CHILD PLAY
Part 2:
Commander Rick Strong
1
Identity: Commander Rick Strong
From this altitude, the stars just began to poke their pinpricks of light through the dark blue-violet sky. As the sun rose and morning broke fully, the hazy film of the Earth’s atmosphere painted a milky edge onto the curved horizon.
Looking down, I could just make out Atopia flashing like a distant green gem beneath wisps of stratospheric clouds, almost swallowed in the endless seas below. Zooming in to view it from here, Atopia appeared as a forested island about a mile across fringed by white-sand beaches. The only visible structures on its surface were the ring of the mass driver circling it and the four gleaming farm towers that rose up out of its center.
Returning my focus to the job at hand, I did another sweep of the area. Still nothing. I zeroed in on one of our UAVs, a giant, gossamer-winged creature whose photovoltaics glittered and reflected the morning sunshine back into the emptiness. In my telepresence point-of-view I followed it, watching its massive transparent propeller swing slowly around and around, urging it onward into the edge of space.
“Good enough?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think that’s far enough,” responded Echo, my proxxi.
“No hurry. Let’s make sure nothing is out here.”
I was enjoying the lazy crawl across the top of the world with the UAV. I took a deep breath, watching the sun reflect off the seas. The silence was serene. I should come up more often.
Just then, the new metasense I’d had installed prickled the back of my neck.
Turning my viewpoint around, I could see Patricia Killiam and her gaggle of reporters from the marketing presentation 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. They appeared as a halo of tiny stars hanging 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 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 outward and away. 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. Backpedaling down and away, I watched the sheet of flame envelope the sky.
“Very nice,” I declared, snapping 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 folded arms beside me, 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 toward 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 tiny explosive pellets into the sky at speeds of up to seven miles per 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 superheated plasma at ranges of a hundred or more miles away. It could take out incoming ballistic missiles, cruise weapons, aircraft, pretty much anything coming our way.
Heck, if I feel like it, I thought, I could even take out a mean-looking flock of seagulls from two hundred clicks.
And so far, seagulls were all that dared come near us.
Atopia bristled with an array of fearsome weapons, of which the slingshots were just one part. Some of my other toys included the mass driver and the aerial and submarine UAV defense systems, not to mention the offensive and defensive cyberweapons. 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.
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 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.
We were closely allied with America, of course, but the United States had enough trouble taking care of its shrinking sphere of influence. I should know—I spent my earlier career in the thick of the first Weather War battles.
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. After damming nearly all of the water flowing out of the mountains, China’s 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 engulf most of Asia and Africa. Of course, the world teetering on the brink of destruction was nothing new.
And now I was in the center of the cyber-universe.
Proudly, I looked around at the Command staff. They were really starting to come together as a team. Just then, I received a ping from Patricia Killiam asking for a quick chat.
The air began to shimmer in an empty space beside me, and her image slowly materialized. She was lighting up a cigarette and smiling at me, dressed in a dark business suit, old-school style, her hair done up in a tight gray bun. Relaxed, but 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.
It was the first time we’d tested the slingshots, and they’d more than lived up to expectations.
I checked some last-second details. “That about does it.”
“Good, because you scared the heck out of what wildlife I’ve managed to nurture on this tin can,” she admonished cheerfully and took 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. That was quite the shock-and-awe campaign.”
“You gotta wake up the neighbors from time to time,” I laughed.
We’d purposely decided not to pssi-block anything in order to measure emotional responses during the test. I’d talked to Dr. Granger about getting the best bang for the buck out of our weapons exercises to impress upon the rest of the world how they’d better not mess with us.
“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. “Good work.”
“Did you see that thunderstorm coming in? We’ve been tracking that depression for weeks, 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?”
I’d returned to fiddling with the slingshot control systems, but this got my attention. I looked up at her.
“Actually,” I said slowly, “that would be great. You wouldn’t mind?” Cindy, my wife, was having a hard time adjusting to us coming to Atopia. We could use the time together to re-connect. “So you really think that whole sim kid thing might be a good idea?”
Patricia hesitated. “Yes, if you’re careful.”
“Maybe I’ll speak to her about it then. I’ll see you later.” I smiled at her as she thanked me again and walked off, fading away without another word.
Patricia was one of the founding fathers, so to speak, of Atopia. After the mess the rest of the world had become, the best and brightest of the world had emigrated to build the new New World, the Bensalem group of seasteads in the Pacific Ocean, of which Atopia was the crown jewel. Atopia was supposed to be—was marketed as—this shining beacon of libertarian ideals. She was, by far, the largest in a collection of platforms in the oceans 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 rest of humanity.
I laughed to myself. Tough guy, huh? Who was I kidding? I was a washed-up basket case who could barely manage a night of sleep without waking up in a terrified sweat half of the time. The only reason I was here was to try to revive my relationship with my wife. Without Cindy, I would be off in some seedy 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, feeling that old guilt begin to bleed out around the edges of my life.
“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.
“Please,” 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.”
Echo nodded and silently walked off to fetch the flowers. He was good at taking orders.