My grandfather lied to my grandmother. I guess it runs in the family. We bought a bungalow in the new moon settlement on my grandfather’s advice.
"Go see space, mine your own gold in the unregulated 'crypto space' far from the galactic conglomerate. Become rich." None of what he'd said had come true.
Soon after the hundred millionth node had been launched from the moon's surface the gold rush had come to an end. The conglomerate had shut down the planet-side exchanges and come gunning for the Saturn orbital exchange satellites. The links between earth-based fiat and orbital coins were wiped out in the blink of an eye. In the time it took for a cloud of nano-bots to swarm on Saturn, over a thousand AI died, the worst technocide since the 2060 cloud wars. We continued slogging away as the earth-solar wealth gap grew. Our economy bled as the coins faltered and mining became harder and harder without the balance between fiat crypto-algorithmic resonance.
Then the conglomerate had set up one means of exchange for paying the upkeep on our personal nanobots, one means to pay the bills and keep our cells reinforced against the exigencies of gravitational demands. We couldn't even pay for the means to strengthen the walls of our blood vessels, they literally bled us dry.
Margaret had this habit of spitting. It began to get on my nerves. If you spit in low gravity, it has a completely different quality than you may be used to. You can spit off in one direction only to have it strike a rock, slide off and come ricocheting back to hit you in the face. Try cleaning a full bio-phage suit after every Saturday's walk in the Sea.
I suppose I couldn't blame her! It was hardly her fault, her lungs had started to malfunction as the payments defaulted on the nanobots that maintained parity between the reduced atmos' and her body's failing systems. We had programmed them to route all systems into blood/oxygen production but even that was running less than one hundred percent now. So here we were, me and my ageing aunt, left to wander the Sea of Tranquility, spitballs bouncing left, right and center with no particular place to go, it was ridiculous. I watched her as she walked. Coughing and spitting, grown taller through atmospheric influence, like something from a history book. An elongated basketball player, turning her head upwards to hock spitballs into the sky, always aiming at that planet of blue and green which had caused her this torment.
The day her mother slapped her face was the day she left the colonies. New moon settlement was dead to her and after her aunt Margaret's passing she just couldn't take it anymore. Her mother and father were both blinkered. Watching their bodies fall apart from lack of funding was destroying her and after the announcement of the conglomerate's intentions to buy the moon from the founders she could see which way the solar wind was blowing, even if her parents couldn't.
She had told them that she was going for a walk in the Sea, out to visit aunt Margaret's grave. I guess lying really did run in the family. I indicated the wallet address in the transfer section on my optical screen and hit transfer, that was it, done! Tickets bought, no going back now. I navigated to the wallet again and pulled up my parent's address as I walked past neon holo-adds, promising the wonders of Earth. The Grand Canyon, the Amazon Reserve, names from virtual journeys I had taken in school. Synthetic dreams of smells and feelings I couldn't quantify.
Now I would get to feel them, in the real. I hit send on the wallet transfer as I walked on to the ship.
At least mother and father would be able to afford to maintain their own nano-bots... for now.
The end.
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