Ouray, Colorado

Year: 2117

“Alright, Zeus! I think this just might work!”

I shut down my virtual lab and jumped off my Zero G couch and walked over to my cooler to grab me a drink of water. I’m nearing the completion of my fourth and final Ph.D. in NanoEngineering and only nineteen years old. I’d like to think I’m exceptionally gifted but since the introduction of APRIL’s to every person born on Earth, it has become rather difficult to get a job with anything less than three Ph.D.’s. This is especially true when we’re talking about space exploration.

Growing up in Ouray has always sparked my imagination of being kind of a speculator of sorts. We still got the occasional tourist wanting to try their luck panning for gold or visiting an old mine in the hopes of returning home with a sliver of gold. It’s pure nonsense since improved mining techniques have robbed these mountains of any surprises over the past hundred years.

I am a student at the Colorado School of Mines and have been attending classes there since the age of eight. Our family owns a rather large estate here in Ouray and they long since turned this abandoned mine into my very own personal computer lab/study den. I think it’s rather cool. At the base of the mountain cliff, there’s an old metal door that leads directly into the heart of the mountain. I think the previous landowner felt turning it into a garage off the road was cool, but my folks thought it was silly. Regardless, my play den had an old metal stair cage leading up into the basement of our house, and the exterior door led out to the road 100 feet below the house.

Dad has often said that most kids would die to have such a workspace and my classmates have all gushed over how lucky I was to live in an actual mine. Me? Well, I like it, and I guess it’s why my third Ph.D. at the age of sixteen was in Metallurgy and Material Science. I guess spending most of my life studying and playing inside a rock has sparked my imagination of living inside an asteroid, mining for rare earth metals and what not. I hope to apply to the United World Council for a job as a Space Mining Engineer. It’s a relatively new field, Space Mining, but Earth needs the materials, and the heavens are full of metal and untapped wealth.

Mom is beside herself due to the dangers associated with mining in space, but what did she expect from her only child when they moved to an old mining town when I was only three years old. People no longer had to live in the cities to work since Virtual Workspaces allowed people to live anywhere. Denver’s thirty million people made for plenty of pollution even with the advent of fusion reactors. People smell, and it doesn’t matter how clean the transports are, people still smell, especially when you are packed in like sardines. So, we left our 500 square foot apartment in Cherry Creek and moved to our 1,800 square foot home in Ouray. Best of all, we had an awesome mine!

My first two Ph.D.’s were fairly standard for kids today. Applied Mathematics and Computer Science seem to be the degrees of choice for any kid hoping to land an entry-level job. I was hoping to convince my professors that we could use nanomachines to mine asteroids for us rather than still relying on man-powered machines. My stupid cousin, Albert Pincock, screwed everything up with his unsanctioned experiments and was responsible for over three million deaths in California. I was still in high school when that happened, but the Pincock Edict made it illegal to experiment with APRIL in any fashion. Getting caught had long-reaching consequences, and nobody in their right mind would dare to try jailbreaking their APRIL.

My APRIL 5.0, whom I lovingly called Zeus, was as much part of me as anything. The Pincock Edict states that any human caught tampering with their APRIL would have his stripped from his very body and banned for life. This threat was more than enough. You couldn’t work, play or get a job without an APRIL. Hell. Every job was virtual these days. McDonald's was purely automated now so as my Dad always said, “No flipping burgers for you, boy.”

United Nano Communication gave Colorado School of Mines, or Mines as we all call it, permission for me to test my APRIL theory as long as it stayed in the virtual lab. I was given a “fake” virtual APRIL vial to experiment and play with while working on my thesis. It was maddening on many levels. First, the Boston Accords prevented self-aware AI’s from existing. Zeus may act like he’s self-aware sometimes but his code prevented such awareness. I could get the virtual APRIL to virtually mine metal, but it still needed direct input from me. It was easier to use the current technology which consisted of massive machinery to dig sort and analyze the composition of the rock. I was hoping to eliminate the need for supervised mining operations. If I could get an independent APRIL to manage the nanomachines, we’d be able to strip and process a ten cubic mile asteroid in less than a year versus the ten years it took today.

NFC, or near field communications, were also limited due to both my stupid cousin and the Boston Accord. Corporations of the old United States screwed up and hampered what can and can’t be done today.

A month ago, I was going through some of the boxes my father had laying around in my storage unit. I came across a storage device that looked so old I almost threw it away. Why would dad have a storage unit that required a cable to connect to it laying around? Surely he would have uploaded the contents to his APRIL and recycled the device. I laughed when I thought it might be my dad's porn collection and as they say about idle hands… I bought an old computer to see what was on it.

It wasn’t porn. It was Alberts research. I had no desire to mess with my APRIL, but Albert had uploaded petabytes of information regarding how to program and modify APRIL using Assembly language. I’ve been using UNC’s coding language called March, the play on words was not lost on me, and having little to no success. Albert likened Assembly language to CRISPR. CRISPR is a gene editing tool used for RNA and DNA manipulation. The APRIL used CRISPR techniques to help integrate into the human body by directly modifying RNA code inside human cells. Assembly language changes computer code with the same level of precision. It can alter values at the exact memory location of said information. I’m oversimplifying it, but even with the advances in science over nearly two hundred years, Assembly is the most powerful language and least used on by programmers. It’s kind of like eating a bowl of rice with tweezers.

I managed to isolate some nanomachines that are found in my body and got them to reproduce in my makeshift lab. I had no plans on doing what Albert did, but I would like to have a few thousand clean APRIL’s to play with outside the virtual space. I spent some day’s researching the laws and consulted with Zeus, and although what I planned on doing wasn’t illegal it skirted the line. Since it wasn’t illegal, and Zeus was permitted to help me with my Ph.D.… I was able to test a lot of things in virtuality to figure out how to get clean samples of APRIL.

I designed an Electro Magnetic Pulse generator using our household GOLDMAN FUSION MINI-REACTOR. The problem of fusion power was cracked before the Cyborg War. It was the Goldman AI at MIT which figured it out, but that didn’t stop future humans from using the AI discoveries to our advantage. We can’t have AI’s anymore, but we sure use their discoveries.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I took a long time working on shielding the computers and workspace to prevent leakage. Zeus said it wouldn’t work, but Albert’s research indicated that APRIL had some weak points. All I wanted to do was to have a blank slate to work from on this project. I began to believe that the virtual APRIL UNC sent me wasn’t as “open” as they promised. I theorized that creating a focused EMP towards my vial of APRIL should, in fact, wipe the slate clean.

Easy as pie…right?

I glanced up at my clock display in my Augmented Reality window and thought I’d have enough time for one attempt.

“Zeus, have I missed anything?”

“You’ve shielded everything and have spare parts behind a lead-lined screen. That should protect everything from radiation if it leaks.”

“I’ve got my lead-lined suit, but we shouldn’t have any leakage. I’ve double checked everything.”

“You’ve created a bomb, Caden.”

I sighed. “It’s not a bomb. It’s a directed pulse to the vial of your nanomachines. There won’t be an explosion just a pulse, and it’s done. Nothing destroyed. Then we can work on getting those damn machines to mining rock on their own. What better place to test my theory than inside an old mine shaft.”

Zeus paused. “You have a message from your mother. She’d like to know when to expect you for dinner.”

“Tell her…tell her to turn off any electronics for the next 30 minutes. Just in case my experiment malfunctions. If all goes well, I’ll be up in 45 minutes.”

“Would you like me to play back her response?”

“No. No. I know what she said.” I laughed at the imagined sight of her running around the house shutting down all the electronics cursing my name. It was their fault giving me a workspace down here. Idle hands.

I waited ten minutes trying to give my mother time to disconnect different appliances and turn off our robots. I had one down here to clean up my workspace, but I took him apart a couple of weeks ago so I could use his CPU on one of my APRIL tests. I haven’t gotten around to fixing it.

“Okay, Zeus, let’s get this experiment over with.”

I walked over to the fusion reactor and spun up the power and watched the power levels slowly rise to a quarter megawatt. I figured a half megawatt would be enough power test the theory. If it didn’t wipe out the protocols on the APRIL, I could try again. Just when I was about to press the button to start the pulse the door to my workspace opened, and I heard my dog, DJ, start tramping down the metal spiral stairs.

“Caden, watch your dog! We’re stepping out for a few minutes,” my father said.

“No! Dad!”

The door slammed shut, and DJ made it to the ground level and knocked over a side table next to my Zero G couch.

“DJ!”

My dog was a golden retriever and possibly the kindest laid back dog in the world if it wasn’t for his hyperactive tail. The darn thing was always knocking crap on the floor. I walked over to the side table and started picking up the loose paper notes I had on it.

“Caden,” Zeus said.

“Give me a second.” I placed the papers back on the table.

“Caden.”

“What?”

“You’ve exceeded one Megawatt. I suggest we abort the test or…”

“SHIT!”

I sprinted over to the fusion generator and hit the power switch, but it didn’t turn off. I pounded on it a few more times as my eye’s looked in horror at the readout saying it passed two megawatts in stored output.

“Shit. Shit Shit. Zeus, why isn’t it shut off?”

“Accessing…” Zeus droned in my head. “Releasing pulse in ten, nine,”

“Wait! It’s not designed to handle that much power. ZEUS! SHIT!” I dove to the floor and slid behind the Zero-G couch and pulled DJ to me

“Two, one.”