The Greatest Commodity (First Draft)

Many Years

His body ached as he lifted himself from bed.

Nevil had spent twenty years on Luna. At first, he only stayed to pay the fine, acting as an extra in various films.

The fine was paid off quite fast, in fact, Nevil hadn't ever quite thought himself an actor, but his employers thought so highly of his work that they paid him extra. In total, the entire fine took less than half the expected time to pay off. He decided to stay indefinitely.

Nevil now lived in a standard apartment in the skin of the Lunar ecumenopolis.

He looked up at the ceiling with weary eyes. through the window, the sun shone down brightly, the sky was a brownish-gray from all the smoke. The stars were invisible. Just like the day he'd first come here, millions of spacecraft hovered above in low orbit, dancing around the heavens like fireflies, their reflected sunlight making each one into a little sun of its own.

The alarm blared, morning -- by the Lunar clock. In truth, it was the same time all over the planet, physical day or night mattered very little.

Nevil finally managed to get himself out of bed. And stood on his own two feet. At seventy, he was no spring chicken anymore.

He grabbed his coat, the mornings were always chilly as power would be redirected into the industrial sectors while the population slept. He darted out the door, hoping not to miss breakfast hour at the cafe.

As he groggily loped down the corridors, he could hear the loudspeakers blaring upbeat music -- a recent addition, designed to help people awaken. There were several other people already out on the same path as him. The 'skin' was the primary residential area on Luna, it was divided into individual sections that each provided equal accommodations for their citizens, each one had a cafe, a hair stylist, a library, etc... they were all equal. Nevil found this bland, but that was how it worked.

He passed individuals whom he'd known for years. They all knew his moods and didn't bother him until he'd gotten his coffee. Though they did give him quick greetings such as, "Hey Jim," and "There goes the sleepy novelist!"

The Cafeteria was a large room, painted in bright cheery colors. The latest musical hits played over the speakers. Though Nevil could've gotten food from the dispenser in his apartment, it was a cheap model that produced food that was inferior to human-made food. That was why these cafe's even existed because it had been decided by popular consensus that real food and socializing was far superior to the lonely digestion of utter crap.

Nevil ordered a hamburger and took a table. He heard a couple -- two women -- discussing his order, oddly enough.

"Did you hear him?" the first one asked, "He eats those too!"

The other one snorted, "Well, he did invent them!"

Nevil allowed himself a small chuckle. "They didn't know!" Nevil had worked as an actor for six years before retiring to become an author, and went on to write numerous critically acclaimed books about life on ancient Earth. Most thought the world he'd written to be fiction, but it was fact, built from his own memory of life on Earth... so long ago. The Hamburger had taken off again when some fan actually took the time to make one herself, she loved it, and sold the recipe to the cafe company -- with Nevil's approval, of course, he got half the revenue, she'd insisted on giving him all of it but he declined. It had taken only a few years to become a very popular item. Nevil had become the Tolkien of the Collective era, his vision of ancient Earth eclipsed all others and soon became the template design for all other novels of the 'historical fiction' genre. Perhaps his success was due to it being provably realistic. Knowledge of the past hadn't simply been lost, merely that the majority of people were ignorant of it, the reason being that it was, so called, boring. Nevil had proved them wrong. And still, nobody knew his true secret.