MINDLYFT

CHAPTER 16

I was whisked away from all that Gutter shit. In a swirl of cloud dust Hinka HellsPath rebranded me from Gutter Villain to Virtuous citizen of MoonCorp. Formerly MaBell. Or so I learned later. New clothes, new hair, and a new, larger and much improved CrashPad high in the sky. There was even a huge swimming pool, gym and game room with a botanical garden, all on the two-hundredth floor, completely climate controlled. They filled my Bitty accounts with bling and gave me a cool visor so I could see what all the CapDrones were projecting without being influenced by it or forced to participate. Nobody but my own teammates and of course the boss Hinka, could even see me unless I granted permission. They gave me a day to relax and get used to my new home. I sent Dad pics just to gloat. He replied with smiley emojis in the form of a family photo, which included my little clone brother and our family dog Ollie.

I had a great home office which I spent most of the day fiddling with. This was its own little room, not some make-shift sliding transformer room with foldouts and slithering walls like my last pad. I was told my colleagues would be living on the same floor as me so we'd be a close nit group. I was really excited to meet them. Excited to go to work for the first time ever. Excited to be alive. I couldn't believe it. A real job doing something important. I'd have taken important to mean helping the elderly or making the air cleaner, but saving the Earth and all humanity was great too. Ollie had been right and I was still a bit weary of what that slobbering dog had under his collar, but if this turned out the way I was hoping, I'd have to do some slobbering of my own all over his snout.

I tried out all the visualization tools in my office and played a bunch of the games in the game room. I still hadn't been officially told the project was to stop an asteroid, or "Global Killer," but from what Ollie told me and Hinka's hint, I assumed that was the case. My early SphereNet searches for the term uncovered some horrific images. Since it wasn't something that had ever happened in modern times most of the images were digitized renditions based on theoretical studies of historical craters. Regardless, three dimensional HoloVids were a little terrifying. According to several theories its what killed the dinosaurs twenty million years ago. An asteroid the size of Texas wouldn't burn up in the atmosphere. More likely it would burn up the entire atmosphere and then the oceans and surface of the planet. Killing everything along the way.

I didn't know anything about asteroids so I spent a ton of time KnowLoading everything available in the SphereNet and even a whole KnowLoad dump on the subject compiled by an astrophysicist at the University of Reloj, the preeminent institution on prediction analytics. And I even did some of this learning by reading on my own, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, underlining and making notes as I went. Most of it I printed onto synthetic paper. 

I was forced to think about what I'd read. Question it, compare it to conflicting points of view, and imagine things as the words described them. This gave me a headache after awhile and took an enormous amount of concentration, not to mention gallons of coffee, but I'd never been more satisfied with knowledge in my life.

Instead of just knowing that asteroids can travel through space at 25 thousand miles per hour and contain copper, aluminum and hydrogen gas, I had time to consider and ponder whether the gas component and the exact make-up of the metallic content impacts the asteroid's speed. Whether its trajectory would be easier or more difficult to change under various orbital circumstances and whether changing any of those factors would impact the damage such a body might do to Earth. 

Unless those questions were actually already known they won't show up in the download. Unless those questions have already been asked by a "qualified" analyst, they will not have been posited for further research or inquiry. Unless my mind was able to sift through all the various known facts and studies of asteroids and orbital trajectories and studies of known planetary impacts, then I never would have thought of those questions. They came to me while daydreaming, something I wouldn't have had time for if I was uploading libraries of factoids in my sleep.