Sleeping Player (Project Chrysalis Book 3) by John Gold (novel24 TXT) 📕

be around. Rose emanated warmth and optimism, and she was crazy for science. After the first three days of non-stop work on neurostimulators, they slept together for the first time. That was the beginning of their odd relationship.

Sometimes, Rolan was woken up by explosions in the next room as an experiment went awry. Other times, he jumped up in the middle of a love-making session with Rosa to write down a good idea he just had. The two of them lived in their own little worlds that intersected when it came to science. And it was that peculiarity that helped them understand what the other one did, decided, and thought.

A year later, Rolan had to admit that Lunar had read him like a book. He and Rosa had both been able to unlock their scientific potential in that time, and that day, he handed over all of his completed personal projects to Lunar’s charitable foundation. With all his heart, he thanked his supervisor at the construction bureau.

“I’m so appreciative of you and the board of directors for inviting me and for Rosa. Without her, I wouldn’t have been able to become a scientist.”

The old man just smiled and patted him on the shoulder.

“I’m glad you realize that, my boy. You have a thousand new discoveries yet to make, both in science and in the rest of life.”

And that’s exactly what happened. Years went by, he married Rosa, and he moved on to bigger projects nobody before him had been willing to take on—thrusters used to transport meteors to where they could be mined, station engines, cold-plasma engines. Everything was going swimmingly until one day, Rosa mentioned having children. He broke out in a cold sweat. She used the special sign they had to let the other know when they needed the conversation to be taken seriously, one of the many ways of understanding each other they’d developed over the years.

For a month, he couldn’t work on his projects. Just the thought of having kids scared him, though it wasn’t so much the problem of raising them and watching them grow up, or even the idea of having his way of life change. As someone who had devoted his life to science, bejng able to shift his habits around was as likely as suddenly acquiring a third eye.

No, it was his retarded thinking that scared him. What if the child inherited it from him? What if Rosa found out? What if it got worse?

Rolan told his wife everything, letting her in on all the fears he had related to children. Rosa accepted her husband along with his maladies, though she decided to hold off on the kids. Really, they could go through the rejuvenation procedure as many times as they wanted, so she didn’t anticipate any problems with conceiving or giving birth.

But four years later, all their fears dissipated when Rosa found out that she was pregnant. She decided she was going to carry and give birth to the baby no matter what it was like.

And that’s how Philip Polanki was born. He did, in fact, inherit his father’s slowed latent thinking, though it was less pronounced and could be controlled. His second deviation was a weak instinct for self-preservation that had almost killed him on multiple occasions by the time he turned fourteen. At eight, fascinated by how atomic power stations worked, he crawled into the plasma synthesis chamber and earned himself a hefty dose of radiation. That happened every time anything really caught his interest. All his morals and instincts went out the window, leaving him in a world fixated on a single idea. His father grew more distant every time that happened, burying himself in his work, while his mother just soothed him by telling him he’d be able to understand his father one day. It was at moments like those that a deep pain she tried to conceal flitted across her face. When little Philip calmed down, she would leave him in the care of their robot nurse. But Philip didn’t cry. He never cried, in fact, never really feeling any pangs of conscience.

At fourteen, he hacked into his father’s video diary and, over the course of the following six months, discovered everything there was to know about his parents, their lives, and their abnormalities. Young Philip didn’t realize right away how strongly the truth affected him. But six months later, he lost all drive and will to life. Once in a while he would pick up something new, but complete apathy would set in soon after.

His parents sent him to a psychiatric clinic, doing everything they could to hide his malady from their friends and family. To the rest of the world, he had just headed off to work on some projects on one of Mars’ moons.

Apathy grew into depression, and he slept twenty hours a day. He stopped eating and responding to those around him. He thought back to his father’s unspoken fears, his mother’s grief, and the dress she was wearing when she left him alone with the nannies to go after his father. His father saw an irreversible mistake; his mother was afraid to admit it. But little Philip understood—it would have been better if he had never been born. That was the first time he felt pain in his heart, felt his own inadequacy. When his parents sent him to the psychiatric clinic, he was faced with the reality of how helpless he was in the face of a harsh world.

After Philip started refusing food, the clinic staff moved him to a med capsule with complete life support. First, there were simple virtual worlds that Philip just observed without ever taking more than a few steps away from where he appeared. The simplistic algorithms and primitive model made them cartoonish. But that’s when Project Chrysalis was released.

The game’s virtual world copied the properties things had in