The Omega Project Read Free Page A

reaches our planet thanks to Earth’s dense atmosphere. The moon, however, possesses over a million metric tons of the stuff, enough to generate energy for the next thousand years.”
    “So, Omega was a secret mission to mine helium-3 from the moon?”
    “Exactly.”
    “But you mentioned the Pentagon. Why involve those warmongers?”
    “First, because the dysfunctional assholes in Congress would never have considered funding such a radical energy plan at a time when politics was focused on unemployment, even though the program created a lot of jobs. Second, because the Pentagon not only had access to the money, they also had the ability to operate the program in secrecy without congressional oversight. Still, the scientific challenges were considerable, requiring NASA to design new lunar shuttles to transport the helium-3, plus a habitat that could safely house a mining crew—don’t forget, each astronaut required large supplies of food, water, and oxygen.”
    “I thought there’s water on the moon—scratch my butt.”
    “There’s ice, so yes, there’s water. There’s also moon dust, which became a major challenge. Moon dust particles act like glass shards, making them a constant threat to the astronauts’ skin and eyes. There’s also limits on what the human body can endure, especially when it comes to long-term exposure to gravitational forces one-sixth that of Earth. Between the health concerns and the costs—about a million dollars per astronaut per day—my uncle decided to go in a different direction … drones.”
    “Drones?” She rolled over, positioning her head on my chest—her right hand casually stroking my penis. “Keep talking.”
    “By, uh … drones, I meant replacing the lunar astronauts with mining equipment that could be remotely operated back here on Earth. All that was needed to do the job was a supercomputer to operate the drones. The way my uncle figured it, if a computer could remotely operate everything from a passenger jet to a surgical appendage performing brain surgery, then why not a mining operation on the moon? That was the reason my uncle recruited me for Omega, to join the best and brightest scientists in designing and engineering GOLEM.”
    “What’s GOLEM?”
    I sucked in a breath as her lips kissed my stomach. “GOLEM? It’s an acronym that stood for ‘Geological Offsite Lunar Excavation Machine.’ Whoever made it up stole it from a Bible story about a soulless being, created by man, to serve his needs. See, GOLEM wasn’t going to just be a supercomputer, it was going to be the ultimate in artificial intelligence—a machine that could think and adapt in order to control complex multilayered tasks a quarter of a million miles away.”
    I closed my eyes, willing her mouth to venture lower.
    She stopped. “Keep talking, Eisenbraun. How did a young track-and-field nerd like you get involved with GOLEM?”
    “My uncle was confident I could resolve the computer’s design flaws, so he assigned me to work under GOLEM’s director, Monique DeFriend, the former head of CSAIL, a prestigious artificial intelligence lab. She buried me in menial tasks, until I submitted a design for GOLEM’s DNA matrix that blew everyone away. Two days later she placed me in charge of GOLEM’s programming. I had just turned twenty.”
    “Nice. So what happened?”
    “What happened? The GDO happened. The world went to hell.”
    Andria released me, her mood darkening. “Who are you to complain? You survived, Eisenbraun. You, with your solar panels and water filters and lake water. I didn’t have seeds and canned goods; I didn’t have a backyard filled with fruit trees.”
    “You also didn’t have starving anti-Semites as neighbors. When the government collapsed, my parents preached secrecy to my younger sisters— ‘If the neighbors find out we have food, they’ll take first and ask for handouts later,’ but it’s hard for teens not to want to help when their friends are