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 protege, 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.
