The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Read Online Free PDF Page A

it for General Electric—a six-scene robotic stage-play about the role of technology in making our lives better. It was Dad’s most treasured possession in the entire world. I seriously believe that if it was a choice between me and it, he might pick it.
    In fact, he had sort of done that.
    Ten minutes had gone by since I’d made it home, and the sounds of the air battle still raged outside. The zepp was going to have a hard time attaining lift-off with all that weight, and I still hadn’t grabbed my own stuff.
    Yes, Dad had said to go right away, no delay. Yes, there was a war raging outside the walls. But I wasn’t going to leave my friends behind.
    The pack’s den was in the back of my room, four overgrown canisters that I kept under my desk. The canisters were standard issue brain-storage—drop as much of the nervous system as you can scrape together into one, and it would grow silicon into the ganglia until it had an interface, keeping the whole thing awash in nutrients and wicking waste products out to an evaporator. I had to remember to add a little sugar every now and again, and to whisk away the residue in the evaporator, but apart from that, they did their thing all on their lonesome. Dad had been worried that I wouldn’t be able to take care of a pet, let alone four pets, but the pack were the happiest doggies in the state. I’d find them somewhere to live when I got to wherever I was going. I certainly wasn’t going to leave them behind.
    The Carousel stood so high on the cargo hoist that I was able to simply climb its service ladder to the roof and then reach up and catch the boarding ramp for the gondola. I yanked it down, hearing—but no longer feeling—the pain in my ribs.
    The zepp had already warm-booted, all systems nominal. The radars reported a clear liftoff path through Comerica’s retracted dome—Dad had added it early on, before I was born, with Mom’s help. I had flown the zepp before, but always with Dad at my elbow. It wasn’t rocket science, of course. The thing rose until you told it to stop, then moved in whichever direction you steered it. It was a zepp—easier to pilot than a mecha.
    The zepp lumbered into the sky, dragged down by the Carousel. We cleared the lip of Comerica and picked up speed, rising a little more cleanly as the Carousel and the zepp made their peace with each other. The lights on the pack’s cylinders blinked nervously. I looked around the gondola’s open windows, trying to spot the harrier and the battle-platform, half not wanting to see in case what I saw was Dad being blasted out of the sky.
    But there they were, Dad still flying circles around the giant thing, its many rotors and gasbags all straining to keep it aloft and stationary. Smaller drones and even a couple of manned planes took off after Dad as I watched and he blasted them out of the sky with contemptuous ease. Dad liked to practice in sims a lot. He might have been the world’s greatest organic fighter pilot at this point. Not that that meant much—who cared about being a fighter pilot anymore?
    The platform’s big guns followed Dad through the sky, seemingly always a little behind him. He anticipated their curve, dodging the twisting, seeking fingers of lightning, the hails of ammo, the guided missiles. He was good—I found myself grinning hard and pumping my fist as Dad took out another battery—but I could see that he wasn’t good enough. He had to be good a million times. They had to get lucky once. They would.
    As I came up level with the platform, it seemed to notice me, turning a battery toward me. The shells it lofted at me hung in the sky nearby, then sploded in a deadly hail of millions of microscale daisy-cutters. I yanked hard at the yoke and floored it, and the zepp turned away, but not enough. I heard a scritching noise as the deadly little bots skittered on the zepp’s armored balloon and gondola, scrabbling for purchase. They rained down past the gondola’s windows,