Counterattack
You can contact Sigmund Brouwer through his website at
www.coolreading.com
or
www.whomadethemoon.com
.
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www.tyndale.com/kids.
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Counterattack
Copyright © 2001 by Sigmund Brouwer. All rights reserved.
Previously published as Mars Diaries
Mission 7: Countdown
and Mars Diaries
Mission 8: Robot War
under ISBNs 0-8423-4310-5 and 0-8423-4311-3.
Counterattack
first published in 2009.
Cover image copyright © by Digital Vision Ltd. All rights reserved.
Designed by Mark Anthony Lane II
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
For manufacturing information regarding this product, please call 1-800-323-9400.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brouwer, Sigmund, date.
    Counterattack / Sigmund Brouwer.
    p. cm. â (Robot wars ; bk. 4)
    Previously published separately in 2001 as Mars Diaries, Mission 7: Countdown; and Mars Diaries, Mission 8: Robot War.
    Summary: In the first of two adventures set in 2040, fourteen-year-old, wheelchair-bound, virtual reality specialist, Tyce Sanders, finds himself in grave danger on his first trip to Earth, and in the second, Tyce must use all his skills to find a way to stop the slaughter of the governors of the World United Federation.
    ISBN 978-1-4143-2312-1 (softcover)
    [1. Science fiction. 2. RobotsâFiction. 3. People with disabilitiesâFiction. 4. Virtual realityâFiction. 5. Christian lifeâFiction.] I. Brouwer, Sigmund, date. Mars diaries. Mission 7, Countdown. II. Brouwer, Sigmund, date. Mars diaries. Mission 8, Robot war. III. Title.
    PZ7.B79984Cou 2009
    [Fic]âdc22
2009016771
Printed in the United States of America
17Â Â Â 16Â Â Â 15Â Â Â 14Â Â Â 13Â Â Â 12Â Â Â 11
8Â Â Â Â Â 7Â Â Â Â Â 6Â Â Â Â Â 5Â Â Â Â Â 4Â Â Â Â Â 3Â Â Â Â Â 2
THIS SERIES IS DEDICATED IN MEMORY OF MARTYN GODFREY.
Martyn, you wrote books that reached all of
us kids at heart. You wrote them because you
really cared. We all miss you.
FROM THE AUTHOR
We live in amazing times! When I first began writing these Mars journals, not even 40 years after our technology allowed us to put men on the moon, the concept of robot control was strictly something I daydreamed about when readers first met Tyce. Since then, science fiction has been science fact. Successful experiments have now been performed on monkeys who are able to use their brains to control robots halfway around the world!
Suddenly it's not so far-fetched to believe that these adventures could happen for Tyce. Or for you. Or for your children.
With that in mind, I hope you enjoy stepping into a future that could really happen. â¦
Sigmund Brouwer
CONTENTS
Journal One: Are You an Alien?
Journal Two: Is It Right to Manipulate Life?
Â
Neuron rifles.
Twenty soldiersâin full protective gear, including black uniforms, black helmets, dark mirrored visorsâeach held a rifle aimed directly at my head. The voltage of just one neuron rifle would cripple me with the pain of an electrical jolt through the nerve pathways of my body.
But 20 neuron rifles fired at me all at once? With the nerve pathways too scrambled to give instructions to my muscles, I wouldn't even be able to scream as I died.
Each of those soldiers followed my slow progress by keeping me in the sights of their weapons. I had nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
Only moments earlier, the robot that carried me in its arms had arrived to take me out of my prison cell. I'd grabbed my comp-boardâmy fold-up laptop computerâin the few seconds I had to gather my belongings. I had left behind my wheelchair from Mars, since it was useless. The prison officials had removed its wheels on the remote chance I'd find a way to escape. Now as the robot wheeled down the wide, white corridor of this military prison, the soldiers surrounded me, front and back.
Carried as I was by the robot, I felt like a baby. Worse, if the robot set me down, the best I'd be able to do was crawl by using my arms to pull me forward. I was without my wheelchair, and after a lifetime on Mars, I struggled with the extra gravity on Earth.
The squeak of the robot's wheels provided a steady backdrop to the soft thumping of the soldiers' footsteps in the quiet of the corridor. None of the soldiers spoke. I wondered if they would fire without warning. I wondered how long they would let the robot continue to take me away from my prison cell. I wondered why they had let me go this far.
I wondered where I was going. And why.
All I knew was that the robot had appeared as my prison cell door opened, and from the speakers of the robot, a familiar but mechanical-sounding voice had instructed me to sit up from my bunk so the robot's arms could lift me. I had trusted that voice.
And now I was here.
With all those neuron rifles ready and able to kill me in the worst way possible.
I didn't even know why I'd been put in this prison. Two days ago, Chase Sanders, my dad and the pilot of the
Moon Racer
spaceship, my friend Ashley, and I had arrived from Marsâwhere I had been born over 14 Earth years ago. To our shock, World United Federation soldiers had boarded our ship and arrested us. And I hadn't talked to Ashley or my dad since.
In my solitude, I kept wondering if it had anything to do with the robots.
For about as long as I could remember, I had been trained in a virtual-reality program. Like the ones on Earth where you put on a surround-sight helmet that gives you a 3-D view of a scene on a computer program. The helmet is wired so when you turn your head, it directs the computer program to shift the scene as if you were there in real life. Sounds come in like real sounds. Because you're wearing a wired jacket and gloves, the arms and hands you see in your surround-sight picture move wherever you move your own arms and hands.
With me, the only difference is that the wiring reaches my brain directly through my spine. And I can control a real robot, not one in virtual reality. You see, part of the long-term Mars Project that my mom, dad, and I were a part of was to use robotsâwhich don't need oxygen, water, or heatâto explore Mars. However, the problem was that robots couldn't think like humans.
So that's where I came in. When I was a baby, I had an experimental operation to insert a special rod with thousands of tiny, biological implant fibers into my spine. Each of the fibers has a core that transmits impulses of electricity, allowing my brain to control a robot's computer. From all my years of training in a computer simulation program, my mind knows all the muscle moves it takes to handle the virtual-reality controls. Handling the robot is no different, except instead of actually moving my muscles, I imagine I'm moving the muscles. My brain sends the proper nerve impulses to the robot, and it moves the way I made the robot move in the virtual-reality computer program.
I admit, it's cool. Almost worth being in a wheelchair.
Ashley was wired in the same wayâwith one difference. Because she'd had the operation on Earth, with better medical facilities, her spine hadn't been damaged. She had the best of both worlds.
Now she was controlling the robot that was carrying me.