Wake, wake, wake.
The words came through his skull from a great distance curled about with chill fog and lack of interest.
</i>"Okay, young feller, next time, don't leap so hard for the ball." The eighty-five year old doctor said with a warm smile and bright eyes. His hands were deft with generations of practise, and the something... It faded on him.
"Next time, I'll incorporate my jeet kune do falling techniques into the snatch dive for the ball. I won't break my collarbone again, that way, anyways." The young boy said, his voice earnest and analytical and accepting.
"But its not neccessary for you to try so hard." The doctor said with soft eyes shared by the boy's parents.
"Isn't it?" He asked back, a bit hurt himself, and he saw pain in their eyes. He was eight. Their combined age was two hundred ninety-three.</i>
Words came to his mind. They were insistent, and demanding.
Wake, wake, wake.
He ignored them.
"But I am creative. Look, at my science fair. Not just the teachers, or my fellows in the multi-continent study group, but even that doctorate with the four degrees was impressed." The boy waved his hand at a diorama which showed the glaciers melting (due to heating coils as unshielded X-ray lasers were forbidden to middle school elementary students which had been his first choice), and the seas rising. After that, little robot men fled inland, and began building boats to send forth armadas to attack Egypt and its freshly built Pyramids.
In truth, the man knew, it was a little crude, but making the whole thing with human Bronze Age warriors at the scale of a ladybug, his younger self had hoped to impress. It had combined the New History, Robotics, and even a battle tactics sim as differing beginning conditions could result in different armies sweeping the simulated Mediterranean Sea. Just moving one captain could tilt the war for new lands after the sea stole Atlantis from the Cretans to the Egyptians. It was a living, breathing (or so it seemed) refutation of both the Great Man and the Historical Forces Theories of History.
His younger self waved at the diorama, and his teacher over the Net, a rather young sixty year old sighed in sympathy.
"It is superlative." And then he delivered the fatal thrust. "Better than all but four percent of the seventh grade science projects in the category of Multi-disciplinary Creative."
"Oh." Four percent. The magic circle was two percent. If you could do something better than ninety-eight percent of humanity, and it was deemed valuable, you could make your own way with others hurrying to open doors for you. Or you could take a well-paid job, do useful work and all at someone else's bidding for decades until you reached at least sixty minimum, and your real career finally started, maybe. If you still cared to be more than a worker at that time.
More insistent and louder the words came, covered in ice, and ice crackling all around them at their power.
Wake, wake, wake.
"The world could be worse, you know." The truly old man said with a faint smile. He was nearing his second century, and given the job of counselling the gifted children as he waited for the death angel.
"How?" Michael snapped.
The man smiled in the gentle way that was common in the world of the early twenty-second century After Death.
"You told me you enjoy reading the fiction of my youth. Alas, Babylon. Mad Max. Deathworld." The old man grinned, having a liking for those books of the days before even the Fall of Communism.
"They're so...crazy." Michael looked embarrassed, but he had been taught to be honest first, and polite and respectful second.
"Indeed. They are. Our half-pagan ancestors locked in a death struggle with a system devoted to looting and rampaging and sadism under the name of brotherly love and equality of outcome. How could our ancestors be anything but mad? But that's not my point. I tell you indeed, that those books might have come true."
"And Max's world would be worse than this one?" The older boy, still a boy, Michael did not sound wholly convinced.
"It would be an easier world than this one."
"Easier?" Michael is incredulous.
"Oh, absolutely. There you only have to fight for your life. Here you have to be brave and honest and love and be kind and dream great dreams of a bright future we don't let you make without a decades long apprenticeship first."
"There I could be a man. Right now." Michael said sobbing as he sat by the old man on a bench in a park that was not unusual in the slightest for its great beauty, and its hundred year old designer.
The old man patted him on the shoulder. For some tragedies, there was no cure, but love and patience.
Still louder, and Michael wanted to flee, so he did.
Wake, wake, wake. The words came softer toward the end as he slid away from something.
"I'm sorry." Michael did not know what to say. He knew it was his fault. Yet, he could not see where he had made a mistake except in attempting to be more than society was glad to give him.
The older man, a father of five, a young eighty, bowed his head after an all-seeing glance that seemed to read Michael's soul. It was as if he expected more from Michael, but upon not getting it, he turned to his private grief. To the inanimate body of what had been his son, torn and twisted by the hangglider's crash, that lay on the floor between them.
Michael had a vision of a great future, and so he enlisted a few others like himself who wanted more than a corner office for the next sixty years. He thought he could take his microbots and use them to load up a hanglider, and use a solar celled glider with a human pilot to get around legal restrictions on in city flight by robots. Then the microbots would jump off from the glider and bring the item they were delivering piece by piece, and assemble it in front of the customer without the pilot having to do anything but fly.
It worked well for two weeks. People were enchanted by the idea. And then Bor got hit by a crosswind and swept into a lightpole above a tollway. It was a long way to the ground wrapped around a lightpole which prevented the opening of his safety cube which should have protected him.
And now Michael wept for his friend.
The voice came and with it some concern. Michael needed to heed it the voice seemed to suggest. And Michael was happy too now.
Wake, wake, wake.
The man leaned back with a small smile, and put his cowboy boots on the empty desk in the small room. Michael stared at him, and took the proffered chair.
"Not quite the terror I'm made out to be, eh?" The man said wryly.
Michael said nothing, as his base core of terror suggested even though there was an overlay of curiosity. The man, with pale green eyes, did not seem to be offended.
"Michael Roger Hammer. That's a good name."
"Um, thank you sir."
--Inside, something exulted. He knew his name. He remembered.
"Do you know why you're here, Michael?" The man tossed in a piece of bubblegum into his mouth, and began to chew it.
"I've messed up royally. You've got the power to kill me if you decide too."
"I do." The man nodded. "Never used it once."
Michael's eyebrows rose in shock. Officers of the Last Court were fabled to go through life executing waitresses who brought them burnt toast.
"We do not advertise that. Simple fact is, some people won't pay attention until you have a blaster stuck up their nostril. Although most who are bent that way are dealt with before now. Either in crime, or they're given positions where their natural predilections do little harm to others or theirselves."
"Mort got that job as a fire ranger a bunch of us wanted." Michael burst out. The man flicked his eyelids, and a tiny screen flickered in front of one eye for a second.
He nodded.
"Got it in one. Mort does not realize it, but he is disbarred from over fifty percent of the jobs out there. No one would hire him. Because one day, he'd do something. It might be an accident. It might be deliberate even, although that's unlikely. Its even possible, he might go violent and mad. Mort believes the universe owes him. He deserves what those who have spent decades honing their skills have as a matter of right."
"But...is he wrong?" Michael asked thoughtfully. It was not a question the culture overmuch encouraged. But they did encourage honesty.
"That's a philosophical premise, and thus, in some sense, unprovable. Since we base our society on the Textus Receptus, the revelation of God to man, by our premises, yes, he's wrong. The universe owes you nothing."
"I-I don't think he's right." Michael said slowly. It did seem to him that someone who spent the last seven decades learning to be a violinist and was thus arguably better than Michael with his ten years of practise would probably have more power, more status, more money, more freedom, more connections than Michael. And Michael could not argue with that.
"It hurts doesn't it?"
Michael nodded intensely.
"You're somewhat like Mort. Oh," He waved off Michael's instant protest. "You respect others, and yourself, and your God. You respect reality which is the same thing really. But you find yourself in the intolerable position of having to wait. And so you try, so very hard. First with Active Team Sports, even in our time, more of a young man's game. Then Creativity. Then Dangerous Testing. Then Charm. Then your Hanglider Company which was very clever."
"But even now, Michael, you're burning the candle. I can see the incredible determination, the willingness to take the dangerous route to the top of K2 or Olympus Mons, a favorite of mine, by the way, is flagging. We made this route available for people with that determination."
"But I'm not good enough."
"No, you're not." The Judge paused. "I think in about five years, you'd finally give up. You'd spend the next fifteen as an apprentice. And then you'll kill yourself."
Michael almost sobbed again. It was all too likely. The fire inside him would end up destroying him.
"There are options, Michael. Other paths for someone like you. In fact, you, might be almost the ideal candidate for these."
Michael looked up to see an approving smile on the man's face.
"One, the JumpGate out on Triton. And two, a little secret project called the Torchthrowers."
"Torchthrowers?" Michael said curiously, having never heard of it. The JumpGate, where a man went naked into the gate because only biology survived through the gate, he had heard of, and indeed he had done a school project on it. Torchthrowers was tabula rasa to him.
"Yes, Torchthrowers, Captain Michael Hammer. Wake, wake, wake." A female voice intruded into his ears, and ice cold water dripped off him. With his vision blurry, he looked up to see the dark skin, and evenly parted hair of Doctor Tanya Morrow.
Suddenly, he felt dizzy, and grabbed the sides of the cryobath he was sitting naked inside of. Icebergs suited for tiny robot soldiers bumped into his pectoral muscles.
"Thought you were going catatonic on us, for a moment, Captain."
"No, me?" Michael scoffed even as he remembered his pain and fear.
"You're allowed to be human sir, especially after you've been frozen for three hundred forty nine years."
"Whoah?" Michael said, feeling the dizzy rush come back again. Hopefully it would pass. Now he needed to find out what crisis had called his battallion of operators out of cryo to solve. But first, a uniform, and some hot oatmeal with raisins.
End of Chapter One.
