Mother Knows Best

In a future where the stars have become a new frontier for both opportunity and conflict, twelve-year-old Chiyoko leads a double life. On one side, she’s a dedicated off-world student attending a virtual classroom; on the other, she’s the genius hacker of her family’s rogue mining ship—a band of orbital pirates making a living by skirting the law and raiding corporate-controlled asteroid mines.

Under the watchful eyes of her parents and alongside her two brothers, Chiyoko has mastered the art of hacking into station systems, outsmarting security bots, and selling stolen goods on the black market—all while evading capture by the United Space Faring Nations (USFN). But when a raid on an Ore Corps mining station goes wrong, Chiyoko and her family find themselves at the top of the USFN’s most-wanted list, with orders to shoot on sight.

As her family narrowly escapes capture and scrambles to plan their next move, Chiyoko stumbles upon a secret that could ignite a war costing billions of lives, a war that not even the mighty USFN will be able to stop. With enemy ships closing in, the young hacker must decide whether to use this knowledge to save her family or alter the course of humanity.

Table of Contents

1. Late for Class
2. Hiro
3. On the Run
4. Getting to Know You
5. Multi-Tasking
6. All Grown Up
7. Clyde
8. Mother Knows Best

Clyde humming means things aren’t going well. It’s soft, comforting, and my eldest brother only does it when he’s upset. On the monitors, Dad is sprinting away from the mining station security robots who fought past most of my hacks and are well on their way to bringing their targeting systems back online. That would be bad. Mama is locked in the transport area which is sealed off and ejecting air because the station manager is pissed and making a point about us boarding his asteroid and stealing ore. Hiro, my other sibling, chatters over the network that it’s time to shoot our way out of this and Ms. Teale is buzzing me with reminders that I’m late for class.

I stop fighting the security robot’s antivirus program and connect them to Clyde’s control instead. There’s something about my brother’s love for meticulous routines and schedules that appeal to aspiring artificial intelligence systems that ease them into his control. Hiro would make a joke about Clyde at this point but never around Mama or Dad.

Clyde stops humming and tells the robots that completing the station’s maintenance tasks are more important than blasting a hole in our Dad. They brake hard, swivel and rush away using their pixel perfect vision to scan for the first item on their new to-do list. The Space City engineers will take months of remote troubleshooting to flush out the peaceful subroutines and when they think they’ve cracked it one of their expensive killing machines will wander off to fix a broken piece of plumbing.

Dad gives a thumbs up to the cameras, uses a console to give me full access to the station systems and once all the firewalls and honeypots are down I send in my scripts and programs to do what they do. They kick the station manager off his terminals, lock him into his office, refill the transport bay with air, and open the doors so Mama and Dad can get back onboard while the ore containers fly themselves to the rendezvous where they’ll stay until the highest bidder buys them. The reminder alarm from Ms. Teale buzzes red this time. I signal Mama everything I’ve done and switch to the dedicated planet side network link.

“Sorry, I’m late Ms. Teale.”

I announce this as my avatar appears in the virtual classroom and a few of the other twelve-year-old’s make a big deal that I’m late.

Ms. Teale quickly settles everyone. I apologize again but the class software suppresses my expression of regret as not contributing to the lesson, and it goes unheard. Long gone are the days of disruption or acting out. Virtual classrooms are programmed to ensure an optimal experience for all students. Ms. Teale is real somewhere in the world but her time and attention are projected, sliced, diced and allocated out by the Almost-AI program running the school to whoever needs assistance most at any given time. If you’re stuck on a new concept, the Almost-AI will pull back sections from other classes that scored high on understanding and development. To the rest of the class, Ms. Teale will be at the board moving further into a subject while the struggling student gets one on one attention carefully time shifted until they seamlessly re-join the rest of the class. No child is left behind and carefully matched to groups of similar interests, career desires, and aptitude. Plenty diverse but always with a connection that prevents isolation and that’s a huge deal to the other space kids and me.

It’s not solely space kids in here. Virtual Reality schools are the norm. The good ones are cheaper to run and get better results than their brick and mortar rivals. VR classes mix-up lessons with activities designed to balance emotional and academic intelligence. When you’re born, and raised on a ship, a station or in a crappy slum on Earth having a good school that isn’t simply about test scores makes a big difference.