1 Cosmonaut Hill

Satellite City, Northern Hemisphere. Soon

SATELLITE CITY: THE CITY OF THE FUTURE, proclaimed the billboards. A metropolis completely controlled by the Myishi 9 Satellite hovering overhead like a floating man-of-war. An entire city custom constructed for the third millennium. Everything the body wanted, and nothing the soul needed. Three hundred square miles of gray steel and automobiles.

Satellite city. A supercity of twenty-five million souls, each one with a story more heartbreaking than the last. If it's happy-ever-afters you want, stay away from the city of the future.

Take Cosmo Hill, for example, a nice-enough boy who had never done a anything wrong in his short existence. Unfortunately, this was of enough to guarantee him a happy life, because Cosmo Hill did not have a sponsor. And in Satellite City, if you didn't have a sponsor and they couldn't trace your natural parents through public-record DNA files, then you were sent to an orphanage until you reach adulthood. And by that time you were either dead, or the orphanage had fabricated a criminal record for you so you could be sold to one of the private labour prisons.

Fourteen years before we take up the thread of this story, baby Cosmo was discovered swaddled in an insulated Cheery Pazza envelope on Cosmonaut Hill in Moscowtown. The state police swabbed him for DNA, searched for a match in the satellite's mainframe, and came up blank. Nothing unusual about that-orphans turn up every day in the city. So the newly christened Cosmo Hill was dipped in a vaccine vat and sent on a tube to the Clarissa Frayne Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys. Freight class.