Leaving Luna

2 - Lavender Ecstasy and Oak Oeuvre

When I was in my thirties, shortly after returning from my first trip to Mars, developers on the west side of Collins Landing decided that it would be a swell idea to take a dilapidated constellation of warehouses and revitalize them into a cultural district. Dad derided it as a waste of money. Why would anyone want to spend time in a rundown warehouse when Rimside West, the swanky mall and surrounding shopping district, opened a year prior?

I shared Dad's sentiment when the press release landed in my news queue. Dad and I are products of the shipping zone around the Collins Landing space elevator anchor. Dad worked the corporate side of shipping for Carpathian Cargo, arranging ships and workers, dealing with unions, generally effecting the day-to-day mundanity of shipping that never held my interest. Corporate wasn't cool, especially to a teenager grown up with the roustabout children of longshoremen, whose name itself is odd. There are no shores on Luna. Fully half of the people who work as longshoremen are, by their own designation, women. Yet longshoremen they are, and low be to you should you suggest they are logistics technicians.

It wasn't until Elliot messaged me, full of excitement for the development that I took any notice beyond derision. They sent along concept art whipped up by real honest to darkness architect models, their authenticity confirmed by a blockchain signature, showing a vibrant, though confined and claustrophobic, but in a tasteful way, bustle of abstract youth and vigor. It did look swanky. I was skeptical.

"When do you leave?" Bridget asks over the din of people milling about in the market that has sprung up in the middle of what those insane developers dubbed Lunar Bohemia. Elliot adores LuBo, as it's come to be known, and though I will deny it to anyone outside our close circle of friends, I like it too. It's decadent, almost obscene to the sensibilities of people who grew up around the docks, people like me. Well. Not completely like me.

"A month. Elliot has me packed already. I'm living on a pair of pants and two shirts that he keeps washing."

Bridget and I went to college together, at Acosta. She was on a Brighton Scholarship, me on a raft of student debt and a not insignificant part of Dad's retirement. Brilliant, but distant, is how girls in theater described her, behind her back, but not behind the backs of the backstage crew that I frequented rather than acting in a production. You could smell their jealously over the sawdust and wet paint that permeated the theater.

Now, Bridget's grandchildren bounce around the fountain that anchors Lunar Bohemia. The fountain throws water to the ceiling of the low-slung former warehouse, deflecting against a bright silvery aluminum cone, cascading down in a not quite mist, falling lazily into the pool of water that encircles the fountain. It's delightfully clammy and moist.

Bridgett introduced me to The Chorus, the hive of Artificial Intelligence and Humans who grew out of the Quantum Computing program at Acosta more than a century ago. She was a physicist who was lured by the computer science program. I was her eccentric theater friend who was nominally studying supply chain logistics at the behest of my father, but not-so-secretly was sleeping my way through the theater department, though never Bridgett. Honestly, Bridgett wasn't my type, even back then when 'my type' was vastly more fluid than it is today.

Becoming a member of the Chorus is a big deal on Luna. It's a big deal anywhere there is a Chorus. Few humans are selected to get the cybernetic implants that hook their brain to the network of quantum computers that spiderweb across Luna. It all passes through Acosta in some way or another. Being selected for the Chorus is winning the lottery, a free ride scholarship, and joining a monastery all rolled into one. I never paid it much attention, beyond the derision my father and childhood friends directed at it. Noodles cost too much? Fucking Chorus. Tram running late? Fucking Chorus. Erectile Dysfunction? Fucking Chorus. To say we held a dim view of the future of humanity is something of an understatement.