Gestation, John Gold [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

Project Chrysalis

Book One Gestation

John Gold

Translated by Jared Firth

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Contents:

Contents:

Part One

Sword and Shield

Part Two

Prelude to War

Book Recommendations:

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Part One

Sword and Shield

What could a twelve-year-old child understand about life? Family and the colony leadership are there to pick you up when you fall; they give you food when you’re hungry and they offer you an education. What does a twelve-year-old child living in an orphanage understand about life? It’s a struggle. You have to fight for your place in the sun, and you have to take out your enemies, no matter whether you’re a boy or a girl. Nobody will ever help you out of the goodness of their heart. That’s all they know, even if it hasn’t yet formed into a worldview or hashed itself out into a clear set of beliefs.

Eliza Donovan, psychologist at the Psychological Development Center for Children, sat in her office thinking about what to do with the children who found themselves in an orphanage at that age. She was in the middle of an internship focused on her specialty, correcting the behavior of problematic orphans, and was looking at a permanent position with her own project when she finished.

There are ways of guiding and molding the worldview children have, but only if you get to them before they turn twelve. From then on, the only way specialists can help is if the child recognizes their problems and seeks out psychiatric help.

Eliza, as an inveterate optimist, and an open and cheerful kind of person, was very different from her colleagues. Her sunny disposition made her a joy for anyone to talk to, and her youth and beauty only made things easier for her. In the harsh space age, with colonies ploughing the expanses of the universe, men saw in her an angel from the ancient myths.

Weighing on her mind was a group of kids from an orphanage in the sixth circle. Well, not exactly a group. They were loners, children who hadn’t acclimated in other orphanages, and who were constantly in open or secret conflict with their peers. Eliza worried that failing to find their place in the community would turn their need for communication, belonging, and recognition ugly: sociopathy, manic disorders, bad company. On the other hand, guiding them onto the straight and narrow would leave them specialists, scientists, and even the misanthropes of new modernity. They were used to depending on no one but themselves, the rest of the world divided into enemies and irrelevants. “Friend” was a meaningless word replaced in their vocabulary by “partner.” But turning loners into potential specialists was a task for a psychologist who could apply both direct and indirect methods to correct their behavior.

Eliza had an interesting case on her hands. Anji Ganet was a twelve-year-old boy who’d already seen three psychiatrists and two psychopathologists. To a man, they’d pronounced him in good health, knowingly refusing to talk with either peers or doctors. There were no behavioral patterns deviating from the norm, though nobody knew how he spent his free time. He took down everything that could have been used to track him in the free zone.

Over the previous thirty years, the government had employed a drastic and somewhat harsh solution to the orphan problem. Children older than six were all given a full-immersion game capsule that doubled as their bed. Before that age, they used contact lenses or nanobots in their eyeballs. The devices in both cases dropped them into a virtual reality that gradually taught them how to use the infonet. At twelve, with the permission of their caregiver, they were given their own higher-level gaming account. Permission was no longer needed once they turned fourteen, and mature content was unlocked when they turned eighteen. Throughout the spectrum, children selected a race and name, after which they were placed in an in-game family, often with brothers and sisters. Everyone else in their families were NPCs. It was a humane solution—the children needed the love and care of parents, and the government couldn’t give that to them directly, so it offered access to a world that could. Orphanage life meant eight hours asleep, twelve hours free time, and four hours required schooling.

Project Chrysalis, a Lunar government program, was scheduled to start that month. The UN and a committee of independent experts had titled it the project of the century.

Lunar was an independent nation formed sixty years prior on the dark side of the moon. It was unaffiliated with any of the coalitions or alliances; its borders were closed, and it was only sparsely populated.

Back then, sixty years before, Armadillo Industries had declared its independence, taking up just part of the moon’s surface area. Three short wars followed in quick succession, along with seven other attempts to take Lunar by force but nobody could defeat the dwarf nation. Even nuclear and bacterial weapons proved unequal to the task, and not a single person in Lunar died throughout the entire turbulent period. In fact, it was a fully autonomous and robotized defense system that held the enemy ships at bay and repelled their marines as if they were nothing more than a group of naughty children. Lunar was heaven for scientists, and it even began limiting its invitations to the cream of the crop. Technical advancement was the order of the day, with the rest of the nations left in the dust.

The previous year, Lunar announced Project Chrysalis. Six months later, the entire gaming community received free