Atoma and the Blockchain: Atoma Series, #1

By Gerard O'Neill

Every problem comes with a solution.

And every solution has its problem.

Enter Atoma.

 

Before my accident, the biggest gripe I had was with the way adults handled my ADHD. On the eve of my 16th birthday and my Citizen's Celebration Day ritual everything changed forever. Just outside of Chicago my school air-shuttle crashed. Oh, they were able to rebuild me, and everything should have been fine. If only the artificial intelligence that controlled the robotic surgeon did not discover the secret my mother managed to hide for 15 years. Even from me! I woke up to discover I was no longer a citizen. I was not even legally human. I had no rights at all. They gave me a choice. I could live a short harsh life in a gulag on the tundra. Or I could agree to be trained inside a mysterious facility for a high-risk expedition. In other words, a suicide mission. It wasn't difficult to decide which to choose, because I knew one thing they didn't... The big flaw in their plan. Me!

 

Atoma and the Blockchain is Book I in the science fiction action-adventure Atoma series. Book II is out soon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gerard O'Neill Books
• Release date: Apr 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393302001

Gerard O'Neill

Gerard O'Neill is a novelist who lives with his family in Sydney, Australia, but originally hails from the deep south of New Zealand. He worked too long in the suffocating confines of the academy, which explains his need to escape to the great outdoors as often as possible. He speaks English reasonably well, and Japanese, but the last is still a work in progress. He enjoys Kendo. He also likes to pick up a good book, particularly if it's science fiction, and reads a wide range of books, including non-fiction. Gerard likes to keep up with the latest developments in science and technology. He reads history, and currently almost anything about the Russian revolution will grab his attention. https://www.gerardoneillbooks.com/ Also found here: https://www.facebook.com/GerardONeill.Books/

Book preview

1

Sisters

Bright red droplets cut through the leaden winter sky, forming a crosshatch of perfect lines above my snow-covered city. I gaze up at a grid traveled by convoys of long-haul drone freighters gliding day and night twenty-thousand feet over Chicago.

We truly are living in a world of robots. Cold, soulless, but oh so necessary.

I always imagined the highway in the sky was a wound left by an angry bear a moment after the swipe. Just before the blood begins to flow. Gray, white, and red were the only colors to be seen through the window of the bedroom I shared with my sister Ellie.

Dad always told us the mini ice age was supposed to end soon. We were waiting for a sign. Perhaps this year would turn out to be the warmest in three decades. I couldn’t wait for all the snow and ice to disappear. My entire life so far had been one long winter. I was over it.

Staring outside at all the whiteness had done its work. I was good and awake. I ran my hand over the touch bar on the wall next to my bed, sending a dark ripple across the window that turned it opaque. The image of a clock flashed 7 am before an annoyingly cheerful anime character floating across the screen ringing a noisy bell and a reminder message that the year 2050 was brought to us courtesy of the corporation governing Earth. Just like every other bleak year since the time of the Great Reset. 

I leaped from my bed to the warm floor. It wasn’t going to be a typical school day, not with all of my morning lessons canceled. They were going to prepare those in my grade who were old enough for their Citizenship Celebration Day for their ceremony. On our sixteenth birthday, we would all arrive at the local City Hall with our parents. The ceremony marked the day we officially became adults. The CCD was a medical procedure that took place in every town on every working day of the year.

Family and friends would fill the seats in front of a stage to see nurses place a cap studded with small round nodes on our heads. The nodes relayed signals from our gray matter to the AI. The results analyzed and the data used to make their Biometric ID for their new Bricards.

The CCD had always seemed odd to me, and I asked plenty of questions, but no one could ever answer them to my satisfaction. I was told that I think too much, and there was nothing to worry about. That it was just another ceremony. I was not convinced. 

Why?

That would be the first question I asked the instructors when we arrived at school. That’s if they allowed us to ask questions. Of course, most would be satisfied with whatever answer they were given.

At the end of the ceremony, they would receive their Bricard from an official. Everyone gets one. Hey, isn’t that great? Friends and family in the audience will go ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ and applaud us enthusiastically.

I was not looking forward to it. I mean, big deal! Mom’s Bricard did me just fine.

Don’t forget your med-shot, Ellie called out from under her blankets. You left it behind yesterday. You will get into trouble if you don’t take it this morning.

I stared at the medicine dispenser on my bedside table. My affliction was a form of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. That is what the nurse told Mom when I was diagnosed by the Doctor. ADHD had become so common that six out of every ten kids needed daily med-shots.

I didn’t mind that my brain worked at twice the speed of most others in my class. That seemed to me to be a bonus. My number one enemy was boredom. I even watched holovids at twice the normal speed just to keep them interesting. 

You’re not Mom, I snapped at my sister.

I’ll tell her you are not taking it, she warned.

No, you won’t, I muttered.

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

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

Not that I ever have a lot of patience, but on that morning I had woken up with less than usual. The med-shot smashed against the wall above my sister’s bed, showering her in pieces of the device. I stared as the content of the broken vial ran in streaks down the wall. I did not know I was going to do that.

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

Do you have another one of those? Ellie asked. 

I shook my head. I had managed to avoid picking up my prescription from the ratty old school nurse. I knew she would be talking to Mom.

What are you going to do? She asked already on the floor on her hands and knees picking up shards of glass and plastic. Maybe, you can rub it into your skin.

Bin it, I told her. 

You can’t do that, she said.

I snatched it from her hand and dropped it into the refuse combustor drawer in the wall. 

There, I said giving my sister the most reassuring smile I could muster. Now it’s gone.

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

I’m better off just handling it, I told her with a shrug. Everyone is just going to have to get used to the way I am eventually.

She giggled. 

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

Like a robot? I asked, feeling faintly irritated again, but not so much as before.

She nodded. 

I was beginning to worry I was losing you, she said.

I’m not going to go anywhere for a long while yet, Ell, I said, and I kissed her on the cheek. 

2

Shuttle Crash

Ifound my friends waiting at the shuttle stop chattering excitedly among themselves. The CCD was about to happen and they couldn’t wait. The idiots. 

To be honest, I didn’t think my friends were stupid at all. It was just that their excitement over the whole CCD ritual was a bit, well, sad.  Their enthusiasm soon had me buzzing too. It never took much to get me going, and by the time we boarded the shuttle, jostling each other for the best seats, I was positively manic. 

I sat next to the aisle, where I could be a part of all the conversations happening around me. I wasn’t the class clown, Joanne Chin wore that label proudly, but I was competition for Jo. I remember the laughter and teasing. Yes, maybe there was some light bullying too. That did happen, but it was nothing too mean.

My school was some distance out of the city. To get there, I needed to take the shuttle bus. I was studying celestial mechanics and all other things to do with aerospace. Since I was a little sprout, I always wanted to build a space station. For about as long as I could remember, since at least 2039 when I was a four-year-old, our great corporate governing body had talked about placing space stations between the planets in our solar system.

There were two stations locked in orbit between the gravities of Earth and the Moon at what in celestial mechanics was known as the Lagrange points. They were marvels of construction and awesome enough in themselves, but they weren’t anything like the dozens they promised would soon be orbiting Jupiter. All that talk had quietened down after the first expedition to Mars went missing. An entire crew and their vessel simply vanished into the void of space with not a trace to be found.

Many years back, before I was born, the corporations and governments on the planet united as a single giant all-controlling corporate megalith that named itself Earth Corporation. Most knew it simply as Earth Corp. The said the new form of government represented human progress. We would never have to go back to the days of a wasteful and unscientific system of competing nations. We were told the resources in our solar system were enough to colonize every sizable orb in it. We could finally leave our planet to live on other worlds.

The plan was to colonize the planets and the moons. Then, when most of the population had migrated to the outer limits of our solar system, Planet Earth would be transformed into one giant beautiful park where nature flourished. Precisely how that would happen was not made clear. It didn’t matter because it wasn’t as if the citizens had any say. Democracy was once more an ideal we could only dream about but rarely discussed for fear of attracting the interest of the ever-vigilant AI.

The Moon was already a designated science reserve off-limits to commercial enterprise. Instead of prospecting on the lunar surface, mining companies captured asteroids. When they looked at the planets they licked their lips, greedily anticipating the wealth to be plundered.

I decided on the kind of career I wanted more than two years ago. Growing up in Chicago didn’t offer a lot of choices, but I was lucky that Mom was a respected scientist. When she suggested engineering might be a fun job for someone who liked math and was a hands-on type I trusted her advice. After all, she was my mother, she was smart, and she was well-connected.

Overall, things were going nicely. I had made friends and my school was fun. My future was a firm path, well-trodden by many before me. It was taking me somewhere I wanted to go. Yes, life was looking rosy on that fateful morning, if I had bothered to sit in my seat and take a moment to reflect on it.  

I didn’t bother to snap my seat belt on before the shuttle lifted off. I was too busy playing the fool. By the time we leveled out after a sharp ascent through a storm system, I was dancing in the aisle, daring my friends to do the same. An irritating voice from the ceiling told me to sit down. Another stupid robot that was already reporting my behavior to the cockpit. I didn’t care because I would be in my seat by the time someone came into the passenger tube to check.

The intercity freighter that hit the shuttle had drifted off course. Overloaded with Bricard readers and suffering a rare programming error, the heavy drone sliced easily through the tail end. It would have killed us all if it wasn’t for our quick-thinking and ill-fated pilots. They hit the eject button a split second before the collision. The passenger section contained in a single tube rocketed upward to safety. The cockpit and the rest of the craft spun toward the ground in a fireball.

For a few brief seconds, the tube was in free fall before the stabilizing thrusters fired and the wings unfolded from beneath the cylinder. The remote-controlled glider landed in a field where the rescue services found it some ten minutes later. It was a timely escape and a textbook rescue. 

Things did not go so well for me. When the tube shot free of the shuttle, I was thrown against the ceiling and slammed against the seats. As the dark curtain mercifully came down, I glimpsed a pretty hand bounce against the floor. A hand that should have been attached to a wrist. I recognized the scar that ran from the second knuckle of the index finger to the roots of the nail. It was the result of bad timing and poor judgment on my part, the day I pulled a bone from the mouth of a dog. The hand was mine.

3

Blink!

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

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

Blink if you feel pain, said the eyes. 

Feel pain? Was she joking? I felt totally numb. 

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

This one’s for the I.C.U.

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

Book the Doctor.

Done.

She should be put in stasis, another broke in.

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

I was awake again.

You’ve been in an accident.

She was smiling. I could tell from her eyes as she peered down at me above her face mask.

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

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

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

You are going to be fine, Smiley Face continued.

I felt the point of a hypodermic spray gun against my neck then my pain melted away. 

I gazed up at the huge metal arm hanging over the table like a metallic cobra ready to strike.

The artificial intelligence known as the Doctor was networked throughout the hospital. It performed hundreds of operations like the one it was going to do on me all at the same time. Thousands across the continent. Millions around the world. Every operation performed by a single AI. Every hospital on the planet was linked to a single inhuman brain known as the Doctor. The beneficial power of an AI was that it could never make mistakes. That's what Earth Corporation told the world.

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

A thousand needles stabbed me all over, but the Doctor gave me the really good stuff and I floated off to Never-never land.

The giant mechanical arm of the robot Doctor was still hanging over me when I woke to find Mom standing at my feet. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and the smile she gave me was shaky. 

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

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

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

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

Androids can look human enough if you don’t look too closely at their eyes. The detail in the orbs is usually realistic but they are lifeless. It was obvious in the way they looked at you. Android designers could never get that detail right. The whole time a smiling android talks, it simply stares, as if it’s angry or high on some drug originally intended for patients under psychiatric care.

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

Mother turned to her in surprise. 

Whatever do you mean?

Surely you know? The