The Complete Atopia Chronicles

~ Childplay ~



Book 2:

Commander Rick Strong





1





Identity: Commander Rick Strong



FROM THIS ALTITUDE, the stars had just begun to poke their pinpricks of light through the deep blue violet sky. The hazy film of the Earth’s atmosphere painted a milky edge onto the curved horizon as the sun rose up and morning broke fully.

Looking down I could just make out Atopia, flashing like a distant green gem beneath the wisps of stratospheric clouds, almost swallowed amid the endless seas below. From here, lacking any surface buildings except for the ring of the mass driver circling it and the four gleaming farm towers that rose up out of its center, Atopia appeared as a forested island a mile across, fringed by white sand beaches.

Returning my focus to the job at hand, I did another sweep of the area. But still nothing. I zeroed in on one of our UAVs, a giant but gossamer–winged creature whose photovoltaics glittered and reflected the morning sunshine back into the emptiness. I followed it with my projected visual point of view, watching its massive transparent propeller swing slowly around and around, urging it onwards into the edge of space.

“Good enough?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think that’s far enough,” responded Echo, my proxxi.

“Well, no hurry. Let’s make sure nothing is out here.”

I was kind of enjoying this lazy crawl across the top of the world with the UAV. I took a deep breath, watching the sun reflect off the seas from between the clouds below, trying to force a sense of relaxation into my body. The silence was serene and complete up here. I should come up more often, I thought to myself.

Just then, the new metasense I’d had installed prickled the back of my neck.

I looked around to see Patricia and her gaggle of reporters rising up from Atopia. In this augmented display space, each of their points-of-presence blinked and then brightened to a steady glow as they assembled around the test range. To me they appeared as a halo of tiny stars, hanging nearly ninety thousand feet up here with me.

They were waiting for the show to begin.

“Okay Adriana, let’s light this thing up,” I said to one of my system operators, pushing my focus back down to the dot of Atopia below and leaving the UAV to spin off into the distance.

Immediately, the speck of Atopia began pulsing with intense flickers of light, and I waited for the show to begin. I counted; one, two, three, four, and then the first flashes began to glitter in the near distance.

Tiny concentric shockwaves flashed outwards and away and the empty space began to shimmer, filling with hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of white hot streaks that pancaked and mushroomed into a wall of flame. The inferno spread and engulfed me in a booming roar. I back-pedaled downwards and away, watching the sheet of flame envelope the sky.

“Very nice,” I declared, snapping back into my body at Atopia Defense Force Command.

Everyone was watching a three-dimensional display of the firestorm hovering over the center of the room, surrounded by the floating control systems of the slingshot battery.

“Would have been nice on that mission back in Nanda Devi, huh?” suggested Echo, standing with his arms folded beside me and admiring the show with the rest of the ADF Command team.

I took a deep breath.

“That’s just what I was thinking.”

Jimmy, my up-and-coming protégé, laughed, pointing towards his temple. “The wars of the future are going to be fought in here.”

“Wars have always been fought in there,” I chuckled back, “but even so, these babies sure make me feel better.”

The slingshot batteries were rotating platforms that could sling tens of thousands of explosive pellets per second into the sky at speeds of up to seven miles a second. The pellets were set to disintegrate and spread their incendiary contents at preset distances, creating a shield effect weapon that could put up an almost impenetrable wall of super heated plasma at ranges of up to a hundred or more miles away. This bad boy could take out incoming ballistic missiles, cruise weapons, aircraft, pretty much anything coming our way. Heck, I could have even taken out a mean looking flock of seagulls from two hundred clicks if I felt like it.

So far, seagulls were about all that dared come near us.

Atopia bristled with an array of fearsome weapons of which the slingshots were just one part of the high energy kinetic variety. Some of my other toys included the mass driver, the aerial and submarine UAV defense systems, not to mention the offensive and defensive cyber weapons. Everything was dusted down so heavy with smarticle sensor motes that even a flea couldn’t hop out there without me getting a bead on it. We were locked down tighter than a nun’s thighs, and that’s just how I liked it.

I looked around at the Command staff proudly. They were really starting to come together as a team. Just then I received a ping from Patricia Killiam, asking for a quick chat.

In an empty space beside me, the air began to shimmer, and her image slowly began to materialize. She was lighting up a cigarette and smiling at me, and dressed in a dark, short skirted business suit, old school style. Relaxed, but still somehow strict with her hair done up in a tight gray bun, and always well presented, never slouching. I liked Patricia.

“Finished playtime yet Rick?” she asked, shifting her hips from one side to the other and taking a drag from her smoke. She took a quick glance at the dissipating blaze on the main display, raising her eyebrows.

Today was the first time we’d tested the slingshots, and they’d more than lived up to their expectations. I checked a few last second details.

“Yeah, I think that about does it.”

“Good, because I think you scared the heck out of the wildlife I’ve managed to nurture on this tin can,” she admonished cheerfully, taking a puff from her smoke, “and the tourists want to go back in the water—not that you didn’t put on a good show for them. That was quite the shock and awe campaign.”

“Well you gotta wake up the neighbors from time to time,” I laughed.

We’d purposely decided not to pssi–block anything during the test to measure emotional responses during the weapons tests. I’d talked to Dr. Hal Granger about getting the best bang-for-the-buck out of our weapons exercises to impress on the rest of the world how not to mess with us. Hal projected the image of thoughtfulness on his broadcasts, but in person he was a bit of a toad—funny how that worked.

“Well, that’s your job, Rick, to help scare the world into respecting us. My job is to help scare the world into saving itself,” she said without a trace of humor. “Anyway, good work.”

“Did you see that thunderstorm coming in?” I asked after a moment. “We’ve been tracking that depression for weeks now, but we can’t avoid them all. Anyway, it’ll water your plants up top.”

She smiled.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” she suggested after a pause. I’d returned my attention to the slingshot control systems, but this thought snapped my mind back. I looked up at her.

“That’s actually a great idea,” I replied. Cindy, my wife, was having a hard time adjusting to coming here.

“So you really think that whole thing could be a good idea?” I added, coming back to an idea I’d been discussing with Pat earlier about Cindy.

“Yes, I think so,” she replied. I looked at her, sensing some hesitation, but her smile convinced me otherwise.

I nodded and smiled, then returned my attention to the slingshot systems.

“Thanks, Pat, see you later then.”

I smiled at her as she walked off and faded away without another word. This was definitely her party.

All that neo–hippie stuff that Atopia floated on in the waters of the world media didn’t mean that a lot of nasty people out there weren’t eyeing this little piece of heaven with very bad things in mind. Atopia was out in international waters, and as one of the first floating sovereign city-states, it had to be able to protect itself from all comers. At some point the Atopian masters of synthetic reality had to bow to where the rubber met the road in the dirty, physical world, and that was where I came in.

Atopia was closely allied with America, its original flag before independence, but America had enough trouble taking care of its shrinking sphere of influence. I should know after spending the best part of my career in the thick of the first Weather War skirmishes.

What had begun with China diverting water from rivers flowing out of the Himalayas had quickly turned the roof of the world into a global hot spot, but their double punch of seeding clouds to drop their rain before reaching India was what had really tipped the bucket. The combination had driven crop failures, mass starvations, and a nasty confrontation between the newly muscular superpowers.

While the initial conflict was long over, regional wars over a growing variety of resource depletions had continued to expand and had engulfed most of Asia. Of course, the world teetering on the brink of destruction was nothing new.

And now I was in the center of the cyber universe.

So the best and brightest of the world had begun emigrating to build the new New World, the Bensalem group of seasteads of which Atopia was the crown jewel. Atopia was supposed to be—was marketed as—this shining beacon of libertarian ideals. She was the largest of a collection of platforms in the Pacific off California, a kind of new Silicon Valley that would solve the world’s problems with technological wizardry.

Come to the offshore colonies, they said, for the security, fresh air, good food, the sun, the sea and first dibs on the latest and greatest in cyber gadgets. Come to escape the crowding, the pollution, the strife and conflict—and that, brother, was the truth. So the rich came here and to other places like this, while the rest of humanity watched us needily and greedily.

It was my job to protect them; the rich folks of Atopia, of course, not the masses of the rest of humanity.

I laughed to myself; tough guy, huh? Who was I kidding? I was a washed–up basket case who could hardly manage a night of sleep without waking up in a terrified sweat half the time. The only reason I was here was to try and make an attempt at reviving my relationship with my wife, Cindy. Without Cindy, I would be off in some sweaty corner of the world acting out a kind of ‘heart of darkness’ finale to my life in a psychotic blaze of glory.

Maybe that was a little dramatic. I’d probably be off soaking my sorrows in a bottle while desk jockeying in Washington—that sounded a little more likely. I smiled and began to run through the slingshot shutdown checklist, but then paused as I felt the old guilt begin to bleed out around the edges of my life again.

“Want me to pick up some flowers for her from Vince?” asked Echo. He always knew what I was thinking, especially when I was thinking about her.

“Yeah, that’s a great idea,” I responded without looking away from what I was doing. Noticing a breach report from Jimmy I added, “And could you look into what made that UAV malfunction? The damn thing circled back and burned up in the blaze. What the hell was it doing up there anyway?” I shook my head.

Echo nodded that he’d take care of it as he silently walked off. He was good at taking orders.

§

The excitement of the slingshot test hadn’t yet faded and I felt an energetic flow carrying me down the hallways back home. The flowers Echo had gotten from Vince were perfect. Flowers were always a sure bet for making a woman feel special, weren’t they?

“Hi, sweetie! I’m home!”

I proudly held the bouquet of real flowers in front of me as I walked through the door. I’d snuck along the corridors as I’d arrived with them, trying to avoid the prying eyes and bad graces of our neighbors who would have seen the wasteful gift in my hands.

Cindy looked at the flowers less than enthusiastically as I entered.

She hadn’t even bothered to shower today and sat in a dreary heap on the couch, bags under her eyes, watching a dimstim projection. A large head floated in the middle of our living room, contorting itself in the middle of a joke while a laugh track droned on in the background. Cindy wasn’t smiling, though, her face just dully reflecting light from the display.

It was going to be another one of those kinds of evenings.

“Rick, you didn’t need to buy flowers,” she immediately complained. “What are the neighbors going to think?”

“Sorry, sweetie.” I felt like I was always being sorry these days.

Walking in, I could see it was Dr. Hal Granger’s EmoShow floating in the display space in the middle of the room.

“Could we turn off Dr. Emo, please?” I asked more edgily than I intended. “I get enough of him during the day.”

I felt stupid standing there with the flowers.

“Sure. He’s all that gets me through the days here, but no problem,” she announced as Hal’s head disappeared from the middle of the room, casting the place into sullen silence. With a great sigh she glanced at me and declared, “Well, I guess I’ll get a vase or something.”

She swung herself laboriously off the couch and got up to go into the kitchen area.

“How was your day?” I said brightly, trying to restart the conversation. She was rummaging around in some drawers in the kitchen, off to the side of the large, open main room of our apartment.

“It was fine,” she responded, lightening up a bit, “but this place is so depressing. I feel like I can’t get any space or air. This apartment is so…subterranean.”

I rolled my eyes, but carefully. By Atopian standards we lived in a palace. Our place was near the edge of the underwater shelf, not more than eighty feet down. A large curved window looked out into the kelp forests, and rays of sunlight danced through from the waves above, illuminating the brightly colored fish swimming past.

Most people didn’t even have an exterior window, never mind all this space and furnishings. That was the entire point of Atopia: with everyone here having deep and easy access to almost perfect synthetic reality, you didn’t need much in the way of space or material things in the physical world.

“Submarine,” I corrected her pointlessly, “you mean submarine.”

“Whatever. It’s dark and claustrophobic.”

She had found a vase and was filling it with water. The tap turned off after a few inches had filled its bottom, and then she walked purposely towards me with it in hand.

“Cindy,” I started, and then stopped. I searched for the right words. “Cindy, just try to use the pssi system. You can be anywhere, do anything you want.”

That was the wrong thing to say. I took the vase of water from her hands and cringed looking at her face. I was a real tough guy, all right.

“I don’t like the pssi system!” she spat out at me. Then she closed her eyes, counting to ten as she backed up a little. Her shoulders relaxed and she opened her eyes.

I said nothing.

“Okay, sorry, I just had a bad day. Sorry.” She shook her head.

“Look, pssi is great for watching stuff and surfing the net, but I don’t like all this…this…” she stuttered, searching for words and waving her hands around in the air, “all this flittering and stimswitching. It’s weird.”

“I know,” I acknowledged. I’d been subjected to enough of Dr. Hal’s EmoShow to know that acknowledging your partner’s feelings was important. “I know this isn’t working out the way we hoped, but I took on a commitment here, and I can’t very well crawl back to Washington with my tail between my legs now. I mean, just try and give it a chance, or at least go up on the beaches?”

I was holding the vase with one hand and waving the other towards the ceiling, pleading with her. She took the vase back from me and smiled as she poked at the flowers.

“I know you’re right, Rick. And these are beautiful flowers,” she said, leaning down to put them on the table. She stepped back and stood straight up to admire them.

“I’ll try harder,” she declared.

My heart filled with some small hope.

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

“It is nice being able to use pssi to spend time with my sister back home,” she admitted, “and she has such great kids.”

I could see what was coming next, and my heart sank back down fearfully.

“Rick, have you thought about what we talked about? What would make me really happy? The reason I thought we came here?”

“I’ve thought about it, sweetie. I’m just not sure that either of us is ready for it,” I replied. “Just not quite yet, okay?”

“Okay,” she replied, doing her best to smile as I walked over to give her a hug.

I had an idea.