Chapter 1 / Prologue: Another Day, Another Thousand Dollars

	From my perspective, this whole course of events started during an especially boring eighth-period English class. I had let my mind wander during some stupid quiz and woke up to the teacher's shout of "TIME'S UP", which was at a decibel level that was also planned to rouse to attention my friend Tom DeLuca, two rows behind me. I then looked down at my paper and saw only my name, "Nathan Steele", and the date, "5-21-2326." Damn! Tom had been sleeping; I had been daydreaming about some new gadget I wanted to build.

	Oh well. It was Friday afternoon (meaning that a weekend was coming up) and I thus didn't especially care. Then one of my classmates, Tony, piped up from the back of the room: "There's gonna be no homework this weekend, understand?" Tony then proceeded to crack his knuckles.

	The teacher, Andrew Fletcher, felt like playing along, and he stammered out "Er…yeah…class dismissed."

	None of the 23 students in this particular 8th period English class lingered for long, myself included. I ran into Tom DeLuca again at the end of the hallway, near the staircases. 

	“Darnit, I am way too thirsty; it’s only a 15 degree day…”  He then headed over to the nearby water fountain.

	I stealthily moved in on his right, and cranked the water up full blast. Now it was time for some running. There was a set of double doors, leading to stairs, at the end of the hallway, and I went through them. I then clomped down the stairs and was out of the building rather quickly.

	Tom lived quite close to the school building, within a few blocks, so he normally walked, and today appeared to be no exception. I saw him turn left. I, however, turned right and began to walk in the direction of the nearest bus stop.

	Of course, four hundred and fifty years after its development, the internal combustion engine was out of use. These buses, and most other vehicles, ran on magnetic-repulsion hovering technology.

	I looked back on the Johnston High School building. It wasn't all that different in architectural style from the nearby ones, it was simply larger and with more levels. It had the same façade of molded sheet metal, and the same type of windows- rectangles about a meter long and one and a half meters tall. Those windows’ arrangement, in neatly packed rows and columns, was interrupted only by the set of doors.

	During the course of the ride, I thought up more strategies for 'The Game', that is, 'The Mercurian Duels' a new science-fiction computer game that was exceedingly popular at the moment. To put it in a nutshell, it involved running all sorts of special missions throughout the solar system, and doing so better than your opponent. Sometimes you met your opponent in open battle, with military forces government-sanctioned or otherwise. Sometimes, it came down to sabotage and politics.

In the game, most of the ten planets had a human presence either on their surfaces or on their moons; in reality, only the Earth, Moon and Mars had a heavy human presence. 

	This game, however, was fairly accurate in how it depicted the Earth. Although nuclear weapons had been used a few times after Nagasaki, massive nuclear disaster had never occurred, a major contributing factor to the planet remaining in relatively good shape. The planet's population had stayed at several billion- I believe that the last Republic census (2325) put the number at around 25 billion. 

Humanity had been rather ingenious about where to put all these people, and the game represented these devices. In addition to traditional land-cities, a concept that had existed for thousands of years, there are the giant North Pacific 'pier cities', that is, cities located on flat, modular ships. This level of civil engineering ingenuity had been displayed on land as well, with self-contained cities that are somewhat like skyscrapers that go horizontally as well as vertically, containing all normal city facilities somewhere within them. One advantage of these was that they were relatively easy to place in hostile environments, due to the fact that they’re self-contained and thus could have self-contained climate regulation. Sometimes, there was a desirable distancing achieved by the ability to place such cities in hostile environments. In fact, I had a memorable 'Mercurian Duels' game where I was based from a self-contained city in the desert of western North America. In addition, both the real world and the fictional world were united under one government, referred to as the 'Terrestrial Republic'.

	Come to think about it, a late night playing this game had probably dulled my attention to the point of that aimless in-class daydreaming earlier today. At any rate, my ride was almost over. The stop where I got off was at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Baumer Street, and my house was at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Grapevine Street. Getting from one corner to the other entailed a walk through the city's Triangle Park. This was planned. My “gadget” was actually a small spacecraft. I knew someone who got me a lot of the parts I needed; and he’d likely be somewhere in that park. That someone was Sgt. John Murphy, of the 7th Division's Mechanized Infantry section. In other words, this guy was a tank commander. He had access to quite a few military facilities; relevant to me was his access to military junkyards. The stuff in there was surplus from their perspective; cheaper and better than regular civilian stuff, from my perspective.

	"Hey, Nathan," he called out.

	"Yeah?"

	"I don’t really feel like a lot of talking right now, got to head home soon myself, but I wanted to say that I found another one of those ID-4's for you." (The ID-4 was the 4th-generation Ion Dynamics small-craft engine.)

	"Sweet! Thanks."

	“It’s in that gray cardboard box over there.”

I noticed a gray cardboard box next to a large white cooler marked DRINKS. (Did the cooler contain fine wine, perhaps?) I picked up the box and continued the walk to my house

	I opened out house door and flopped onto a overstuffed chair. Then I was interrupted by ‘Marvin’, the ‘personality’ of our entertainment system. At times he was annoying, at times amusing. “He-llo, Na-than,” it intoned, ‘How a-bout the fo-low-ing mo-vie selection?”

	“No, not that one, not right now,” I responded. “Activate the Humor Headquarters channel.” Its voice recognition mechanism complied, and I was soon watching ‘2H’.

	I began to open the parts box from Sgt. Murphy, paying attention to that with the 2H video in the background. The engine set didn’t contain that many separate parts, just a lot of wires dangling out a central component. However, there was a small cooling fan in the back. I tried to spin the fan, almost playfully, but the fan didn’t want to budge. Poking around, I discovered that some pieces of paper were jammed in near the spindle around which the fan rotated. Examining those pieces of paper, I nearly dropped the heavy metal engine on my foot. You see, ‘the pieces of paper’ were currency. A few $5s…and a $1000. Jackpot! Furthermore, I noticed that each of them had the same message scrawled in the bottom margin: “The Apocalypse comes August 13th”, or some such nonsense.

	I began to think about what I would do with that money. ‘The Mercurian Duels’ game subscriptions weren’t cheap, and neither were spaceship parts. (Sgt. Murphy wasn’t able to find everything I needed.) I was inspired get up and look for ideas on what to do with the money. I turned off the entertainment system, over the robot’s protests.

	Looking at the $1,000 bill itself, I noticed that it had a portrait of General James McKinnak (in fact, he the person that my home city, Kinnacksville, was named after) He was a hero of one of the wars of the late 2100s, which had been key in bringing about planetary unification. Nationalist sentiment had ridden high for centuries – the type and level of catastrophe that would force unification’s hand is something that I didn’t want to contemplate.

Then, I went to my bedroom, hoping that the objects within would spur ideas as to what to do with the recent cash find.

	Several of the items on a particular shelf had been gifts from my (moderately) rich uncle, Alex Frayer. You see, although it had long been known that asteroids contained iron, rock and/or ice, and perhaps nickel, it had recently been discovered that some asteroids contained more valuable metals and minerals. My uncle’s business involved mining some of these asteroids. It made sense that many of my gifts from him were made from assorted precious metals, as that was indeed his line of work. I had heard him describe the mining business, and it really sounded quite impressive. Gigantic robotic crawlers scoured the various asteroids, filling up massive storage bins with bits of rock. Small ships flew the bins to a nearby smelting center/ foundry. Then, the (relatively pure) metal was molded into convenient forms, such as 250g bars like the ones I had. Then, the metal was shipped to Earth spaceports and the Martian industrial centers. The serious side of me wanted to contact him and get involved with that business somehow. The less-serious part of my brain, however, was coming up with yet crazier ideas for using the money. I suppose I’d think about it later.

	I decided to go looking for gifts nearby. One shop right in my path was a jeweler’s. Yes, I had gone out for gifts, but not in the kind of price range that a jeweler has. I decided to head to some of the other nearby retail establishments. I found a restaurant gift certificate for my parents (Isaac and Kathryn), as well as some movie/VR disks for my 11 year old sister, Alexa. That was it for now, and I headed home. In the intervening time, my parents and Alexa had evidently gotten back. I walked in the door with a rather smug look on my face. “Well, guess who found a large quantity of money today?,” I said, holding out the items.

	“Well, that’s very nice of you,” my mom said as she saw store bags that were clearly gift items.
	“Was it legally acquired money?” Alexa teased.

	“O’Malley’s Steakhouse? Nice one. Haven’t been there in a while.” That was Dad.
	“I’m sorry, son, that was too erudite. I meant: “Meeat! Thog like! (grunt)”, he said, mimicing O’Malleys caveman-based advertising campaign.

	Alexa said of her gift,. “Princess Daria, parts 3 and 4. Awesome! Part 2 was such a cliffhanger.” Maybe Daria’s adventures did have a sophisticated plot by an eleven year old’s standards; from what I had heard of the series, I thought otherwise. I had different tastes in low-plot movies; let’s leave it at that.

	Now it was on to the food consumption chamber. The kitchen’s automated system had assembled meat disks in a bread casing, along with slivers of a fried tuber, and sugar-coated fruit.

In the mental frenzy triggered by my discovery of the $1,000 bills, I had half-forgotten about the engine component in which I had found the money in the first place. Once this thought crossed my mind, I headed out to a heavy-duty shed in which I was storing my partially built spaceship. To add some degree of cool secret agent panache to the building, I had an access keycard and a simple voice recognition password system. But most of the gadgetry was inside.

	The ship itself was somewhat T-shaped, with the engine mounts constituting the ‘top bar’ of the T. The engine mount consisted of a metal block with six round ports for the engine components. There were two on top and four on the bottom, and the top was tapered accordingly. 

	The lefthand space in the bottom row was still empty, and I moved towards placing my new engine component there.

	Installing this thing required a process with few, albeit tedious, steps. First, you had to connect various wire strands. Red in the engine mount block connected with red on the actual engine; this wire went to the fuel system. Green went to the cockpit control panel, and black would have connected to the emergency self-destruct device. I had chosen not to install a self-destruct “feature”, so right now the black wire ends connected to empty space. In addition to the wires, there was a small tube sprouting out of the fuel tank that needed to be locked in place. Finally, the engine slid in and clicked, but it was advised to solder or weld the outer rim, as having an engine fall out is generally an incident you want to avoid.

	Standing back and looking at the work in progress, I guessed that it was about four-fifths complete. The fuel tank was right behind the engines; it still needed to be filled, although there was obviously no reason to jump the gun on that step. The cargo compartment, which needed its lid installed, lined up perfectly right in front of the fuel tanks. (I supposed that a blown cargo compartment was better than a blown cockpit.) It measured about one and a half meters wide by about two and a half meters long, which made it slightly thinner than the fuel tank assembly. The cockpit, which was noticeably thinner, was in front of that.

	This is where many of the yet-to-be installed components belonged. I was still looking for several control panel sections. The whole thing could also use paint (I’d prefer a color besides metallic grey), as well as a coating of the heatshield solvent Epsilon-1400. There were a few other assorted parts I already hand, and those simply needed to be installed. That wasn’t too difficult, and I was back out of the garage fairly quickly.

	This gave me plenty of time for a Mercurian Duels game. I got to my computer, and logged into the game network. When checking the rankings list, I noticed that I had risen slightly, to #1,732. I decided to challenge Swordrunner, the player at #1,690.

	My opponent chose the Star Pirates player type, and a main base somewhere in the Asteroid Belt. I chose ‘Corporate Army’ and a headquarters in the northern half of Earth. 

Swordrunner: Good luck.
Emperor Nathan IV: You’ll need it.

	It took a little while, but I eventually got several agents to Mars, which gave me a position within wonderful striking distance of Swordrunner’s main base. Plus, my fleet was greatly aided by my researchers’ recent discovery of the Level V cloaking device. After an expensive retrofit to install this, my fleet moved into position practically at his gate. Yet a lot of credit also belongs to the double agent I had planted in his Data & Scanning center- I had him throw up a wonderful decoy- a  fake report of a lucrative pirating target in the vicinity of Jupiter, leading a portion of his fleet away. This enabled me to uncloak my ships, and face a smaller fleet in the upcoming battle, which I ended up winning. 
	
	Sunday was really rather uneventful for a non-school day. On Monday, I brought in various school paperwork. As the year was drawing to a close, I figured this would be the last of it until September.

	

	July 15th was the day of Johnston High graduation ceremony, which was well-deserved recognition for a notable set of accomplishments. However, the ceremony seemed to be a rather dry formality.

	However, it had been a rather dry ceremony UNTIL John Cooper had loudly shouted “Darnit, we’ve busted our butts for weeks, now let’s PARTY.” This was the cue for someone to wheel in a giant cart fully stocked with beer. I figured this wouldn’t draw much scorn, since most of the older high school students (and obviously, the various adults in attendance) were of the current legal drinking age. But suffice it to say, official ceremonial decorum broke down after that. 

	July 16th – Parents and sister weren’t in the house, girlfriend was. No more explanation needed.

	A few days later, I was lounging around when it was about time for mail delivery. I wasn’t expecting to get much that day. However, there was one item for me that looked quite official. It was a notice from some corporate sweepstakes department. In all likelihood, it related to something I entered on a whim and never thought I’d win. The note read, in part:

“You, Nathan Steele, have won I.S.S. Sweepstakes Number #V-10273, the ‘Capital Idea Vacation Getaway’. As you live on the North America continent, your vacation will be to the respective continent capital, Washington DC”

	Evidently, transportation was included. The train tickets were dated for a few weeks from now, August 13th to be precise.