The Moonborn: or, Moby-Dick on the Moon Read online

  The idea of writing Adam Moonborn’s autobiography washed over me as we approached the Domes of Gamelan Base. This was it. The readiness was all. Turning back had not been an option for a long time.

  “This is the autobiography the Moon needs,” Starboy said. “Adam Moonborn is the greatest Lunatic alive.”

  Eight

  Everyone knows who Adam Moonborn is. Born on November 22nd, 2069, to Elliott Xavier Brandt and Olivia Horowitz Brandt, in the Brandt family home in the recently-constructed Gamelan Dome, one of the new private bases on the Moon. The date seemed forced and suspect, immediately raising concerns about either the truth of this narrative or the health of the newborn baby.

  A publicity stunt, people said, but the world fell enraptured all the same. Someone wrote a poem about it. Lots of people wrote poems about it. The poet laureate of the United States, Alison Stone, who had only two years earlier read at the inauguration of President Catherine Andrews-Blythe, wrote a poem for the occasion: “Childe Born of Sky.” The poem became a bestseller, even after it was revealed that Elliot Brandt had commissioned it for a significant, arguably tragic, sum of money.

  The Moon’s First Family, the Brandts were soon named. An admired family, beloved, in the spotlight, on a pedestal, with the beautiful child Adam Moonborn at the center of it all.

  Nine

  As I told Starboy, I had suspected the assignment would be writing for Adam Moonborn. The job appeared before me on the internal jobs board at Spectral Wordsmiths, by whom I had been employed for three years before the interview process began. I had never written a book for them, not a biography or an autobiography or a novel, not even an essay or article. I had two responsibilities in my role as a Creative Technician for Spectral: writing discussion questions at the ends of chapters, and spying.

  You are correct that these are two seemingly unrelated sets of duties and skills.

  The thing about the beginning of my application process is that the economy was still doing well. The assumption existed that a recession or depression lay around every corner, but that assumption has been a fixture in the zeitgeist for over a century.

  Not only was the economy good, but I had a comfortable job, above entry-level. A good job, perhaps a career, but one that I hated desperately. My hatred for the job consumed my soul and my life. I had no good moments. Every potential minute of happiness—be it an afternoon walk, a disappearance into a game, a particularly thrilling microfilm—became spoiled by the despair and misery clouding my existence.

  What did I do all day, and why did I hate it so much? To be clear, I did not hate all of it. But the part that I did hate, that tore me down, focused on the auditing of personal libraries for stolen files. Bots performed the majority of the job, scanning every homecloud for files that looked like they didn’t belong. My role—the “human element,” as my bosses called it, when they sold our services to corporations or individuals worried that their files might be in the libraries of others—was to sit in a room, alone, monitoring the monitors, screening the screens. I performed these tasks in downtown Kennedy City.

  I’ll leave out the other details, so as to avoid boring you, but I’ll tell you this: I hated it and I saw good people go to jail for the things we discovered. I considered whistleblowing, considered telling my fellow citizens about the realities of who could see what they did, but then I remembered that people were constantly blowing whistles about this exact kind of thing and that nothing ever changed. That, and I liked the government ruling the Euro-American Union, especially considering the alternatives out there. But a fear did rise in me every time I reported a misappropriated file to my supervisors, a fear that resulted not from paranoia but from the complete lack of paranoia. Fear of the idea that we had become comfortable with this. That I had become comfortable with this. The world hadn’t become some kind of dystopian hell that everyone had been predicting my entire life, but had instead become a place where everyone existed comfortably deprived of any pretense of privacy or solitude.

  So, naturally, an interview appealed to me. An escape from this position of legal spy. Something where I could take a less hands-on approach to being part of the machine. When I saw the job posting, the exact things that scared others away (no attachments; relocation for months or longer) called out to me.

  I did not think it over. There was nothing to think about. I wanted the job.

  Interview after interview after interview, a never-ending cycle in which I became convinced that I would not only never get the job, but that I would never stop interviewing. I would never know, trapped in a loop of endless striving, never affirmed or denied.

  They asked for writing samples. I had nothing to submit professionally, aside from the discussion questions I wrote, in the other half of my role as Creative Technician for Spectral Wordsmiths.

  I wrote these questions in the autobiographies of the arguably famous, questions that probed at whispered meanings: What impact did her near-death experience have on her singing career?

  Would he have become a famous athlete, had he not watched his brother die?

  Is the guitar a metaphor for anything? If so, what?

  This was the part of my job I did not hate. I did not like it, but I did not hate it. Questions in the life stories of athletes and actors, politicians and public figures. Saviors, heroes, political prisoners, princes. I had written these questions, but now I wanted to write one of these books myself.

  “What about the stories you might not want to tell?” an interviewer asked me in a late round. “Murderers and thieves. Scoundrels and savages. White-collar criminals. The imprisoned and the wrongfully acquitted. Would you be comfortable telling one of their stories?”

  “I believe in the truth,” I said, uncertain if this answer made sense. “Even if I’m telling the story of a killer, I should tell that story with honesty, to find what can be learned from it.”

  During all these initial interviews, the four or five at the beginning, I never saw the people interviewing me. They occurred via voice-talks, with me sitting in my apartment, pacing, answering what they wanted to know.

  Then they called me in for a test. It had been over a year since I had first seen the posting. The economy had begun to weaken over that time, although economists deemed it a speculative recession, resulting from a widespread self-assured conviction that an economic downturn had to be arriving soon. Things could not stay this good for this long.

  “Meet us at the Kennedy Federal Building,” they told me. I knew the place, although it struck me as strange. I expected the eventual physical interviews to be in the building where I worked, the Spectral headquarters downtown. Instead, I took the rail to the federal building, a place I’d never been before.

  I showed up nervous, made only worse when I had to remove my shoes to enter the building.

  “You’ll get these back when you leave,” the guard told me as he put my shoes in a sealed bag. I worried I had made some kind of mistake or had fallen prey to a prank, until the man at the information desk nodded when I told him my name and why I was there.

  “Someone will come get you,” he told me, and gestured to rows of empty benches in the lobby.

  Ten minutes of waiting, ten minutes to consider the bizarreness of it all, the unpleasantness. Ten minutes to reconsider, ten minutes to wonder if they would lose my shoes. I had been to a federal building only once before, in college, having received a citation for falling asleep drunk at the wheel of my Frius. I had fought it, arguing that a car that drives itself shouldn’t need a conscious driver.

  “Machine error is nothing compared to human error,” the officer had agreed. “But that doesn’t make it acceptable to sleep in a vehicle or be drunk in the backseat. You did both.” I’d heard the lecture before, heard it from various people. They gave me a Driving Under the Influence ticket, resolved by paying a small fine.

  “Applicant Twenty-Seven,” a voice said, interrupting my reminiscences.

  I looked up to see a short bal
d man in a suit, a few feet from me. I hadn’t noticed him approach.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re interviewing for the Spectral Specialist position?”

  “I am.”

  “Follow me.”

  I followed him, worried I would slip on the floor, worried about the impression given by my mismatched socks. He opened the door to a room with two white folding chairs at an empty white table, the kind of interrogation room you see in old television shows about cops.

  “In here,” he said. He turned and walked away as I walked into the room.

  The day ended with me signing a contract, a vague document crowded with ambiguous promises. The presentation of the contract followed a four-hour audition, or skills testing, or quiz, whatever you want to call it. Typing responses to writing prompts on a handglass, shuffling from room to room. First they interviewed me, then they reversed the process. They had me interview strangers, asking them about their lives, determining what belonged in an autobiography and why. The only time I saw the short bald man again was when he was leading a different man, also shoeless, down the hallway.

  “You have a physical in one week,” they told me at the end of the day. “Any offer of an employment status change is contingent upon the results both from today and your physical. This assignment requires some very specific physical requirements, including a brain scan.”

  The physical itself, when it happened, went entirely uneventfully, aside from one conversation with the doctor that I’ll describe in detail, because of its relevance to the story, including some minor foreshadowing.

  “Do you have a mindchip?” the doctor asked.

  “No,” I told her.

  “Don’t be pedantic,” she snapped. “Do you have any biomedical implant above the neck?”

  “No,” I repeated.

  “You’re not chipped in any way?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Are you a flesher? In one of the back-to-the-basics movements?” She looked both amused and indignant, as if she had never quite encountered a situation before in which someone didn’t have a piece of technology implanted in their brain.

  “I don’t see it as something that requires me to join a movement,” I answered slowly, the kind of rote answer I had become accustomed to giving. “I just don’t want something foreign implanted into my mind or body.”

  “That’s what they call being a flesher,” she laughed, making a note. “Well, this is a good thing, I have to say. For you. Won’t hurt your chances.”

  And for the reader who doubts the veracity of this narrative, suspecting that my answers to that surprised doctor are the equivalent of the alcoholic who swears he only has three drinks a week: I assure you, my mind is not, never has been, and never will have any kind of technological implant in it.

  A call flashed through on my monitor at work three days later, the caller listed as Spectral Human Resources. After the months upon months of interviews, I suspected a joke.

  “Congratulations,” the voice on the other end said, no avatar showing on the screen other than a gray silhouette with the letters HR imprinted on its face.

  “Give your two weeks’ notice tomorrow,” it told me.

  “Where am I going?”

  “You should make plans to settle any concerns you have in Kennedy.”

  “Aren’t you telling me where I’m going?”

  “We’ve determined your placement. Expect the official files to come through after this call. Your updated contract, travel plans, required reading, and all other relevant documents. Your physical cleared you to travel off-Earth.”

  “Off-Earth?”

  “Your assignment and assumed identity will be revealed upon reaching your destination.”

  “But what’s my—”

  “Please stop interrupting or this offer may be revoked. Transportation has been scheduled to deliver you from your current residence to the Obama Spaceport two weeks from today, from which you will reach your final destination. You’re going to the Moon.”

  I didn’t know anyone who had ever been to the Moon before.

  Ten

  “The greatest Lunatic alive,” I repeated, back to Starboy.

  “You’re familiar, of course, with our re-appropriation of lunacy?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “From the required reading?”

  “No,” I said. “I remember the ad campaign.”

  “It’s much more than just an ad campaign,” Starboy answered, that sneer creeping into the corners of his mouth again. “But good.”

  I let the idea of lunacy and its ponderous silence have its moment. The campaign, as mentioned before, was to reclaim the idea of lunacy. It involved a series of high-profile ads across both cyber- and physical-space, in which the words I am a Lunatic accompanied photographs of prominent Moon dwellers and other Lunar enthusiasts. Most of the ads featured admired or notorious tech billionaires and trillionaires, although many also highlighted ordinary residents of the Gamelan Domes. I tried to remember if I had ever seen Starboy in one of these ads.

  “How long until we’re there?” I asked. “And what’s the plan?”

  “Don’t you know what day it is? We still observe Earth days up here, if you weren’t aware.”

  “Um,” I calculated in my head, not wanting to check my handglass just to confirm the date. “November 22nd?”

  “Today is Captain Moonborn’s birthday,” Starboy said. “Hence why we need to get you fitted for a tuxedo. But first, tell me what reading Spectral assigned to you. I’d like to get you all the books you need, but no need to repeat anything you already have.”

  Eleven

  The required reading consisted of eight books, all of which involved the Moon, its residents, and its history, with a particular focus on its recent history and current residents. The list featured four non-fiction books of varying degrees of esteem, two collections of essays, two collections of poems, and one novel by a resident of Lucas Station.

  A Brief History of Man and Moon by Horatio Jest

  Other Worlds Than These: The Three Lunar Colonies by Edward Finnerty

  Childe Borne of Skye, and other Lunar Poems edited by Grady Schatzlein

  Eden Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Lunar Royalty by Katharine Lubbock

  A Stately Pleasure-Dome Decreed: The Official Biography of Elliot Brandt by Lindsay Lee

  The Philosopher Kings of Space by Steele Conley

  The Founding Families of the Moon’s Golden Age by Oscar Kittredge-Haruto

  Moonkiller by Rick Hazard

  It’s worth noting, at this point, that the above list is far from a comprehensive list of recent, notable books about the Moon. In particular, it lacks a number of unauthorized biographies of Adam Moonborn, his parents, and his siblings, one example being Death of Moon: How the Brandt-Moonborn Family Killed the Romance of Space by Luke Finch. I suspect that this was partially to keep me from recognizing, before my arrival on the Moon, that Adam Moonborn was absolutely the employer.

  There were two other candidates that I had considered to be likely subjects for my assignment: Cornelius Rumford, eccentric and reclusive scientist who, according to the reading, spent most of his time in solitude somewhere on the far side of the Moon; and Harvey Andrews, the conservative microfilm actor who had recently washed his hands of consumerism and moved to Aldrin Base to, as he announced it, “do real work again.”

  These three men had struck me as the most likely Lunites to have best-selling autobiographies in their near futures. I had ruled out two other Lucas Station residents—prominent space lawyer June Carter West and socialite Eleanor Lewis—after Spectral Human Resources had let slip that my assignment would certainly be male.

  I read this list of books to Starboy off my OurGlass as the LUV quickly approached the first of the Domes, but meanwhile, I internally ran through everything I had learned about Captain Adam Moonborn, both in the last two weeks and throughout my entire lifetime.

  Twelve

&n
bsp; The world had grown bored with Adam Moonborn by the time I was born. But then it fell in love with him again, lost interest, and came back again, like a sad relationship or, really, like two bodies orbiting one another. Adam Moonborn and the people below him. His fame waxed and waned, as did society’s tolerance for his antics.

  The story of his childhood consisted almost exclusively of heartwarming, positive public events. His first trip to Earth (age four), his first day of school at the Gamelan Public Academy at the Domes of Gamelan (age five), his second trip to Earth (age seven), his extended stay at the Gamelan Meditation Center on Mount Jobs (age nine). The birth of his two younger sisters, Elizabeth Moonborn and Olivia Moonborn, also garnered a significant amount of press, when they joined the small but growing crowd of children born on the Moon, whom the media had deemed “Moonlings.” Most of these so-called Moonlings were the children of executives and staff of Gamelan Corporation, trying to put down roots in the cold rock.

  And then, the public, tragic, shocking death of his parents and sister Elizabeth, three weeks after Moonborn’s eighteenth birthday. This marked a turning point in the tone of news about the First Moonling.

  After the funeral, a very public feud began between Moonborn and his two older brothers, twins Mark and Richie Brandt, both of whom had been on Earth when the accident occurred. This conflict between the two Brandt brothers and their full-blooded brother with a different surname continued through a number of instances of negative press, including Moonborn’s brief stint at university on Earth, his permanent return to the Moon at the age of nineteen, and his ousting from the Gamelan Board, plus a series of failed relationships and several drug-induced public incidents.