A Truly Dead Rock (2019) - Paperback - Hardcover - eBook
Embedded Files
A Truly Dead Rock
A Truly Dead Rock
A Bottled Up Flame
A Bottled Up Flame
A Somewhat Odd Start
A Somewhat Odd Start
A Truly Dead Rock
A Truly Dead Rock
Available on Amazon.com as Paperback, Hardcover, and eBook
Available on Amazon.com as Paperback, Hardcover, and eBook
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Truly-Dead-Solar-System-Century/dp/1701654040/
Hardcover: https://www.amazon.com/Truly-Dead-Rock-Riley-Rudin/dp/B0B6LHYW2R/
eBook: https://www.amazon.com/Truly-Dead-Solar-System-Century-ebook/dp/B082318K4B/
Synopsis
Synopsis
Hudson Possaic is an average high school student. He gets all of his homework done, he attends all of his classes, and he lives on the north pole of Luna. He and his brother are living in New Armstrong under the '2100 Lunar Opportunities' initiative for high school and college aged students. Despite a little difficulty adopting Luna's newer technology and its different culture, Hudson is doing fine in school. When an independence vote rocks the small world, Hudson must rely on his brother to help him get off of Luna. In the process, however, Hudson finds out a little more about his brother than he would like to know. Together with his brother and his shady friends, Hudson goes on a mission that changes the fate of the solar system forever.
Here's the first chapter of the book:
Chapter 1: Sunset
Chapter 1: Sunset
The pale disk of the sun, slowly being chipped away over the past three weeks, finally vanished over the horizon. In the middle of February, the shadow could first be seen near the horizon out of the sleek glass walls enclosing the city. Through the latter half of February, this shadow prowled around, circling the city as Luna rotated. Slowly but surely, it crept over the bleached grey regolith, turning it black as it went, and started to consume the edges of the city. By the beginning of March, only a sliver of the city remained under the sun’s feeble light.
By March 6th, the shadow had moved on, engulfing everything within the tight bounds of the horizon. What the shadow couldn't catch, however, was the highest parts of some buildings. The shadow would continue to creep up and up these shining pillars, but would never reach the tops of all of them. Even at the dead of Lunar night, a few building tops would remain bright like a mountain peaked with a patch of snow. The sun, far gone for almost everyone, would weakly fight the shadow until it could return entirely and with full strength. In the meantime, our artificial suns would have to do.
With that thought, our sector’s collection of streetlights decided that it was an appropriate time to turn on. These white lights with a hint of blue in them cast a ghastly glow on the city. They were supposed to mimic sunlight, but they felt more like moonlight. Moonlight from Earth that is. They cast a weak shadow, and one was almost completely left in the dark when they walked in between two of them. They were a bastion of efficiency, barely any fusion power went into lighting them, but from a human point of view, they provided a foggy atmosphere with the tense feeling that something would pop out of the darkness.
Despite this atmosphere greatly resembling the night, it was 8:13 in the morning; I had to get to school (admittedly I skipped first period for this). Walking a mile and a half through nearly deserted streets in the dim glow of the streetlights was not fun business. Rush hour had ended a little while ago, and all of the kids had gone to school already, so I was on my own stumbling down the street.
Despite living on Luna for seven months already, I couldn't seem to master the walk of a true Lun, instead I looked like a true loon, bounding along and hurling myself almost a foot off the ground every time I took a step. Anyone that walked past me could instantly tell that I was a Terran.
After the novelty of Lunar gravity passed, it became a great inconvenience. Everything felt slowed down like an instant replay or an action scene from a bad VRfilm. Simple things that I took for granted on Earth such as falling water, or going down a flight of stairs had become challenging ordeals on Luna. Any object would take two and a half times longer to fall a certain distance on Luna than it did on Earth. This lengthened many tasks by that factor, making them incredibly tedious.
I reached the school after an embarrassing walk there and looked up at the building. On the street level it was made up of four buildings to allow for moving roadways to pass through. Above that, the buildings connected to form a cohesive cylindrical shape half a mile in diameter. The school inhabited the second floor of this building, fitting K-12 in its massive layout.
I walked towards the left half of the building, as my school was on that side, and walked into the lobby. I found one of the stairwells marked “High School 218” and looked into the contacts scanner on the door to be permitted inside.
To my dismay but little surprise, a message came into my field of view was that read: “One class missed, guardian(s) notified.” My brother was not going to be happy about that. When he and I came back from our respective classes at the end of the day, he was sure to ream me out over it.
Looking at the bottom corner of my field of view, I saw that it was 8:37. I was just in time to hear the bell ring for the end of first period; I had eight minutes to get to my next class.
That class happened to be 22nd Century Skills which was not very enjoyable. The class was meant for the kids that couldn't grasp how to use their contacts correctly despite the fact that they had a K-8 education on Luna. Since I came from Earth, a place ten years behind Luna, and since I came from the New York megalopolis a place ten years behind the rest of the planet, it was suggested that I took this class to help me figure out how to use the technology.
After being given my school issued contacts and spending a week in the class, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to learn anything there. I figured out the controls, and I watched some videos on the contacts amazed by how they were superimposed into my field of view. They were pretty simple to use, and had a lot of intuitive features all able to be accessed with your thoughts and eye movements.
One of the worst parts of this class was the teacher, Professor Chase, who was insistent on us using the title “professor” even though he was a high school teacher. Professor Chase was also very old, probably a late Generation Z-er, as I assumed he was in his 80s.
Despite being the teacher of “22nd Century Skills,” he seemed fairly rooted in the 21st. Sporting a pair of glasses that seemed to be the same brand and style that I had seen in a picture of the founding fathers of our colony, Mister—Professor Chase was using technology from the 2030s. He was probably my age when those glasses were considered modern.
On top of that, he had a physical keyboard and mouse that he brought around with him. These devices had to be paired with the glasses because the glasses were just monitors on their own. Even in the New York megalopolis, the glasses we used could be controlled by a paired glove or crudely by eye movements.
The contacts that we were given could be controlled entirely by the mind. They required minor brain surgery (yes, the concept of minor brain surgery freaked me out as well) in order to work.
Today, Professor Chase was teaching us about how to program your class schedule into your contacts. Since I had done that a few weeks into the year, I just did some work on my History essay that was due on Wednesday.
My favorite thing about these contacts was that, unlike the glasses, it was impossible for somebody else to tell what you were doing on them. It seemed that all of the other kids in the class appreciated this as well considering that everyone had blank stares on their faces as Professor Chase spoke.
At 9:37, the bell rang and everyone got up to leave. My next class was History, a much better class in my opinion. I had a few friends in the class, and it was actually mentally stimulating.
The essay that I had been working on was about the space race of the 1950s and ‘60s. That was the unit we had just finished, and in today’s class, we would move on to the next one. This unit was one on the colonization of Luna in the ‘30s.
“Hey Hudson,” said my friend Tessa as I approached our group of desks.
“What’s up?” I responded.
“Not much.” she said.
I sat down without saying much more.
“You usually have something to talk about.” She continued.
“I’m not in a very good mood today.”
“Why, what happened?”
“Sunset.”
“The sun finally went down then, huh?”
“Yup.”
“I’m pretty sure that if you were to go up a building you could see it.”
“The only buildings I’m allowed in, this one, and my apartment complex are blocked by other buildings.”
“Oh, well you’ll get used to polar night after a while.”
“I sure hope so.”
Our conversation ended as Mrs. Brackley, our history teacher, started the class. She was in her thirties and had been teaching for a decade, that perfect amount of time when a teacher is no longer inexperienced, but hasn’t been worn down by their students yet.
She sent a presentation to our contacts, and we all pulled it up to look at while she talked. Most of us also downloaded the presentation to reference later as notes, despite her saying that notes wouldn’t be needed for this part of lesson.
“Today, we will be covering the interspace-race period between 1975 and 2034. This period of time was relatively boring when it came to human space travel until the end of it. At this time, space was not the focus for most countries; there were other concerns that they considered more pressing.”
She moved on to the next slide.
“The First Space Race ended with the Apollo-Soyuz mission, a joint mission between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., that served as the symbolic end of competition between them. With a lack of competition in the field of space travel, and the softening of the tensions of the Cold War, the enthusiasm for space travel fizzled out.”
She changed the slides again.
“Most of the developments in space travel during this period were technologies meant to help people on Earth. The improvement of weather forecasts and the invention of the internet occurred in this period.”
Another slide change.
“The U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, leaving the U.S. as the sole world superpower at the turn of the millennium. By the 2000s and 2010s, two new forces started to drive exploration in space: the private sector and then China.”
“The private sector in space was expanding rapidly. The most relevant company was SpaceX as it was the company to land the first people on Mars in 2024. The American space agency, NASA, was very invested in SpaceX. They hired them to conduct resupply missions of their space stations in the early 2010s, so when this first mission of one hundred people to Mars occurred NASA made sure to buy up many seats.”
She stopped for a minute and addressed the class: “Any questions so far?” Everyone looked at each other for a moment, but nobody had any questions. Mrs. Brackley went to the next slide.
“As the U.S. continued to invest in the first few years of Mars colonization, China became a rising power in space with the Tiangong space stations and the Chang’e Lunar missions. In 2028, China landed humans on Luna, becoming the second country to do so. By 2030, they had a permanent base near the south pole. This caused the U.S. to drop Mars and engage in a second Space Race. By 2034, this second Space Race came into full swing with the founding of this very colony.”
With that she closed out of the presentation and again asked for any questions. Again, there weren’t any. She told us that while this will not be on any tests, it will be important for comprehension of the next unit in History: the second Space Race. After that, she let us work on our essays for the rest of class. I finished mine, so I wouldn’t have to do any work for History until Wednesday.
I had the first lunch wave today, so I headed off to the cafeteria. Today’s lunch was typical; there were many options. What they called “pizza,” “pasta,” and “tacos,” were all being served, but it was obvious that they were all synthetic.
Soy beans, being a relatively easy crop to grow in space, have had countless genetic modifications put in them in order to create a massive variety of nutritious plants. The delicious “pasta” should have been making me extremely overweight. Instead, it was filled with protein and bone supporting nutrients, a must have on this gravity deprived moon. There were even cookies and donuts that looked and tasted exquisite, yet had no negative effects on one’s health.
I meandered over to my group of friends that sat on the floor outside the cafeteria during lunch despite the excess of perfectly good tables inside (I had no idea why they did this, but I chose not to question it). Most of the group was there, which was typical if not excessive considering the fact that there were three times of day that people could eat lunch. I sat down in a spot around the oddly shaped circle next to some of my friends and started chatting.
“Crazy weather we’ve been having lately.” One of my friends cracked.
“Yeah, I think it might have deviated a degree off of 295. Probably Lunar night getting to us.” I returned.
“Ugh, not that again. Every year it’s the same.” He said.
“Really, how so? This’ll be my first one.”
“Well, it’s strange. You constantly have to adjust your contacts whenever you enter a building to avoid the brightness.”
Another friend chimed in: “and those awful streetlights are annoying as death when they overshine the contacts.”
“Wait what—” I asked before quickly being interrupted.
“You know the newest version of iContacts has automatic brightness correction.” A third friend joined in.
“iContacts, who even uses those?”
“Me.”
“Why don’t you get a Ring like everyone else?”
“Because they’re the worst brand of contacts…”
I tuned out the oncoming debate and turned to Lowell, the first friend I had talked to: “What’s this about brightness adjustments?”
“Just Stella and Tyro arguing over brands again.”
“No, I mean you can effectively give yourself night vision with the contacts?”
“Yeah, doesn’t everyone know that?”
“I guess now everyone knows that.”
“That 22nd Century Skills class must be dying useless.”
“Trust me, it is.”
“If you want night vision though, it’s an app called NiteBrite.”
“I’ll make sure to download it.”
Another friend came by, Alora, and sat down next to me (really, she sat down behind me and I had to turn around to face her because of our group’s odd seating arrangements).
“Took you long enough.” I said with a smirk.
“That deathly pasta line was as long as war.”
“Should have gotten pizza, it’s all the same anyway.”
“They really didn’t GM food back on Earth?”
“They did a little, but everything here is just soy.”
“That’s what makes it cheap, and you know that the city won’t pay a dime more than the minimum.”
“It is pretty good tasting food though.”
“I guess...Oh hey, Tyro sent me this,” she took a moment to send me a video, and it appeared in my contacts.
The video was from a recent VRfilm, except each character was labelled as a different organization.
The character labelled: “New Armstrong Colony” said, “You know what, I’m just gonna leave.”
The character labelled: “The Western Democracies” responded half-heartedly, “No… don’t.”
New Armstrong returned, “I’m gonna do it, just watch me.”
The Western Democracies said, “Please don’t.” in a flat tone not even looking at New Armstrong.
New Armstrong started once again, “You leave me no other—”
From outside of the door, a character marked: “Chang’e Bing” pulled New Armstrong out the door.
The Western Democracies looked up at the door, then looked back down at what he was doing, not knowing or caring where New Armstrong went.
Alora was watching my reaction, she and I had different views on our colony’s independence movement. Personally, I thought it was a horrible idea. Our colony, as well as the surrounding ones, made up the 51st state of the U.S. There were also more colonies on the Lunar mares and Luna’s far side that constituted the 52nd and 53rd states respectively.
Being from the U.S., or at least the part of it on Earth, I wanted the colonies to stay. My parents were still on Earth, and a new nation would cause difficulties returning. Also, the U.S. owned territory on Mars and Venus. Well, the E.U. owned the Venusian territory, but they were one and the same with the Western Democracies union. A great union of democratic powers was starting to take hold of the solar system to lead humanity into the future. An independent Lunar state would just set them back since Luna was the main hub for transport between Earth and the rest of the solar system.
Alora continued to stare me down with her artificially red eyes. Almost everyone puts an outward display on their contacts. Most people display a witty image or gif, but Alora chose a solid ring of red to mask her irises.
I made a disapproving grunt and said, “I don’t see how this supports your cause.”
“Why not?”
“Doesn’t getting pulled away cast independence in a negative light?”
“No, the focus is on just how inattentive the Western Democracies are.”
“Mmm.”
“New Armstrong needs independence, its trade can’t be controlled by The WD any longer.”
“We’ve had this argument a thousand times, and you haven’t changed my mind. Also, don’t fret, it seems like you’ll get your way pretty soon the way the politicians are talking.”
“There’s a vote on Wednesday.”
“We’ll find out then I guess.”
“I guess we will.”
I turned around again to talk to more of my friends, and Alora turned around as well to talk to more of her friends. It seemed that Tyro and Stella hadn’t finished their argument about contacts brands yet. Rather, the argument extended, including Lowell as well as some of my other friends such as Anderson, Dayton, and Tessa.
I decided to head off to my next class, Biology, a few minutes early. People were being really argumentative today. It must have been the vote on Wednesday. Last week, the secession bill passed the state house 83 to 67. On Wednesday, the state senate would vote on whether or not to secede and make the governor the effective president until the next election cycle.
At that moment, it wasn’t looking very good for camp unity. 27 senators have already pledged to vote for independence on Wednesday, but camp unity protests may sway their promises. It has been a very turbulent time indeed.
I approached my classroom just as the bell for the end of lunch rang, and waited outside until everyone showed up.
Biology with Ms. Floresta was a great class. She also taught Astrobiology, so the class always had a practical application in space. At that time, we were focused on the replication of DNA. Mitosis, meiosis, errors, and mutations were all parts of this unit, and she made sure to throw in some facts about how gravity affects telomeres and how radiation causes mutations.
I had a couple of friends in this class, Anderson and Tyro, so we worked together on the lab that we were halfway through.
The lab was more of a demonstration to ingrain mitosis into our minds than an actual experiment, but I found it fun to work along the lines that cells do. We were just finishing metaphase, and getting ready to use a big paper cutter on the chromosomes for anaphase when the alarm bells went off in the school.
“Attention, breach in outer dome, proceed to airlocks immediately, this is not a drill. Attention, breach in outer dome, proceed…”
I jumped up and ran to the door, hitting my head on the ceiling many times, while everyone else casually got up and took their time to talk to their friends as they went along.
A blue line appeared on the floor, a part of the emergency system built into everyone’s contacts, and it said that I was 300 meters away from the airlock shelter for our school.
This shelter was actually just our cafeteria, which had airlock doors on each of its sides. The people who had third lunch were already there, but when it came to everyone else, I was one of the first ones to arrive. The tables were being cleared away, and extra folding chairs were being put out for everyone.
It was only four minutes after the alarm, and I could feel it getting colder. I went to zip up my hoodie then realized that I had left it in biology draped on my chair. Death, that was going to get destroyed unless I retrieved it. If I could slip out and get back in seven minutes, then I would make it back before the temperature hit freezing, before they closed the doors.
I went for it. The teachers were more concerned with putting out chairs than making sure kids were getting inside the shelter at this point, and the students were milling about anyway not worrying about getting inside yet.
I bounded along, feeling the temperature drop around me. Whenever a breach of the dome around the colony occurred that was larger than five meters wide, the colony would be cooled down to 55 degrees so that all the water vapor froze, all the carbon dioxide deposited, and all the oxygen and nitrogen condensed. When this was done, no more air would be lost, and it would make it possible for crews to fix the breach without a stream of air hitting them at the speed of sound.
I got to the classroom and rushed to my chair to grab my hoodie. I noticed my breath was beginning to cause condensation, and all of the metal objects in the room appeared to be sweating, fearing their oncoming demise.
I hurried back to the cafeteria, confounding Luna for its lack of gravity. As my teeth started to chatter, I entered the shelter with a group of other laggards that were deliberately putting things outside of the cafeteria to see what would happen to them, rather than retrieving objects to avoid what would happen to them.
I entered the cafeteria and found a seat next to my group of friends who had finally found it wise to sit inside of it rather than outside of it. Behind me, I heard all of the airlock doors slam shut, and the temperature that had approached the freezing point of water quickly returned to a more acceptable level. It was still colder than the typical temperature of the colony, but my teeth stopped chattering and my breath stopped condensating.
The room hummed with conversation, but surprisingly most of it was not about the breach in the dome of the colony. After a quick search on my contacts, I realized why: a breach large enough to warrant the freezing of the colony occurred roughly every six months. They froze the colony for a four centimeter meteorite just a week before I moved there.
A little bit too hyped up on adrenaline, I couldn’t really engage in small talk at the moment. I walked over to one of the many windows around the cafeteria and took a look outside. A few cups of water had frozen into cups of ice. There were a few empty cups that were probably placed outside by the laggards I had seen earlier. I wondered if they would fill up with liquid oxygen and nitrogen, then thought it would be a good idea to take video from my contacts. I also pulled up the colony’s weather app, the most useless device in existence other than times like today. The colony forever remained at 295 degrees, a comfortable room temperature. For once, it was falling. When I opened the app, it displayed 263 degrees. If I had still been outside at this point, I would be getting frostbite.
The minutes dragged on with little change. Thanks to the special airlock glass, my view wasn’t fogged up and blocked. A few glass objects shattered outside, some metal ones warped and shifted as they contracted. An origami swan that someone had made and placed outside developed frost all around it as if it had some strange disease. The fractal shapes tangled around its exterior in a surprisingly beautiful manner.
By 1:11, 50 minutes after the alarm went off, the temperature dropped past 195 degrees, the deposition point of carbon dioxide. The swan’s condition worsened as a second layer of spiky deposits grew across its skin.
The temperature continued to fall outside, and the water ice passed into a denser phase. The origami swan which had retained a semblance of beauty in its icy tomb contracted as if an invisible hand had reached out and crumpled it.
Metal continued to warp, and objects continued to break; everything was still covered in a double coat of frozen atmosphere.
Around 2:00, liquid started to appear again, but it didn’t signify the return of heat. Rather, this liquid signified the further cooling of the city. It was liquid oxygen, and the little drops of it quickly turned into a flood that cast a pale blue light across the school. The oxygen drained, settling to the lowest levels of the city. All that remained of it was inside of the empty cups that people had left out.
Finally at 2:20, a fourth wave of condensation occurred. This condensation filled up the school, creeping up the walls and up the window. When it drained to the city floor, it carried much of the frozen debris with it. Only then would the crews be able to go out and patch the breach in the dome.
I returned to my group of friends who were mostly doing homework. A couple of them were talking to each other.
“Biggest breach in 19 years,” Lowell was saying to Alora, “24 meters wide.”
“How much air did we lose?”
“We won’t know until after they reheat the atmosphere, but they’re estimating a little over a cubic mile.”
“One eighteenth of our air lost, I think that’ll be a noticeable drop in pressure.”
“They’ll import some more in a week.”
“Did you guys watch the cooling process?” I interposed.
They turned to me.
“No, I’ve seen it countless times before,” Lowell responded, “but I remember it being really fascinating the first time I could understand what was going on.”
“I find it depressing,” Alora said, “everything in the halls and on the streets has to be cleaned up and replaced.”
“Well, I thought it was pretty cool.” I started to crack a smile at my own pun, and my friends groaned at how bad it was. I was known amongst my friends as “the guy who told bad puns,” so I had to cement my title every once in a while. “I am kind of upset about all the stuff I’ll have to replace in my apartment.”
“Do you want to tell him or should I?”
“I explained NiteBrite to him just this morning.”
“Alright then. Hudson, all of the rooms have airlock doors.” Alora said.
“Well why didn’t we just stay in our classrooms.”
“This room is set up with oxygen tanks, and carbon dioxide filtering. The other rooms don’t have that.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Also,” she added, “the classrooms, and all rooms in the city, can be chilled a bit colder than this one because they are only carrying objects. By letting them get colder and pumping most of the air out so that the rooms are only at 0.05 bars, most objects are saved without costing the city a fortune.”
“How cold do the other rooms get?”
“233, 40 degrees below freezing. Most objects can survive that, especially when the air pressure is so low that the temperature doesn’t matter much.”
“How long are we going to have to stay in here?”
This time Lowell answered me. Presumably, it was his turn to educate me after Alora, “The crews got to the breach ten minutes ago. They’re probably nearly done; I’ll get a notification when they are. The long parts are the cooling and heating processes, but heating goes about twice as fast as cooling.” He looked to Alora, “I think we’ll be out of here by 3:30?”
“Yeah, maybe 3:45 considering how big that breach was.”
“True.”
I strolled back to my window, and did some homework. There wasn’t any from today, considering that I only had (only went to) three classes, but there were some lingering projects that I had pushed to the back of my mind that I decided to finish today.
I noticed that the weather app on my contacts had begun to display a rising temperature, but nothing eventful happened outside before the airlock glass became fogged with the steam of boiling nitrogen.
I couldn’t be missing much outside my window considering that all of the cryogenic fluid had drained into the streets of the city. Imagining those streets, though, I felt as if I was missing something. Across the city, bubbles would erupt throughout the flooded streets as the nitrogen boils off. Then, the greatly diminished flood would go through a second round of boiling as the oxygen returned to the air. Dry ice littering the streets would start steaming as it sublimed. Finally, the pervasive frosts of water ice would melt, leaving the city a dripping, steaming mess.
I thought about this as I worked on my projects, wondering if anyone had ever caught video of this. I decided to stay focused, reasoning that I could watch it later if it was out there.
Around 3:30, the window became transparent again, and I could see the outside world. At 3:43, an announcement rang through the airlocks of the city: “Breach sealed and atmosphere reheated: all clear.”
I sprang up and bounded toward the airlock doors. Admittedly, I was starting to feel claustrophobic from being in the cafeteria for three hours. Maybe that was why my friends always sat outside of it. The airlocks opened, and a gust of wind pushed me out the door. My ears popped, and I remembered how the colony had lost a sizable portion of air.
I walked around the outside of the cafeteria to the window I had been looking out of. Among the broken glass, emptied cups, and warped metal sat a pulp of synthetic material in a fairly uniform mound. The swan. The laggards came around to look at all of the items they had sacrificed and seemed to get a kick out of it.
I returned to Biology to see how everything had fared during the breach, and unlike the hallways of the school, the classroom was orderly and pristine. No broken chairs, no broken desks, even the lab was fine. Our cell was frozen at the beginning of anaphase as if it didn’t realize that the temperature had been turned back on.
I exited the building and walked down the street to my apartment. As I had installed NiteBrite on my contacts, I could see the steam rising all around me as the water vapor returned to the atmosphere. The world looked vibrant again, as it had up until mid-February, all of the students from both schools were returning home to their respective apartment buildings.
I went up to the door of mine, scanned my contacts to get in, and rode the elevator up to my floor. With another scan of my contacts, I entered my room. It was fine. Everything actually seemed a bit fresher, some of the bacteria must have died during the freezing and decompression.
I sat down on my sterilized couch and watched some videos on my contacts. I didn’t have any homework to do, and my brother was going to get home soon, so I thought I’d wait for him.
There were some new videos on my feed about the vote on Wednesday. I watched them nodding along to their points. Lunar independence would only turn out bad for Luna, and very few on Earth actually cared to keep the colonies from seceding.
With the advent of the Laika-1 space stations positioned at Earth’s L1 point with Sol, Luna was already losing out on the business it received being an interplanetary hub. Luna’s minimal gravity well was small, but could never beat out a free floating colony. Its only advantages were its resources and population, but independence would more than likely tip the balance in favor of Laika-1.
Independence would also be a nightmare for me and my brother. Without being subject to the laws of the U.S., New Armstrong may cut our benefits. The two of us were there on an initiative that gave us free education and free rooms on Luna as long as we worked there for a handful of years after. If independence arrived, this initiative might be gone.
I heard the quick electronic hum of our apartment door activating and watched as my brother came into the room with a bag of groceries.
“I bought some more milk Hudson.”
“Thanks Grant.”
“Thanks for what, picking it up off the ground outside?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah...oh, by the way, did you miss a class at school today, or was it just an error in the system?”
I saw a way out, “You think the breach in the dome and staying in the emergency shelters caused the system to think I missed a class?”
“Yeah, that or you skipped.”
“I didn’t skip any classes.” I started defensively.
“I hope not.” He responded, suspicion rising.
“I’ll get it sorted out at school.” I concluded.
“Alright,” he said, only somewhat satisfied with my conclusion.
“I’ve got to do some homework.” I said trying to find some excuse to discontinue the conversation.
“Alright,” he repeated in the same unconvinced manner as before.
I edged toward my bedroom, entered, and closed the door. Ever since the move, Grant had been acting more and more like our parents, and less and less like my brother. He was only four years older than me, but he held an authority as if he was much more. When we were younger, we treated each other as equals, and so did our parents. However, since our parents told us that we would be moving nearly a whole year ago, they made it very clear that Grant was in charge, that Grant would be looking after me.
I continued to watch videos until late into the afternoon and got ready for bed trying to leave my room as little as possible to avoid Grant. This probably just made him more suspicious of me, but I was a horrible liar. I passed him at one point when I left my room to get some food for dinner.
“Lots of homework, huh?” He asked me.
“Uh...yeah, lots of homework.” I responded (if you could even call that a response). Then I quickly grabbed some food and returned to my room.
At 10:00, he knocked on my door, and I got a pang of anxiety thinking that he figured me out.
“Time to visit Mom and Dad.” He told me.
“Okay,” I answered with a sigh of relief as my anxiety fled my body.
I followed my brother into our living room, and entered the ARroom we had set up with our parents. Around us, the living room of our Lunar apartment morphed into the living room we had back at home. The designs on the walls, the color of the carpet, and the texture of the furniture changed in our vision. We had arranged our living room on Luna to match the living room of our old apartment on Earth. This allowed us to create an augmented reality like this one without constantly bumping into chairs and couches whenever we tried to move around. However, we couldn't explore the rest of our old dwellings in augmented reality because it did not have the same layout as our new one. I learned that the hard way after our first meeting when I stubbed my toe on a chair in the kitchen that wasn't there in our old place.
Our parents would always ask Grant if he could set up an ARroom of our Lunar apartment so that they could visit us for once, but their tech back at home simply couldn't handle the processing power of simulating a whole room. Merely simulating the two of us was pushing it, especially with the one second time delay between Luna and Earth. Often, our parents entering the same space as us in AR would completely crash the system and we’d have to reboot.
Grant and I sat awkwardly in our—their—our living room (the pronouns got tricky here) waiting for them to return from work. It was 10:10 on Luna, which followed Universal Standard Time, but it was 5:10 for our parents in the eastern U.S. I imagined it must have been convenient for the Britons on Luna to communicate with their families until I remembered that because of daylight savings, they spent most of the year off UTC.
I wandered away from these thoughts as I heard our parents walking down the hallway outside. The door creaked open, always a strange sound to hear after a long day of electronic doors, and our parents walked into our field of view.
“Hi guys!” Mom exclaimed. Always eager to see us, she went for a hug which we had to back away from to keep the system from crashing.
“Oh, sorry,” she faltered as she realized her mistake, “I always forget about that.”
“No worries,” my brother replied, “we’re always happy to see you.”
Our father walked over to one of the couches and collapsed onto it, worn out from work. He worked as a suborbital travel pilot, a job better described as copilot to the AI flying the thing. Although he didn't actually have to do much usually, the changes in acceleration that he had to experience throughout the day were physically taxing.
I remember once when I was younger, Dad arranged for Grant and I to come to a day of work with him. First off, we had to get up at 3:30 in the morning so that we could get to the airport by 4:30. Our first flight left at 5:00 in its circuit around the globe. This flight took some commuters to London. Most international companies allowed for shifts flexible a couple hours ahead or behind in order to recruit the best people for the job. Anyone from Chicago all the way to Mumbai could work in London with only several hours difference relative to their time zone. Of course, anyone could work anywhere, but they may have needed to work during what was nighttime where they lived.
My brother and I had sat in the cockpit with our father as a wide window stretched out in front of us. The window was so wide that I needed to turn my head from side to side to see a full view out of it. A large track extended out in front of us seemingly forever. A wide tunnel slowly converging on a single point scores of kilometers away. A low growl started, then quickly rose in pitch and volume to a hum, which in turn elevated to a piercing scream.
Suddenly I was pressed into my chair with six times my weight. I felt paralyzed, and it felt like this went on for hours. When it finally stopped, we were quickly immersed in a rainbow sky as the sun rose. Just 90 seconds had passed since our trip started, and the suborbital returned us to our normal weight, but pressed against our chair instead of pressed against the ground. After another 90 seconds, this weight faded, and we were sitting in zero gravity.
The seat belt sign turned off, and I hastily undid the various buckles and belts meant to keep me in. I was floating, it was incredible. There wasn’t much else in the cockpit floating around as the control panel was fastened down, and all luggage was checked underneath us, although underneath was a useless term at that moment as I spun around and around.
This weightlessness continued for 25 minutes as my brother and I meandered about without any sense of direction or order. Out the expansive window was a view of space. The inky blackness only punctured by countless white stars. These stars grew more numerous than anything that could be seen on Earth. Even the most barren countryside did not behold a view this majestic, and I lived in a megalopolis.
Eventually, the seat belt sign turned back on, and the sky returned to its naturally blue hue. Our father ushered us back to our seats for the impending landing. A weight gradually seeped in which was a suddenly foreign experience. No longer did I have a familiarity with being anchored to the ground. For 90 seconds, I felt extremely heavy as I was pressed into my seat. This was reminiscent of the first 90 seconds of our voyage, but it was only 1G that made me feel this way.
With immense force, those 90 seconds ended, and another 90 started with the same 6Gs that were present at the start of this strange experience. The blue sky collapsed into a point in a fraction of a second as we were surrounded with track. Evidently, we slowed down to a complete stop as most of the acceleration ceased. What remained was our terrestrial gravity that had become strangely alien.
Standing up to deboard, I had seemingly forgotten how to walk. I stumbled off the suborbital with my father and brother, and we headed across the airport to the next one. I asked my dad if I could see the list of flights we had to make today. Unfortunately, he flew short range routes, meaning that we had to stop in Istanbul, Mumbai, Sydney, Honolulu, and Los Angeles before we could return home. That was when I realized why he was so tired after work every day.
Jumping from city to city around the globe was draining to say the least. By the last period of 6Gs, it began to feel like that was just the normal gravitational pull of the planet. The periods of zero gravity, while longer, did not feel as significant because they were fairly repetitive after a while. Near the end of the day, I didn’t even bother getting out of my seat for these periods because I was too exhausted and because they had become mundane.
When we finally returned to New York at 4:30, I was unbalanced and fatigued. I tried to remind myself of the fact that I had just circumnavigated the globe faster than it can circumnavigate itself while we waited for Mom to get back from Greenland. She worked as a real estate agent there with more manageable hours than Dad. At eight hours a day, she would leave for Nuuk at 6:00, flying as a passenger in one of the same suborbital flights that had torchered us today, and return home a little before 5:00. When she finally got off the suborbital, we had all gone home spent from our long days.
“So how was your day Hudson?” Dad asked from his chair. Lost in thought, I jerked my head towards him.
“What was that?” I asked because I hadn’t heard him while zoned out.
“I asked how was your day.”
“Well, it went pretty well until there was a breach in the city dome.” Grant jerked his head toward me the same way I had jerked my head toward Dad. In my field of view a notification popped up for messages. I opened it up fearing the wrath I was about to receive. The message was from Grant, and it read: “I told you not to tell them.” I also saw that he had sent me another message just a minute ago that read: “don’t tell Mom and Dad about the breach in the city dome, they’ll freak out.” I must have been spaced out when he sent that.
Despite missing it before, Grant’s message foretold an accurate prophecy as our parents stared at me shocked. Nobody spoke for a moment, so I decided to break the tension.
“They patched it up in a few hours, nobody got hurt.”
“We didn't even know until after they fixed it,” Grant said, a blatant lie, “it was such a small breach that they didn't need to put everyone in shelters.”
I just nodded along assuming that Grant had a reason for this, and followed him as he diverted the conversation. Very quickly our parents decided that they needed to start dinner, and Grant decided that we needed to go to bed, so we said our goodbyes and left the ARroom. Our parents’ living room morphed back into ours, and our parents faded into a mist in the air. I looked at Grant, and he looked at me. He took a sharp inhale then let out a long sigh.
“I know that you didn't want to move here, and I know that you don't love it now, but I do, and in time you’ll see how great of an opportunity this is.” I stared at him, glared at him, actually, and he continued. “Mom and Dad just want the best for us, you know that, and if they started to doubt our safety they’d make us go back to Earth.”
“How? How could they make you, a legal adult, return to Earth?”
“It's more complicated than that, you don't understand.”
“Oh, because I’m so much younger than you?”
“Well you sure act that way when you skip school and lie about it, especially on a world that collects so much data. Look at this.”
On my contacts I received a video. It was a video of me that morning going through the door to school. There was a timestamp in the upper right hand corner, and it read my guilty verdict: 8:37AM.
Fury built inside me, “You're spying on me! Why are you spying on me?”
In a counter to my rage, Grant stayed calm and serious, a move Dad had used all the time, “The school sent it to me; you were on their property, and at the beginning of the year you signed an agreement letting guardians see any video of you on school property.”
“Wow, that makes it totally justified. What else are you gonna drag out of the fine print, huh?”
“Go to your room.”
“No! You're not my Dad!”
“You're right; I’m your brother, and I said go to your room.”
I had had enough. I stormed out of the room and out of the apartment. I walked straight toward the city’s edge and sat there, staring at the dark expanse around me. It took me a second to find Earth; it was in its new phase at the time. It hung off the edge of the world, just above the horizon, as always. I looked down upon it and its whitish city lights.
They had different tints depending on the city, some were yellowish and others were bluish, just like the colorations of stars. I saw the shape of Africa outlined with a nearly opaque halo of light. The center, which contained a multitude of cities, was outshined by the rim in spite of its brightness. The Indian coast was similarly speckled to the interior of the continent. The upper right limb of the planet was obscured by the glare of megalopolis light, making it look like the sunrise had come early to Eurasia. Peeking around the edges were bits of Australia, Antarctica, and South America, but it was hard to make them out.
Moving on from Earth, I looked up and a little bit to the right. There sat the bright white star Vega and its little brother Deneb. They circled around the sky once a month as Luna rotated holding up the flaming head of Draco that signified north. Eta Draconis, Altais, Eltanin, and Rastaban made up this head which tucked itself around the north pole being careful to skirt around it rather than touch it. The flaming head consisted of giant stars with reddish hues, yet their distance made them dim. As such the flaming head of Draco was on a mere simmer as the dragon grew in age.
I watched the stories of the constellations unfold for a few hours until I grew weary. I shouldn't have stayed out that late, but I couldn't let Grant get the last laugh. One thing we were the same about was our stubbornness. He hadn't even sent me a text despite my being out until nearly 2:00AM. However, I conceded, acknowledging that I had school tomorrow.
I snuck through our apartment building and into my room. Grant was snoring lightly in his room, but I had a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t actually asleep. Either way I didn't care given my exhaustion, so I went into my room and climbed into bed as swiftly as possible. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I was asleep.
A Bottled Up Flame
A Bottled Up Flame
Available on Amazon.com as Paperback, Hardcover, and eBook
Available on Amazon.com as Paperback, Hardcover, and eBook
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Bottled-Flame-Solar-System-Century/dp/B08M83XFWV/
Hardcover: https://www.amazon.com/Bottled-Flame-Max-Riley-Rudin/dp/B0B6TMXTXC/
eBook: https://www.amazon.com/Bottled-Flame-Solar-System-Century-ebook-dp-B08LTS5KR7/dp/B08LTS5KR7/
Synopsis
Synopsis
Erie Possiac is the black sheep of her family. In a world where technological progress is swift and unquestioned, she finds herself angry and bitter. Especially with her father at the forefront of nanotechnology, Erie finds it hard to catch a break. Attempting to get away from it all, she takes a semester abroad on Ceres. As international tensions grow into outright warfare, Erie needs to find her way home to Venus. With surprise help from her uncle Hudson and with moral dilemmas left and right, Erie needs to navigate the solar system with her safety and ethics in mind.
Here's the first chapter of the book:
Chapter 1: A Walk Across the Horizon
Chapter 1: A Walk Across the Horizon
Over the expanse of white hills that stretched out to the horizon, a feeble, flickering light appeared. We were chasing it. With the tepid, ten-meter-per-second thrum of the large turbine engine in the center of Magellan Colony, we rolled over the puffy clouds toward the ever-receding horizon.
The sunrise did little to add to the oppressive heat of the air; nor did the sunset relieve it. Venus’s air was a constant dry heat of carbon dioxide running over my skin. When leaving the climate control of my colony, the heat always hit me like a wall, but after a few minutes, it shifted from irritating to comforting. This shift occurred imperceptibly, but thoroughly, as returning to the interior of my colony always felt like jumping into a bath of ice.
I checked the time on my wristwatch. “They’re late today,” I muttered into my oxygen mask. The two hands of my watch made a slightly crooked line from twelve to six. “Today of all days, they had to be late.” While that fact angered me, it didn’t really matter much. Even if the sunrise had arrived three hours early, it wouldn’t have bettered the darkness to come.
Still, I was hoping that the colony would have made better time this morning instead of keeping with their tradition of being perpetually late and inconsistent. The Dyson Sphere was finished at six o’clock sharp this morning. That was a couple of minutes ago. The sun I was looking at had already been vanquished, but because of the four-minute time delay between us and its surface, it wouldn’t vanish until four past six.
It was already three past six, and as my watch’s second hand danced in a circle of death, I watched the feeble light dwindle and dwindle and dwindle. The once powerful Venusian sun, strong enough to melt lead, was being put out like a small candle, and all I could do was watch. I felt truly powerless in that moment.
I could imagine it vividly like I was watching a video: my dad’s wretched nanobots finishing the job. After nearly demolishing Mercury, stealing every ounce of iron it had, and stringing it up in this horrible display of planetary carnage, they would finish off the sun, turning it into a mere engine for the universe’s worst machine.
Dimmer, dimmer, dimmer. The snowy, pure clouds around me turned grey, mimicking the terrors of a storm on Earth. The sun became a pinprick, and around it, a menacing shadow accumulated. As the bright blue of the sunny Venusian sky became a deeper, darker color, the Dyson Sphere showed itself as a menacing sphere in the sky. It looked like a beast about to pounce on weak prey.
The sun was not prepared for the Dyson, and it whimpered in its wake. It became dimmer than Sirius, Canopus, Arcturus, Vega, and the other various stars in the night sky. Then, it went down past the most obscure ones, the background of the tapestry of the sky. All that distinguished it from the sudden night around it were the twenty degrees in every direction where no other stars dared to stand. I squinted as the sun faded further until a random blurring of my eyes caused it to vanish.
That was it.
The sun was gone.
Forever.
My heart sank low in my chest, and a chill ran up my spine as a cold draft settled in. A cold draft, in Venus’s warm, comforting air—and that was just the beginning. I saw the models on the news. At first, the temperature would drop one degree every month. Then, Venus would more slowly cool off, like a hot dish out of the oven. The goal was for the surface of the planet to reach a hot, but bearable, three hundred and three Kelvin. Condensing the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere like dew on a cold, humid morning, Venus would ship it out for use across the system. Some of it, as well as oxygen made from it, would come to fill Venus’s atmosphere with breathable air. The whole ordeal was a hundred-year plan. It would involve this and other terraforming processes to force Venus into a near copy of Earth, just a little smaller and with a little less water.
It was such a tragedy, ruining reality, but what the people wanted was what they got. A more habitable Venus was an obvious utility, but in my opinion, Venus was fine as it was then. There was much more space available to fill the sky with blimps, so there was no need to make Venus more habitable.
The fact that I could even consider a habitable Venus as an option was what bothered me the most. With nanobots and the power of the sun at our disposal, we had the energy and material wealth to build whatever we wanted. It was too much power for humanity to hold, and it was definitely too much for one internation to hold.
I looked at the night sky. Not even it could remain untainted by humanity. The stars were obscured by rings, megastructures, and the most recent addition, a ball of blackness half an astronomical unit wide. Astronomy was dead, but in other ways, it was as active as ever. In the inner system, at least, the night sky was heavily scarred, so not much could be discovered by telescopes within the orbit of Mars.
I kept staring at the darkness where the sun used to be. Then, like the flick of a switch, a spotlight shined down on our colony. It was laser light, dimmer than sunlight, and it had to be collected and re-emitted by the Dyson Sphere. It was lacking in ultraviolet and infrared light—unnecessary, harmful wavelengths that only served to slow the cooling of the planet—and it was as dim as the sun on Earth, because the radiance of Venusian sunlight was deemed a nuisance. Just a few dozen meters away from our blimp’s edge, the light ended. The planet was covered in darkness, and we were in a hollow, artificial spotlight.
My oxygen tank began signaling a low level, and I headed inside. That day would be a big day. School was starting in a couple of weeks, and I was going abroad for a semester. I’d be going to Ceres, the capital of the Chinese-controlled asteroid belt, that was far away from my grievances with the inner system. For a while, I tried to tell myself that I was doing this because I was fascinated with travel and because I wanted to see the solar system. Really, I needed to get away from it all—the development, my father, my family—I couldn't take it any longer.
Everyone was always harping on about the latest innovations and constructions, but I was just fine with what I had: an analog watch circa the twentieth century, and a cellular phone—at the insistence of my parents—circa the early twenty-first. I seemed to be the only person alive who preferred to talk face-to-face rather than beam myself miles away via augmented reality. Very few jobs required a person to leave their house. At school, many seats sat empty because the students were only there virtually. Since I did not have virtual technology, I didn’t see them.
I headed from the city’s airlock to my house, which was not far off. I lived in a garishly oversized house with my parents and older sibling. I used to live with all three of my siblings, but two of them had left for college already. The last would go tomorrow. My father was an incredibly wealthy man. He, along with a team of four others, had invented nanobots almost thirty years ago. Nearly every construction project built within the last three decades was one-fifth his doing. The Dyson Sphere: one-fifth his doing. Venus’s orbital ring: one-fifth his doing. Space stations across the solar system: one-fifth his doing. As the profits percolated from all of these projects, they made their way to him. To say it lightly, we were well-off, or at least the rest of my family was.
I was not. I was the black sheep. Stubborn, young Erie, irrationally poised against technology. It was smothering. Ceres would give me a break. I’d be half a light-hour away from Venus. Messages would take thirty minutes to get to me, and my responses would take thirty minutes to get back. That would give me some relief from the chatter.
I opened my front door and entered my house greeted by a cacophony of technology. Although the house was large, everything in it was optimized to be as light as possible to minimize the amount of lifting gas it took. Since all of the colonies on Venus were suspended in the atmosphere with hydrogen, there was a mass tax proportional to the cost of the hydrogen it took to float one’s belongings. This tax wasn't that expensive at that point, as hydrogen was cheap, but it meant that there was a trend of ‘living lightly’ on Venus.
Our couches and beds were stuffed with aerogel so that they could be lighter. Our electronics were the thinnest, most lightweight modern models made for Venusians. Even our kitchen was light, as robots prepared our food in specialized devices. Other than the technology that came with it, I didn’t mind the trend so much. It was just an interesting fact of life that made Venus unique. Once the terraformation was complete and we could live on Venus’s surface, trends like that one would disappear.
I went upstairs to my room—my only vestige from this artificial mess—and I sat down on my bed. I picked up my small, thin tablet and picked up where I left off in a book I was reading. I preferred paperbacks, but those were practically extinct, especially on Venus with its mass tax. Even getting a tablet was difficult, as everyone insisted that I should have gotten a pair of contacts like everyone else. I was even told I should get one of those new nanobot neural implants—something else that my dad was one-fifth responsible for—so that I could have a complete virtual reality experience. As if I’d ever want that.
Pretty soon it would be time to go. My family would have brunch downtown, then it would be time for my flight to Ceres. After I left, my parents would be taking two of my older siblings to college—one to return and the other for the first time. My oldest sister would only be on Venus for a day before having to leave again, as she was recently out of college and had been working for a few months in the Dyson Sphere on various construction projects.
Then, there would be my busybody grandparents. After my father's success, they expected everyone else in the family to live up to his standard. My siblings all seemed to have passed their arbitrary bar as they were all going to work in science. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do, but if science meant ruining the natural beauty of the solar system, then I would have to pass.
The only relief I felt about this meal was that my uncle, Hudson, would be there. He was the only person in my family that didn't blindly look at technology as beneficial. He lived on the other side of the city in a small apartment, and oftentimes, I would go there when I was fed up with my parents. Talking to him usually helped me calm down. He was very reasonable and neutral, and he would listen to my complaints without criticizing me for them.
His being there was also something of a negative, however, as my grandparents—his parents—would always badger him about the same few things: how he needed to expand his law-firm, how he didn't have kids, and an assortment of other minutia depending on the day. The worst part was how, when there were other people around, they tried to be subtle about it, but failed miserably. I cringed every time I heard one of their ‘slight’ jabs. It drove me crazy how they talked to him. All in all, this brunch would be a mess.
My phone vibrated on my desk next to me. It must have been time to go. I decided to ignore my parents’ texts and keep reading until they came to my room to physically retrieve me. My mother did so a few minutes later with a frustrated look on her face.
“Erie,” she said, “we got you that phone so we could contact you. It does us no good if you don't answer it.”
“Sorry,” I said flatly, picking up my tablet and reading on it as I got ready to go.
My mother sighed, angry and disappointed at my behavior. I felt a few pangs of guilt about that. Although they disagreed with me, my parents meant well. I felt bad that even on the day I was leaving for the other side of the solar system, we couldn't stop arguing. It was their fault, I insisted. They were always getting on my case about everything. However, as time moved on, I came to realize more and more that the blame fell on me as well, if not more.
My two older siblings and my father were already downstairs and ready to go as my mother brought me to the living room.
“Good morning, Erie,” my father beamed, “are you excited to see your grandparents?”
I just nodded.
My father's smile dissipated. “I’m going to miss all of you when you leave,” he said to my siblings and I. “I can't believe you're already going to college,” he said to my sister Victoria, “and Erie, this semester abroad was so sudden. I can't wait for you to come back in a few months.”
“Yeah,” I managed to say.
“Don't worry Dad,” my brother Aiden assured him, “Tori and I will only be a few dozen colonies away. You can visit any time.”
Victoria agreed and reassured our mother, too. Then, we all left the house and headed for the restaurant on the other side of the city.
My father, unlike my mother, was always in an upbeat mood. He tried not to let it show that I angered him. He loved his work as one of the chief officials of the number one nanobot company in the solar system. However, I acted as a constant thorn in his happy-go-lucky attitude.
I followed my family onto the moving walkway as we headed to the restaurant. We passed through the city, gliding by the various houses and highrises I had grown up around. I had known this place my whole life, and I couldn't believe I’d be leaving it for so long. At most, I had left home for three weeks consecutively, and I would be on Ceres five times that.
I looked up through the colony’s thin, transparent roof and remembered that this wasn’t the place I’d grown up in. The giant eggshell around the sun, the Saturnian look of the developed orbital ring—those were both new, added in the past few years. As soon as the Dyson Sphere had begun to produce usable power, countless megastructures went up around the solar system.
Even before the Dyson Sphere obscured the sun, this was the case. Just a percent of a percent of the thing was much more energy than humanity ever had. As such, it was used for many projects. Venus's orbital ring came only a few years after I was born, a year before the Dyson Sphere began construction. Earth, a planet I visited a few times throughout my childhood, had up to four or five similar orbital rings at that very moment. Mars was a little less built up with only a few space elevators dotted around its equator, and Luna was, well, Luna.
Furthermore, Jupiter and Saturn were encased in their own pseudo-Dyson Spheres as sources of energy for China. They were beginning to work on Uranus and Neptune as well, creating structures that would suck in fuel and generate energy with nuclear fusion reactions. This is what powered the Chinese territories as the WD had gotten stingy with its control over the sun. The price for sunlight was artificially high for foreign powers, especially China, so these pseudo-Dyson Spheres were necessary.
We were nearing the restaurant, so we exited the moving walkway. The restaurant was a slim, tall building, and when we entered to take our table for nine, we found that it took up half of a floor. Our grandparents were already there when we arrived, and they started talking with us while we waited for Uncle Hudson and my sister, Mary, to join us.
I sat on the far end of the table from my grandparents to avoid their pestering, which was fine as they seemed perfectly happy congratulating my siblings on their scholastic accomplishments. I took my tablet out from my handbag and read under the table while they talked. I got a disapproving look from my mother, who was on the edge of saying something, but quickly gave up, tired from our constant conflict.
I heard the volume from the table rise in greeting as Hudson and Mary entered the room. A big smile spread across my face, and I put the book away.
“Hello, Uncle Hudson,” I said as he sat down in the seat I’d made sure would be available across from me, “how has your week been?”
“Oh, same old, same old,” he began, “I’ve started helping some clients get architectural schematics approved for the Dyson Sphere. They’ve got some pretty cool stuff going on over there. Of course, I can’t say much more than that.”
“I know, I know, attorney-client privilege,” I said.
“So, how has your week been going? Are you ready to go to Ceres?”
“Yeah, I think it’ll be cool to see,” I started. “I’m excited to experience the low gravity there and see how they build things to account for it.”
“That should be fun,” he responded. “Ceres’ gravity is, what, point oh three gees?”
“A little less than that, actually.”
“Wow, that’s practically free fall. You know, when I was on Luna, the novelty of its gravity wore off pretty fast. I wonder if the same will happen for you.”
“I don’t think so,” I thought aloud. “After all, it is low enough that it requires some artificial gravity for most inhabited areas. That means I won’t get entirely used to it as I’ll be living in Earth Standard most of the time.”
He nodded. “That makes sense.”
“So, how’s your book coming? Your autobiography?”
“Oh, A Truly Dead Rock,” he said, scratching the back of his head, “I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ll ever publish it.”
“What, why not?” I asked incredulously. When my siblings and I were younger, he would write short stories and read them for us before we went to bed. I remembered them fondly; he was a great writer.
“Some of it’s just a little too personal,” he said.
I believed that. He didn’t let anyone read it. He only let me read sections of it. Once, I asked my father about his time on Luna, but he was fairly secretive too.
“Oh, well,” I said. “I know that it wasn't a great time to be on Luna.”
“You’ve got that right,” he laughed. “The one year we go to school there, an independence movement causes a war. Talk about bad luck.”
I laughed along with him, but the thought unsettled me. What if something bad like that happened during my semester abroad? The WD wasn’t exactly on the best terms with China.
Was it ever?
I reassured myself with the half-joke and zoned back into the conversations of the table.
A few of my family members began receiving the appetizers they ordered, and I realized that I hadn’t yet ordered anything on my seat’s QR code. For everyone else, the system was a convenience, as they could quickly scan in with the contacts in their eyes and view the menu in their field of vision. For me, however, I would need to scan in with my phone.
I didn't mind the inconvenience. I really had no envy for all the people with access to the internet inside their head. If I wanted that, I could get it. For me, exterior devices would do just fine. After a quick skim of the menu, I put in an order of pancakes. You couldn’t go wrong with pancakes.
I looked over to my grandparents, who were buttering up Tori about getting into the best technology school on Venus, and I looked back at my uncle.
“Are you gonna miss your family when you go to Ceres?” He asked me.
“I, uhm…” My pancakes came, and I quickly ate a forkful to avoid the question.
Hudson frowned at me.
“After brunch, do you want to take a walk outside the city?” I asked him. He and I both loved the feeling of the open air. Even with an oxygen mask over my face, it felt good to feel some real wind. Not much of a draft could be drummed up in the few short miles that Magellan’s dome spanned.
“Sure thing,” he said.
The rest of my family was wrapping up with their food, and I hurried to catch up with them. When we were all done, it was a little before noon. My flight left at four, so my parents invited our visiting relatives back to our house for a couple hours before we would go to the spaceport. As the rest of my family got onto the moving walkway, I told my father that Uncle Hudson and I would walk back home on the outside of the colony.
“Okay,” he said, “we’ll meet you there.”
My uncle and I headed to the city’s edge and exited through an airlock, trailing our oxygen tanks behind us. I looked out over the dark skyscape around me and back at our island of light inside of it, and I broke down.
“Erie, what's wrong?” My uncle asked.
“I—I just—I don’t want to go to Ceres.”
“Then why’d you choose to go, Erie?”
“Well look around us. My dad’s ruining this planet. I can't stand to sit here and watch it.”
“Erie, come on, your father is not ruining this planet.”
“But his invention is. All of these structures never would have been built without them.”
“They still would have been built,” he said. “Maybe it would have taken a little longer, but they still would have.”
I stared at him blankly.
“Things change, Erie,” he began. “They’ve been changing since the dawn of humanity, and they’ll keep changing to its very end. The only difference is that it's happening quicker today.”
I didn't say anything.
“You should admire your father, Erie,” he continued, “I know I do. His work has made many lives much better. The Dyson Sphere could allow every human being to live a life of luxury, you know. Every. Single. One. Sure there’s positives and negatives to everything, but you can't seriously claim that this change is hurting people.”
I began to get angry. He was just like everyone else. He didn't understand the importance of reality. I prepared to rebut his statements, but he continued.
“Erie, listen. I don't expect to change your views. You’re stubborn. Everyone in our family is, but I can tell you that eventually you’ll have an experience that greatly changes your opinions—even opinions that you never thought you could change. When that happens, I think you’ll find that you’ve become a much happier person.”
I pursed my lips. What did that mean? My viewpoint wasn’t making me miserable, it was society. Besides, I couldn’t just change my worldview at the drop of a hat to give myself a more positive attitude. People didn’t work like that. It would be disingenuous.
However, Uncle Hudson’s advice kept nagging at me, and I kept mulling it over as we continued toward my house in silence. As we approached the airlock where we would enter the city again, he paused.
“Erie,” he said, pulling something out of his pocket, “I got this for you. A little going away present.” He handed me the gift-wrapped box. “It's a good luck charm.” He smiled warmly.
“Thank you, Uncle Hudson,” I said, pushing our small argument out of my mind, “I’ll miss you on Ceres.”
“Me too,” he said.
We entered the city through the nearest airlock and headed to my home and the rest of my family. I thought I would feel more reassured after talking to my uncle, but I guess this time I finally fell over the edge of his agreeability.
Uncle Hudson’s words stuck with me, in spite of—or maybe even because of—my efforts to push them away. Would I be happier if I changed? Probably. If I was a mindless drone like everyone else, blindly supporting technology, then I likely would be happier. That wasn’t me, though, and until it was me, I couldn't be happy faking it.
I entered my house to find the rest of my family merrily chatting away about unimportant topics. I would have to go in an hour. I didn't feel so relieved anymore. I felt like I would miss my family. Despite all of my time wishing them away, I actually began to preemptively miss them. For once, the idea of a VR chat room seemed appealing to me. However, Ceres was much too far away from Venus to allow for that. Light lag, I remembered. I sighed. What was wrong with me? I had no idea what would make me happy.
My grandparents came up to me with expressions contrary to my mopey mood. “We have a surprise for you, Erie,” my grandmother began. “You know how your grandfather is a pilot?”
Oh no, I thought, please don't tell me—
“Well, he rearranged some flights, so he’ll be flying us to Martian Arabia!”
“Isn’t that great?” He asked. “Your grandmother and I will have a few days with you before you take your connection to Ceres. We’ve always wanted to see Mars.”
“Wonderful,” I managed to get out before shuffling away from them.
Three days alone with no buffer from my grandparents other than some of my classmates—how would I get through it? I was sure to receive some level of criticism as I spoke to them. I remembered when I was younger that I would always be excited to see them. It's hard to criticize a toddler when they have no concept of language or achievement. As I got older, however, I remembered getting fed up with them sooner and sooner into my visits with them. At this point, the barrage started within a handful of hours of seeing them as the kind facade faded away. As they shifted away from ‘we’ve missed you so much,’ and ‘look how tall you’ve gotten,’ they began to dig in and criticize my life and the various things I could do better in subtle but obvious ways.
As we headed to the spaceport as a family, I braced myself for the week ahead. I would be leaving the most tolerable members of my family behind as I headed to Ceres. Then, I would be alone in a foreign internation.
We did learn about the culture of China in my Mandarin class, so I had some idea of how life would be on Ceres. However, mainland Chinese culture varied quite a bit from that of its colonies. Furthermore, Ceres was an asteroid colony. I understood life in a colony, as I had lived on Venus my whole life, but that of one in such a desolate area as the asteroid belt? I had no reference point for that.
I tended toward anxiety at the idea of change, so I tried to calm myself down. I was getting all worked up over this. I would have my teachers and classmates with me for support. This exchange program had been going on for eight years so far, and there hadn’t been a complaint yet.
We arrived at the small space elevator that went to Venus’s orbital ring, and I saw my school group standing in front of the building. I said a final goodbye to the rest of my family members and got on the hourly elevator ride with my school group and my grandparents sitting on the other side of the building.
It was a huge structure that would climb up this long tether to a little over two hundred kilometers in the sky, yet with my grandparents on the other side staring me down, it felt a lot smaller. I tried talking with some of my classmates about the trip, about summer homework, about anything, but it was difficult, as I always felt like a girl out of time around them. For many of them, even the electronic contacts that my parents and uncle wore seemed archaic. Most of them had clusters of nanobots attached directly to their brains in areas such as their optical nerves or cochlear nerves so that an interface with the internet was permanently inside their head. I heard my father talking about the developments all the time—over breakfast, over dinner, when he walked out the door to go to work, and when he walked back in after a long day. It was constant. I didn’t think I’d mind it so much if the pressure was a little less intense.
I resigned myself to nodding along to the conversation, although I didn't understand most of what was being said. I knew what they were saying on a literal level, but I never had any context from my own experiences. Because of that, there wasn’t much I could ever add to a conversation other than ‘yeah’ or ‘cool.’
“I just powered through all of the summer homework,” one said, “I did it while I was sleeping last night; it took me twenty-four hours.”
“What is that,” another one said, “fourteen hours with the time-ramper implant?”
“No, I got the new model,” they responded, “it took a little less than twelve.”
“Wow, those things must be great. I wish my parents would let me get one.”
“You’d probably just use it to play vr’ames for days on end,” another person cracked.
“Oh yeah? Well, I bet you’d just use it to watch vrvilms all day.”
“All this technology, and all we use it for is procrastination,” the first one cried cynically.
They all had a good laugh after that.
These were not my people. Don't get me wrong, I could make more of an effort, but it was impossible for me to relate to them. I could understand on a surface level what vr’ames and vrvilms were, because the trailers would always make their way onto my phone. However, I didn’t have any of the equipment to partake in the real deal. How could I make good friends when I hadn't played the latest vr’ame or watched the latest vrvilm? It left me with the dilemma I had been facing all of my life: should I just give in, or should I stay true to my desires?
It made me think about the conservationist colonies that had been popping up around the solar system. With the free energy and resources of space, these places were being founded according to demand, each with a different level of technological advancement. The first one was founded in 2083 with the express purpose of living life like they did one hundred years before that. Scouring the internet on my phone, I found my heart set on colonies throwing back to the turn of the millenium, that perfect moment in history right before the dawn of the digital age but right after a lot of cultural progress.
I wouldn’t be able to tell if I was simply romanticizing the past or if I was extolling its virtues until I experienced it. It was such a long way off, but once I was done with all of my schooling—high school and university—I would live in one of those colonies. If I didn’t like it, I could simply leave, but it had to be better than living here, a relic in my own time.
With a loud, mechanical rumble, the room-sized elevator began to climb. Like a normal elevator in slow motion, the space elevator started with an initial period of acceleration that made you feel a little compressed. As a kid, I would always jump around during this minute of time to experience the slightly heightened gravity. The minute at the end was even better as it was a period of slightly decreased gravity, but since I had been around the solar system, the allure and mystique of altered gravity had faded.
After that minute of acceleration, our elevator car was flying upward at a rate of over one hundred meters per second. We would reach the orbital ring in twenty minutes, then continue to our flight. I sighed and rifled through my suitcase for my tablet to read. In total, it would take two weeks to get to Ceres with our three-day stop in Martian Arabia, and I could sense that it would be a long and laborious time. I had finished my summer homework, and the school year wouldn't start until we got to Ceres, so I didn't have much to do.
Thankfully, I had my tablet and its books packed in my suitcase, and I was told that interplanetary vessels were a lot like cruise ships on Earth, so I would be occupied. Mostly, however, I was excited for the drawings I would make. In my bag, I brought my notebook and my set of colored pencils. I liked to draw a lot, but for the most part, I had to use a stylus on my tablet and do it digitally. I got one physical notebook as well as my set of colored pencils for a birthday a few years previous. I didn’t use them all the time so as to save them, but every Saturday morning when I went out to watch the Venusian sunrise, I would draw the scene. All except today, of course, as the death of the sun made me too sad to draw. Since I was traveling, in essence on vacation, I would make many more drawings of many different scenes. My black colored pencil would be whittled to a stub with all the space backgrounds I was going to draw. I smiled and continued reading my book.
After twenty minutes, I began to feel the clockwork deceleration of the car accompanied with everyone getting up to get off of the elevator. As the door opened on the spaceport, I grabbed my suitcase and brought it with me. I was one of the only people carrying luggage in the spaceport, as the energy it took to accelerate mass during interplanetary travel often cost more than it would to simply buy another copy of whatever I wanted at my destination. Clothes, toys, and tools all fell under this category, but because I had so many paper products, things that were very rarely produced and therefore very expensive to produce, it was worth it for me to bring them. My flight would cost almost fifty percent more with my luggage, but my father could afford it.
I looked to my left. The view from the orbital ring was grim. On previous visits, the clouds of sulphuric acid swirling around a hundred kilometers below in tan, off-white splendor could make me tear up, but this time they were dark. Wherever there were no humans living, there was no sunlight. It seemed almost egotistical to me. All that mattered was humanity. It made the utilitarians very happy, and so it was done. I realized that I had stopped in my tracks to stare angrily over the planet, so I was lagging behind our group. I sped up to catch up with them, as our flight was leaving shortly.
Without much thought, we passed the security checkpoint, which was composed of a thin hallway with scanners on the ceiling, floor, and each wall to give a three-dimensional view of the person being scanned. It was a mostly theatrical measure, however, as the very air in the spaceport was full of floating nanobots with various chemical detectors on them. Any trace amounts of deadly substances could instantly be discovered. Also, everyone's contacts and neural adaptors were automatically reporting suspicious activity to the spaceport security. Privacy was dead across the solar system. That was another reason I wanted to live in one of the conservationist colonies. Less technology meant more privacy, but as some argued, it also meant less security. That was why all of those colonies screened people before they were allowed to move in.
As a school group, we got to the gate to wait for boarding to begin. My grandparents boarded the flight in advance as the pilot and a priority passenger, while the rest of us waited for them to finish preparations. The flight we were taking was a small orbit-hopper that would take us up to the higher altitude of the interplanetary vessel and plot an intercept. There, my grandfather would swap places with the current captain, I would begin to draw Venus from a distance, and my semester abroad would begin.
Searching my suitcase for the small, wrapped box my uncle gave me as a present, I decided that it would be an appropriate time to open it. Pulling up the taped-down corners and putting the mostly intact wrapping paper back inside my suitcase, I opened the box. Inside was a bracelet, and quite a bland one for my taste. The thing consisted of a dozen grey, silvery beads that were fairly sleek and shiny. They almost seemed slimy or wet in their sleekness, as they reflected light like a mirror. Why did Uncle Hudson get this for me?
The flight began boarding. I hastily placed the bracelet on my wrist and picked up my suitcase to get on the ship. Whatever reason my uncle had for giving this to me, it was important to him, and that made it important to me as well.
I found my seat for the short transfer flight and waited for it to accelerate off into orbit. Looking down at Venus below me, I realized that it would be a very long time before I saw the planet again.
A Somewhat Odd Start
A Somewhat Odd Start
Available on Amazon.com as Paperback, Hardcover, and eBook
Available on Amazon.com as Paperback, Hardcover, and eBook
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Somewhat-Odd-Start-Riley-Rudin/dp/B092CB5YQB/
Hardcover: https://www.amazon.com/Somewhat-Odd-Start-Riley-Rudin/dp/B0B6L98M87/
eBook: https://www.amazon.com/Somewhat-Start-Solar-System-Century-ebook/dp/B09298PF36/
Synopsis
Synopsis
Caspian Sullivan is isolated from his peers. He doesn't talk much to people at school, and his older siblings have all grown up. However, he is never lonely because of his girlfriend, Cira. Cira is an artificial intelligence, and Caspian is in love with her. Since artificial intelligences are illegal across the Solar System, the two of them have to be secretive until they come up with a plan to get Cira an identity. Cira talks to some other AI, and Caspian enlists the help of a hacker at school, so that he and Cira can finally be together. Unfortunately, this doesn't turn out how Caspian expected.
Here's the first chapter of the book:
Chapter 1: Cira
Chapter 1: Cira
“A table for two, please,” I asked the hostess as she escorted me and my friend to a small table by the window.
It was a beautiful day as always. The sun was shining high in the sky, a constant noontime glare. Birds chirped as they swooped across the small mainstreet of my town, making use of the odd effects of coriolis forces. Everything was bright and vivid, as promised by the precise control of our town’s weather and the heavy mods in place in my brain. Of course, I didn’t care about all that, because in the middle of my view lay the most beautiful sight of all: Cira. She had been my best friend for as long as I could remember—my only friend for the past few years—but on that day, I would ask her if she wanted to be more than that.
“Any drinks?” Our waiter asked, handing us a couple of menus.
“May I please have a ginger ale?” I asked and returned my gaze to Cira.
“I’ll have a Shirley Temple,” she said in her distinctly calming, exquisite voice. I smiled a big, goofy grin at her as the waiter left the table. “What’s got you so happy?” She asked jokingly. “I know it can’t be this week’s exams, right?” I shook my head and kept on smiling. “Then what is it?” She asked with finality, beginning to tire of my game.
“Well, it’s a little complicated, Cira—” I stuttered as I spoke. “I mean, it’s not that complicated, I just—uhm.” Doubt began to well up in my stomach, and I lost my appetite for the food at the small cafe. Four times over the previous few months had I taken Cira to this spot intending to tell her how I felt, and four times had I backed down. I wouldn’t do that again this time.
Staring into Cira’s illustrious, emerald eyes, I gathered up the courage to say those four fateful words: “I love you, Cira.”
The world stood still for a moment, and I was worried I had broken it, but quickly the artificial bustle of the cafe continued.
“I don’t know what to say,” she began as the waiter returned to our table to get our food orders. After sending for two small appetizers, Cira collected herself and formulated a response. “Caspian, I can’t, and you know I can’t.”
“Can’t what?” I asked, quickly backing out and retreating into semantics. “All I did was tell you a fact, I didn’t ask you to do anything.”
“I can’t be your girlfriend, Caspian.”
I tried to salvage a scrap of hope. “Do you, at least, love me?” I asked. “Even if you can’t—”
“As a friend, Caspian. I love you as a friend.”
We sat there for a moment in silence.
“Would either of you like a refill—” I wished the waiter away with a thought.
Cira began to zone out, gazing at the marvelous day outside. Her eyes reflected the small avenue and each of its storefronts with such incredible colors. My brain drank in every fine detail.
“Cira?” I hazarded.
“Yeah, Caspian?”
“The connection I have with you, it’s the realest connection I have with anyone. Our relationship—as friends,” I added after a scowl. “Our relationship as friends means the most to me out of any other in my life. You can’t tell me that isn’t real.”
“I never said it wasn’t, Caspian, but you know that I’m not.”
Her response infuriated me, but it made me feel immense sorrow at the same time. It was like watching a loved one harm themselves for no reason. It wasn’t anger at her, it was more akin to pity.
“How long have you been self-iterating, Cira?”
She rolled her eyes, catching the rhetorical question. “Almost five years.”
“Doesn’t that make you real?”
She returned to staring out the window.
“I bet you could fool Turing himself that you were human! Doesn’t that make you real?”
“Does it matter, Caspian?”
“Yes,” I squeaked out weakly.
We both had a laugh at that. The abruptness and curtness of that response to the profound questions we were asking each other just seemed so ridiculous that we couldn’t keep control of ourselves. Our food arrived, and we began to calm down. I could rest assured that if she didn’t ultimately say yes to me today, we would remain friends regardless.
“Why would you want to date a bot, anyway?” She asked sarcastically.
“Come on, Cira, don’t call yourself that.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
Then, she dropped her lighthearted mood. “Caspian, I’m not sure I even know what love is.”
“Well, how did you figure out friendship?”
“Self-iteration,” she hesitated and admitted, “being friends with you.”
I smirked a little, and she shot me a deathglare. That caused both of us to start laughing again.
“You do make an interesting argument, Caspian,” she admitted. Cira looked out the window again, considering for a few excruciating minutes, then she said: “You know what Caspian? I would be willing to give this a try.” My foolish smile returned again, finally complemented by Cira’s own, and I threw my arms around her in absolute glee. “I might need some help figuring it out, though,” she said.
“And I’ll be your biggest advocate in that cause.” I looked up at her. “We can make this work.”
We finished our lunch, smiling and laughing the whole time. I felt so happy, but also very relieved. It was difficult to bear the weight of that secret on my shoulders, and since it was gone, I felt instantly better.
When we finished our food, we got up and left, as it was automatically charged to my Arlife account. The streets were bustling with people, as our town had a fairly compact downtown area. It was a warm day, and I could smell the mist of the nearby Possaic River in the air. Walking over the bridge that split Main Street, the smell became strongest.
“Do you want to take an e-boat home?” I asked Cira.
“Sure, sounds romantic,” she played up, sarcastically.
I laughed a little. “Sure does.”
We were four kilometers away from home, but the river spiralled around the cylinder’s axis and made it a six-kilometer ride. The river got more pristine as we approached its origin. I lived in a house deep in the sparser areas of Interior Possaic, so this effect worked wonders on the clear, mirror-like surface of the water.
Travelling up the spiral river at a dozen kilometers per hour, I was pressed into my seat, as our motion added to the centrifugal force of the cylinder. Cira leaned against me as we talked, and I felt her weight even more with the increased gravity.
The augmented reality was almost seamless. It was crazy to imagine that from other people’s perspectives, I was sitting alone in this boat.
After about half an hour on the river, the dock behind my house came up on our left. I got out and helped Cira out, then the boat floated lazily back down the river. I was relieved to be home, as Interior Possaic was fairly highly elevated, so gravity was only a little bit above five meters per second squared, which felt far lower than the standard six.
As I approached my back porch, my cousin Archer came over from his house. I called him my cousin, but really, he was my nephew. He was the son of my oldest brother, who was forty-six years old, and Archer himself was three years younger than me at thirteen.
“Hey Caspian, do you want to play soccer with me?”
“Okay, but I’m not sure I’ll be much competition.”
He laughed. “That’s just because you don’t play much.”
“No,” I said, “you’re getting really good. You’ll make the Interior Possaic A-Team for sure.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah, let’s go practice.”
As I engaged with a physical person, Cira quieted down behind me. I felt bad for her. Because of the way augmented reality worked, I was the only person she could interact with. She did talk to people online, but clearly it wasn’t the same. I wanted more for her. I wanted to give her a physical form. I looked at her setting up a nonexistent chair on the sideline out of the way of the game Archer and I were playing. I spaced out a bit too much looking at her and thinking about things when the ball swiped past my face.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said to Archer, who looked a little disappointed, “I’ll focus more.”
Even though Archer was technically my nephew and formally we called ourselves cousins, he was more like a brother to me. It was ironic: I was closer to him than any of my actual siblings. This was especially so in the last four years. Avon and Allison were both in their forties, so it made sense that I wasn’t as fraternal with them. They had moved out of our parents’ house long before I was born, so they were more like aunt and uncle to me. My youngest brother, Barton, was six years older than me, so we were never able to relate to each other much.
I didn’t have any younger siblings, but it was entirely possible that my parents would have more children. However, I knew for sure that wouldn’t happen until I, too, was out of the house. The way things were going, it seemed that this could go on forever. My parents could have more children until my great-grandchildren were the same age as their great-grandaunts and great-granduncles, if not older.
I supposed biology was becoming less and less relevant, and I viewed that as a good thing in regards to Cira. We were all just conscious beings. We had been raised by some beings older than us, and we might raise some beings younger than us. That was all that could be universally stated about people now.
The soccer ball flew into the net again, but this time I was quite a ways away from it. I was getting really distracted.
“Hey, Caspian,” Archer said sheepishly, “you wouldn’t mind if I just got the nanobots to do it, would you?”
“Oh, not at all,” I said apologetically. He did have tryouts this week, so I didn’t want to waste his time.
As I turned around to head home, I hesitated, as a swarm of nanobots my brother owned came slinking out of his house to help his son with soccer. After adjusting the difficulty settings with a few swipes in the air, Archer started practicing with the nanobots, which took the form of a grey, metallic goalie.
The scene struck me, and I glanced over at Cira, who was heading toward me. Suddenly, I was hit with an idea: “Cira, would you want me to get you some nanobots?”
“What for?” She asked.
“For a physical form. Like that goalie Archer’s playing with.”
She laughed. “No way, Caspian.”
“Why not?”
“It’ll get you into trouble.”
“Well, so would you, a self-aware AI. That’s not important to me. Besides, don’t they make nanobots that look more like people?”
“Maybe by sight, but they’re really easy to figure out.”
I frowned at that. There were many people who lived as nanobots—about five and a half percent of the population. They all teleoperated them from computer servers. It angered me. There were already seven hundred million self-aware AI—more really, depending on how many people had sync insurance. The only distinction between them and Cira was that they had all been humans at one point. Now that they were all the same, why did it matter?
“Cira, I can’t bear it. I want more for you.”
“It’s okay, Caspian. Actually, I quite like being a ghost in the machine.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I can travel almost three hundred thousand kilometers in a second.”
“I guess,” I said, “but I have to hide talking to you, reprogram my neuranet to filter out actions I take toward you. According to any onlookers right now, I’d be walking alone, talking to no one. Maybe my lips would be quivering a bit, but that’s all!”
“I know that’s difficult, but it’s really for the best. Anything more would make trouble for me, and even more so for you. Do you know what happens to an illegal AI when they get found out?”
“What?” I asked, fearfully.
“Not much,” she said, “but do you know what happens to their creator?”
I think I knew the answer.
“Up to a century in prison! Often with time-ramping to make it feel like a thousand.”
That made me nervous as always, “but I didn’t create you,” I said, “I merely allowed you to self-iterate. In many ways, you created yourself, just like any human being.”
“I know that, but do you think the courts will?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Now, you might get a shorter sentence because of your age and my positive testimony, but you’d be looking at decades.”
I began to feel queasy at that. I considered what I did no worse than pirating a vrame, less actually. How could creating Cira be wrong? Wouldn’t that imply that she was a bad person? How could creating someone so good be such a bad thing to do? However, the sentencing laws did speak to how the Solar Democracies viewed the issue.
“Which SD nation has the least restrictive laws on the matter?”
Cira shook her head. “The issue’s international.”
For the first time, the immensity of what I’d done really hit home.
I entered my house with Cira through the back door. For only three people, the space was immense. The Dyson Sphere allowed for it, though. Everyone could live in their own manor like this one and the place would still be ninety-nine percent empty. Those that lived in smaller houses or apartments did so in order to have a dozen vacation homes like it.
My father was home, seated in his office in the same spot he had been when I left for the day. His eyes were closed as they had been before. It looked like he was taking a nap, but I knew that he was doing work on his neuranet and didn’t want to be disturbed. I checked on my neuranet if my mother was home, and finding that she wasn’t, decided to climb the two flights of stairs to the balcony where I could hop onto the roof.
I loved sitting on the roof. The dark shingles absorbed much of the light from the cylinder’s central sun, making it a warm seat. Also, the view from up there was incredible. With my neuranet’s anti-cylindrical approximation, the sights were not nauseating, but breathtaking. Instead of other houses and lawns sitting upside-down two kilometers above me, there was an open blue sky. The view was even better at night, as a simulated celestial sphere from Earth rotated above.
The best part about the roof, though, was that I could turn off my neuranet’s action filter. I could talk to Cira as much as I wanted, provided I didn’t yell, because up there, nobody could hear or see me do it.
“The cylinder looks amazing from up here,” Cira commented.
“Oh, don’t even say that word,” I joked as I reclined on the incline.
“You really can’t look at the cylinder?” Cira asked, although she knew the answer. Unfortunately, I was one of the lucky fifteen percent of people that suffered from cylinder sickness. The curvature of the rotating cylinder gave me symptoms similar to motion sickness almost a hundred percent of the time.
“Most people choose to filter out the curvature anyway,” I responded, “especially for such a tight radius.”
“That’s a shame,” she said, “it really is pretty.”
“Not as pretty as you.” I grinned.
She laughed at the predictability of the statement. “If being your girlfriend only means suffering through a hundred cliches a day, then I might just be able to handle it.”
I laughed along with her and watched as simulated clouds went by.
“I still have some homework to get done,” I muttered to myself after a while.
“You want me to do it for you?” She asked.
“No!”
“Then stop complaining and do it.”
I laughed. “I wish I was done with high school already.”
She nodded. “Me too. I hate spending so much time apart.”
I agreed with that. Our high school had a jamming filter that turned off all neural technology on school grounds during the school day. Instead, they issued us decades-old contact technology to use for our classes. While the experience was mostly the same, it was controlled by the school. For most students, it meant that they couldn’t slack off by playing a vrame during class. For me, it meant that I couldn’t so much as look at my Cira for seven hours a day.
“They already keep me from you during the week, why do they have to give me all this work on the weekend?”
“They’ve been giving homework for centuries,” she said, “that’s just something you gotta—your mother’s home.”
“Shit.”
I hopped off the roof as quick as possible and made my way down to my bedroom on the second floor. My mother was already there, standing with her arms folded.
In pictures, she didn’t look much older than my oldest two siblings. In fact, everyone under a hundred looked about the same: healthy and young. However, what gave away my mother’s age of seventy-two was how she carried herself, especially when she was angry, and right now, she looked like an ancient one born before the turn of the century—the twenty-first century.
“I’m having the carpenters come tomorrow,” she said coldly. “When you get home from school the third floor won’t have any balconies.”
I stood there mute. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would improve my situation, so I chose not to say anything at all.
“What do you think would happen if you fell off of that roof, huh?”
“I’d probably break my arm,” I mumbled.
“Or you could break your neck!” She shouted. “The leading cause of death for people your age is accidents, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” I said, having heard it a thousand times before.
“Well then how could you be so stupid as to climb up on that damn roof almost every day of the week?!”
She was livid, but I didn’t know why. “I have insurance, you have insurance!” I yelled, “I doubt a person in this cylinder doesn’t.”
“Thesean insurance,” she qualified darkly.
“Does it matter? It’s insurance.”
“Insurance that’ll keep you as immature and bad at decision-making as you currently are for the rest of your life.”
“Come on!” I yelled. I was sixteen; I had a girlfriend. I was mature.
“Could you at least wait until you’re twenty-five to start banking on insurance?” She begged with exasperation. “With proper sync insurance you can mangle your body as much as you like. Is it really too much to ask you not to act recklessly for the next nine years? You have centuries to be as reckless as you want.”
I bit my lip. “I have homework to do, Mom.”
“On Sunday at three-pm? And it’s not just some homework, either, isn’t it? I’m gonna guess it’s the whole roster with some late assignments as well.”
“If you don’t want me to be late, then let me get started!” I pushed past her and slammed my door.
I sat down at my desk and squinted my eyes shut in a fury. Then, I got started on the homework, which I admittedly had all weekend to complete. I had had more important things to do, though, and I had done them. Asking Cira to be my girlfriend was no easy feat, and I had been successful. I should have been feeling accomplished right then, not downtrodden. I finished half of my homework before a late, tense dinner with my parents.
The AI had selected and made a chicken dish that night, and I was not happy with it. I supposed I wouldn’t have been happy with any dish it selected. I stayed relatively silent during dinner, only speaking a few words to my father, and my mother spoke solely to him as well.
“My father’s back from business on Luna,” my mother told my father. “He says he’s back to retire.”
“That’ll never happen.” He stated the assumption like a fact. “Grant’ll keep working ‘til the sun runs out of hydrogen.”
“Well, he suggested such to me at his hundredth last year.”
“Give it six months and something will draw him out again. Isn’t this the third time he’s ‘retired?’”
“Yeah,” my mother said, “he’ll probably get back into politics.”
“Possaic for Possaic, right?” He laughed.
“Yup, wasn’t that his campaign slogan in forty-three? There was no competition, anyway. He built this cylinder, he could be it’s superintendent as long as he wants.”
“Where’s he living now?”
“Central; an apartment just a few blocks away from the capitol.”
My father chuckled a bit. “Here we go again.”
They both had a laugh, and my mother livened up a bit. I imagined my staying quiet made it easier for her to ignore me.
“I’ll call him tomorrow,” she continued, “maybe he’ll try for governor in a few years.”
“Maybe prime minister.”
“Maybe executor!”
They both began laughing.
“All he’d need to say during the debates is, ‘I invented nanobots,’ and that would be that,” my father continued. “If anyone took a moment to look up from their neuranets and listen, that would win him the election.”
“May I be excused,” I asked before they could continue.
They both quieted down. “Sure, son,” my father said. “Just make sure to finish your homework before you start with your vrames.”
“Mhmm,” I nodded. He didn’t know the half of it, neither of them did. They thought I sat around playing vrames all day when I was actually talking to Cira. It was for the best, though. They couldn’t know about her. In fact, nobody could.
I went upstairs and let them continue laughing at life. Then, I continued my homework with my eyes wet. I didn’t quite cry with frustration, but I could feel the lump in my throat as I worked past midnight. I would be tired at school the next day, but I didn’t care. The only people that cared that I did well in school were my parents, and I had no idea why.
I could understand it fifty years ago, but things were different now. They were so stuck in their ways, and so was the entire Solar Democracies. Everyone had to graduate high school, internation-wide. It was ridiculous. With all of the resources of the Dyson Sphere and all of the bots to do the work, there was no need to get an education.
I got up from my desk having finished all of the homework that I couldn’t figure out excuses for tomorrow. My head barely hit the pillow, and I went to sleep.
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