ONeill - Atoma and the Blockchain Game

Click the link and find out about my follow-up books and related goodies .

Sign Up For My Newsletter

To

My Girls

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

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

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

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

Fricking robots were everywhere .

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

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

This wasnt going to be a typical school day. All my morning lessons had been canceled. Today, they begin readying us for Citizenship Celebration Day. Everyone called it CCD. They tell us it is a joyous event. We are primed to look forward to the day we will become adults on our sixteenth year. The event is always held in local town halls where family and friends watch the nurses place a cap on our heads. Each cap is filled with small round nodes that relay signals from the synapses of our gray matter to an AI that reads and analyses them. For what reason does the AI do that will be the first question I have for the instructors .

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

Dont forget your med-shot, Ellie, my sister, called out from under her blankets. You already left it behind yesterday, so you better take it this morning .

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

I dont mind that my brain works at twice the speed of most others. Its a bonus with only boredom being my enemy. I even watch the holovids at twice the normal speed to keep them interesting .

Youre not Mom, I snap back .

Ill tell her, she warned .

No, you wont, I muttered feeling the first flush of irritation with her .

Yes, I will, she replied in a snarky voice. Im sick of covering for you whenever you get into trouble at school. Its not supposed to work that way. Youre my big sister so you should be covering for me and not the other way around .

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

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

Shit, Atoma, she sits up in surprise. Youve done it now .

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

What are you going to do? Ellie asked .

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

Bin it, I tell her .

You cant do that, she said .

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

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

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

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

She giggled .

Im actually relieved, she said. That stuff made you unbelievably calm .

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

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

I gave her a hug. Im not going anywhere , Ell .

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

When we boarded the shuttle, we jostled each other for the best seats. I liked to sit close to the aisle where I could be a part of multiple conversations happening all around me. I wasnt the class clown, Joanne Chin wore that label proudly, but I was competition for Jo. I remember the laughter and teasing, and maybe there was some light bullying .

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

There were two stations locked in orbit between the gravities of the Earth and the Moon at what in celestial mechanics is known as the Lagrange points. They were marvels of construction and awesome enough in themselves, but they werent anything like the dozens they said they planned to have around Jupiter. When they would start building those, no one knew for sure. All the talk had quietened down ever since the first expedition to Mars went missing .

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

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

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