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  Atoma and the Blockchain Game

  Gerard O’Neill

  Gerard O’Neill Books

  To

  My Girls

  Contents

  1. Shuttle Crash

  2. Rescued

  3. The Doctor

  4. Escape

  5. Empty House

  6. DNA

  7. Stillness

  8. Memory Adjustment

  9. Odd Meeting

  10. Grimwade and Klunker

  11. Commander Jacinda

  12. Each has Something Special

  13. Isabella is Gone

  14. War or Peace?

  15. Final Phase

  16. Beneath the Base

  17. Into the Wormhole

  18. Klunker Confides

  19. Tough Days

  20. Wright-Patterson

  21. Countdown Begins

  22. Bullseye

  23. Big Blast

  24. Capsule Curves

  25. More Dust

  26. Boy with a Sword

  27. Computer Talks

  28. Attaapa the Donut Planet

  29. Vicious Trees

  30. Double Pupils

  31. Copper Skin

  32. Wriggle

  33. Village in the Valley

  34. The See-er

  35. Ilyin

  36. Speaking Kai

  37. Warriors

  38. Not Different

  39. Bravado

  40. An Audience of Elders

  41. Friends or Foes?

  42. Spider

  43. Breakfast

  44. Orange and Purple

  Thank You For Reading

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Shuttle Crash

  We live in a world where so very many people behave like programmed robots on autopilot. They act as if they are not in complete control like they walk through someone else’s dream, or maybe that should be someone else’s nightmare. It isn’t until they wake up and find it all so terribly real that they even stop to ask themselves the two big questions.

  What does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be alive?

  2050 is brought to you by Earth Incorporated, just like every year ever since the Great Reset.

  I looked away from the dazzle of white that coated our backyard to watch the drops of bright red moving in a tight formation of perfectly parallel lines through the leaden winter sky. They looked like the opening wounds left a moment after the swipe of an angry bear. The long-haul drone freighters traveled twenty-thousand feet above Chicago. Monitored and controlled through installations of antennae arrays and relayed by tiny satellites orbiting the Earth.

  Fricking robots were everywhere.

  Dad always said the mini ice age was supposed to be lifting and that this year would be the warmest in twenty-nine years. About fricking time. My entire life so far had been variations on one long winter.

  Good and awake I ran my hand over the touch bar on the wall beside my bed and watched the dark ripple as the glass of the window turned opaque. A clock in the center of the glass flashed 7 am and at the beep, I tumbled to the warm floor.

  This wasn’t going to be a typical school day. All my morning lessons had been canceled. Today, they begin readying us for Citizenship Celebration Day. Everyone called it CCD. They tell us it is a joyous event. We are primed to look forward to the day we will become adults on our sixteenth year. The event is always held in local town halls where family and friends watch the nurses place a cap on our heads. Each cap is filled with small round nodes that relay signals from the synapses of our gray matter to an AI that reads and analyses them. For what reason does the AI do that will be the first question I have for the instructors.

  It’s during this ceremony that they would give us the Bricards we will keep for life, and we would become officially recognized as adults. Big deal. Mom’s Bricard does me just fine. I’d rather not go through any silly ceremony.

  “Don’t forget your med-shot,” Ellie, my sister, called out from under her blankets. “You already left it behind yesterday, so you better take it this morning.”

  I stared at the small plastic medicine dispenser on my bedside table. Medicine for my condition. A form of ADHD the Nurse told Mom when I was diagnosed last year. ADHD, that means Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It’s so common that at least two out of ten kids have it and they take something just to keep all the non-ADHD’s around them happy.

  I don’t mind that my brain works at twice the speed of most others. It’s a bonus with only boredom being my enemy. I even watch the holovids at twice the normal speed to keep them interesting.

  “You’re not Mom,” I snap back.

  “I’ll tell her,” she warned.

  “No, you won’t,” I muttered feeling the first flush of irritation with her.

  “Yes, I will,” she replied in a snarky voice. “I’m sick of covering for you whenever you get into trouble at school. It’s not supposed to work that way. You’re my big sister so you should be covering for me and not the other way around.”

  “Oh, shut up!” I tell her, snapping like a worn guitar string.

  Not that I ever do have a lot of patience, but this morning I have awoken with even less than usual. I throw the med-shot at the wall above my sister’s bed, showering her with pieces of the device.

  “Shit, Atoma,” she sits up in surprise. “You’ve done it now.”

  “Hey, you two,” Dad shouted up to us from the kitchen. “No fighting. Come on down for breakfast.”

  “What are you going to do?” Ellie asked.

  She had jumped out of bed and was hurriedly picking up the pieces of plastic scattered on the floor. She found the drug tube and held it out to me.

  “Bin it,” I tell her.

  “You can’t do that,” she said.

  I grabbed it from her hand and dropped it into the refuse tube in the wall, waving my hand over the light that asks me annoyingly am I sure I want to do that.

  “It’s gone now,” I tell her as we heard the click of the machine. It had been vaporized safely, hygienically, and best of all, instantly.

  Ellie was staring at me like I had sprouted horns and a tail.

  “The way I see it I’m better off getting used to the way I am and just handling it,” I told her. “They will all just have to get used to it.”

  She giggled.

  “I’m actually relieved,” she said. “That stuff made you unbelievably calm.”

  “Like a robot?” I asked, still feeling irritable, but it was fading fast.

  She nodded her head. “Not so bad, but I was beginning to worry that I was losing you.”

  I gave her a hug. “I’m not going anywhere, Ell.”

  So, that’s how my day started. I was feeling positively manic by the time I reached the shuttle stop. I was excited to see my friends, and like them, I was buzzing with anticipation now that our CCD was actually going to happen.

  When we boarded the shuttle, we jostled each other for the best seats. I liked to sit close to the aisle where I could be a part of multiple conversations happening all around me. I wasn’t the class clown, Joanne Chin wore that label proudly, but I was competition for Jo. I remember the laughter and teasing, and maybe there was some light bullying.

  My school was some distance out of the city and to get there I needed to take the shuttle bus. I was studying celestial mechanics and all other things that were part of what they still call aerospace. Since I was a little sprout, I always wanted
to build a space station. For about as long as I can remember, basically since I was four years old back in 2039, Earth Incorporated had talked about placing space stations between all the planets in the solar system.

  There were two stations locked in orbit between the gravities of the Earth and the Moon at what in celestial mechanics is known as the Lagrange points. They were marvels of construction and awesome enough in themselves, but they weren’t anything like the dozens they said they planned to have around Jupiter. When they would start building those, no one knew for sure. All the talk had quietened down ever since the first expedition to Mars went missing.

  They had been talking about terraforming Mars for years too, but they never seemed to get started. There was always an excuse. Mars lacks a molten core, so it has no magnetic field to protect the kind of atmosphere needed to support life. Venus was too hot and too gassy. That kind of thing. It was all rather unimaginative of them, given we were halfway to 2100, the start of a new century.

  Earth had united as one giant all controlling corporation rather than the competing nations of ancient times, they had all the planet’s resources available to colonize the solar system. Another official line they kept feeding us. They told us the plan was first to colonize the planets around the sun, then make Earth one big beautiful national park.

  The Moon was already a science reserve and off-limits to commercial business. The mining companies captured asteroids instead of prospecting on the lunar surface, but it was obvious they were looking at the planets and licking their lips greedily anticipating the wealth awaiting them. When the colonization of our solar system would finally lift off the ground was anyone’s guess. I only hoped I would not end up at the end of my study with a useless piece of paper in my hand. That I would not end up a space engineer with no work.

  I decided on my career two years back. Growing up in Chicago didn’t offer a lot of choices. I was lucky that my mother was a respected scientist. She could always break the ice for me in the future. She told me she knew a few engineers too and so I was trusted her advice. Well, she was my mother, after all.

  I was heading in a definite direction when my school showed me their list of career choices I had to select from. It included space engineering. I like math, and I like making stuff.

  Overall, things were going very nicely. I had made friends and school was fun. My future was a firm path, well-trodden by many before me, but still taking me somewhere I wanted to go. Yes, life looked pretty rosy on that fateful morning.

  I hadn’t bothered to snap my seat belt on before the shuttle lifted off. I was too busy playing the fool, and by the time we leveled out after its sharp ascent I was already dancing in the aisle.

  That was before an intercity freighter overloaded with Bricard readers sliced through the tail end of the shuttle. Most of us would have died in that same instant if it wasn’t for our quick-thinking pilot. He had hit the release on the escape tube a split second before the collision. The full impact was avoided as the thrusters ejected the passenger section contained in a single tube. The remains of the plane went down under us in a fireball trailing black smoke visible for miles.

  For a brief few seconds, we were in free fall, then gravity took effect and the tube fell for several seconds before stabilizing thrusters fired and the wings unfolded. The remote-controlled glider landed us in a field in front of the ambulances and fire engines. It was a textbook escape from the kind of catastrophe that might once have ended thirty years ago, back in my parent's school days, very badly indeed. For me though, it might just as well have been 2020.

  I was thrown against the ceiling, or it might have been the side wall. Then, when the thrusters ejected the tube, I was slammed against the seats. When the dark curtain began to come down, the only sound I heard was a terrible grinding from inside of me. A hand landed on the floor with a light thump. A strange sound for such a pretty hand.

  It should have been attached to a wrist.

  The fingers were cute

  I could even recognize the scar running from the second knuckle to the nail. A slight miscalculation I made when I pulled a bone from the mouth of our neighbor’s dog

  The hand was mine.

  2

  Rescued

  Strangers loomed over me, peering down at my face as though they had never seen a 15-year-old girl before. They spoke to each other in urgent voices while bizarrely, still managing to sound calm. And, there was a really annoying beeping sound that just would not stop.

  Something was wrong with my vision. I could see one side of my nose. I mean no matter what I was looking at I could see my nose. I’d never noticed seeing either side of it before. I tried to move my head to see what was happening around me but I couldn’t.

  “Blink your good eye if you feel pain,” said the two eyes gazing down at me over the face mask.

  Feel pain? I was totally numb.

  It wasn’t the kind of numb feeling you get before the sensation of pins and needles begin, like when you wake up in the middle of the night and find you are sleeping on your arm. It wasn’t the freezing numbness of fingers and toes when you play too long in the snow. It wasn’t like one part or several parts of me were numb at one time. It was the absence of any feeling at all. I no longer had a body. Something was terribly wrong with me.

  “This one’s for the ICU.”

  “Surgery room two-ninety-two is available,” another voice shouted back.

  “Book the Doctor.”

  “Done.”

  “It’s best she’s put in stasis,” another broke in.

  “No,” the first voice said. “She’s going to make it if we heli-lift her now!”

  I woke up again.

  “You’ve been in an accident.”

  I could tell from her eyes she was smiling. She had practiced for moments like this. All those times when she needed to reassure horrifically damaged patients. Her eyes were open far too wide and they stayed fixed on me far too long. There are some emotions you just can’t hide. I knew she was looking at me with barely disguised horror.

  “You are in a hospital. The Doctor is going to fix everything.”

  I watched a nurse work a control like a black baseball, set into the top of the control console. As they swung me in a frame over the table, I stared at the giant human mold reflected in the mirrored ceiling. The mold closed around what was left of me in an instant. The cold embrace of the Doctor.

  “You are going to be fine,” Smiley Face continued.

  Fantastic. Well, I’m feeling anything but fine if you really want to know. I gazed up at the ceiling and saw myself and I screamed.

  She pressed a hypodermic spray gun to my neck and the horror was gone. Replaced by something robotic. I was an extension of the Doctor. Not something it worked on, but another part of it.

  I gazed up at the huge metal arm hanging over the table like a metallic cobra come down. The artificial intelligence known as the Doctor was networked throughout the hospital. It performed hundreds of operations like the one it was going to do on me all at the same time. Thousands across the continent. Millions around the world. Every operation performed by exactly the same AI.

  Every hospital on Earth was linked into that single inhuman brain. The Doctor was in all of them. We were told the power of an AI was that it could never make mistakes.

  The robotic arm glided silently across and begun a rapid to and fro movement over the length of my body. I watched as tiny lights raced up and down it until I could see them no longer through the vibrating air. The room distorted until I could no longer see a shape.

  I felt the pain of a thousand needles stabbing me all over, then the Doctor fed me the really good stuff. I was floating to Never-never land. I no longer cared about anything. I barely noticed the lights snap out.

  The giant mechanical arm of the robot Doctor was still hanging over me when I woke up, and there was Mom standing at the end of the bed. She gave me a forced smile through eyes red-rimmed from crying.


  I can’t remember when I last saw my mother cry. Mom was always such an ice queen. She didn't believe in making a public display of her feelings and was much better at hiding her emotions than me.

  She leaned over the bed and kissed me on my cheek, and as she did, I tasted a single salty tear that fell on my lips.

  I started to cry, but I quickly stifled my sobs when I saw Mom straighten up.

  A nurse had walked into the room and without so much as a word stood in front of the console. She gazed at the readings and began to manipulate the ball. She was an archetypical tough matron; stubby legs, strong shoulders, and yet she was not so old. I guessed she could be a robot.

  An android can look human enough, except when for their eyes. The orbs are usually realistic, but they may as well be glass. The problem was the way they looked at you. Android designers could never get that detail right. The whole time a smiling android talks, it simply stares as if angry or high on a drug that was originally meant for patients under psychiatric care.

  “I can’t imagine how you have been able to stay out of sight for so long,” she said to me in a disinterested tone.

  Mother turned to her in surprise.