Hack the Moon
500 word Sci Fi Flash
Not much sunlight here on the dark side. The Luna Juvenile Detention and Rehabilitation Facility is cold and boring.
“Gonna eat that?”
A fourteen-year-old High Grav muscular two hundred kilo frame looms over me. Mood regulation implants encircle his temples. He offed four teens on a transport ship with a valve wrench I heard. Outer System kids always go big with High Grav exercises.
“Eat what, muscle brain?” I ask.
Pupils dilate, then he smiles. A dopamine dump saves me from becoming his fifth victim. He lumbers down the habitat tunnel.
“Psychos like that should be dark sided.”
Mine was just an accident, like a bad joke. I liked Gordo. He’d laugh if his exploded innards weren’t still drifting somewhere between the Moon and Earth.
He’d always say, “Hey Lin, coping time.” He’d bust out a canister of Hydro Hooch. “Best booze on the Moon,” Gordo claimed.
We were Hydroed out of our heads when we went into the Grav-less Solar Dome. Gordo’s dad was a tech. Gordo was a wiz at DNA-Security hacks and got us in. He taught me all about them.
“It thinks I’m my dad,” he said, laughing.
It was cold in there. We tethered ourselves to floor bolts on the observation deck that circled the center of the dome. Were floating gently above the silicon deck. A thin UV proof glass ceiling made up the dome. In the center of the dome huge clear silicon pillars rose from the floor seven stories to the top. Billions of tiny genetically engineered phosphorescent life forms swam inside the pillars generating energy. They glided up and down the pillars, reminding me of a giant blinking Christmas tree in a mall near Taipei I had seen once.
Hydro fueled thoughts and impulses hit so fast that I barely knew what I was doing when I unhooked Gordo’s tether and kicked him into one of the pillars. He was laughing when the static pulse around the pillars repelled him rapidly towards the top of the dome. I was just too out of it to realize how fast he was going.
I watched him burst through the ceiling. I saw his body balloon up and rip through his orange Carhartt Jumper.
When my tether snapped taut, my head hit the deck. Then blackness.
The courtroom didn’t want to listen. I tried to explain how the Hydro and the memory of the Christmas tree made me do it. They had the security cam footage. And my Algo-Psyche profile with its “anti-social tendencies” flag was all they needed.
Studied for my Bio-Technician’s certificate. They think I’ll be released back into society as a well-adjusted adult. But I found out me and the director are distant relatives. Close enough for a hack to get me to the Outer Systems. Just need to get director Chang alone.