Turing test preceding an ungodly comment to token ratio... What's new? What's really new? He was about to click on a post about a treasure mystery when another post with over 800 tokens and more than a thousand comments within four hours caught his eye.
"Flying pirate ship? Must be some edited video. Or UFO conspiracy theorists from the staterna again."
There was a funny UFO-enthusiast WeDouga creator from the United States named Amelia F. Jones whose videos he watched. Every video was dedicated to proving that aliens were real, from covering pilot reports of UFO sightings and testimonies of being silenced by the government to examining clues for life on other galaxies. She used to upload almost every Saturday, but in her last video over three months ago, she claimed to be going on a trip to find legendary British space pirate Captain Alice in a makeshift spaceship that she built out of the parts to a relic WW2-era plane.
Like most fans, Erland always presumed that the videos were just entertainment, at least more educational than the television series Elderly ET. Her disappearance led to speculation that she was serious about finding a space pirate: what she dubbed one of the select humans who gained access to special spacefaring technology beyond what the rest of humanity had seen during their time. According to the legend, they took off with it against government orders after seeing that it could teleport them anywhere in the universe at superluminal speeds by opening up wormholes, stretching the currently understood laws of physics.
He couldn't help but be worried for her mental state, like other fans, while envious of the diverting life that she seemed to be living, compared to the monotonous expectations of school, more school, and inevitable work that awaited him.
"Amelia is lucky. I wish I could just leave to go on an adventure too. The adult world is so fake and boring..."
Erland stood up and looked up at the shimmering night sky from his bedroom window, allowing his eyes to slowly adjust to the dim light. The North Star, Polaris, was ablaze, shining in the constellation Ursa Minor, to the right in his view above Ursa Major. For some reason tonight, it appeared to twinkle more brightly and wildly to him than normally, as if it were a distant festival bonfire flickering in the midst of rushing gusts. The starry flames were dancers, swinging their veils of fire to and fro around a white point in the sky. No, it reminded him of the smokey campfire in the distance as he was lying down with his back on cool grass under a canopy of stars with Pappa, Isi, and Peter before they slept away the night in sleeping bags, before summer faded into autumn.
"I wish that I could stay young forever."
Closing the hanging curtains, he put away the laptop and sat down with lidded eyes and a yawn, about ready to collapse in his abominable school uniform. It was unusual for him to be going to sleep earlier than his brother, but after the disaster that occurred between him and his parents, or rather, between mostly him and Isi as usual, he wanted to forget today already and wake up in time to ditch the exams on his own before his parents could catch him. His thoughts raced and left him restless, but for once, he wanted to just drift off to sleep as soon as he could.