Space Case: Chapters 1–3

Moon Base Alpha—along with everyone who lives on it—has been the subject of an absolutely staggering amount of hype: The first human outpost in space!

Living in Moon Base Alpha is like living in a giant tin can built by government contractors. It’s as comfortable as an oil refinery.

So my childhood was pretty idyllic. I had lots of friends. I did well in school and played on every sports team. I surfed every weekend—and when I did, there were usually dolphins in the waves with me.

Mom is a lunar geologist who wrote some landmark papers about the moon and the consistency of its mantle and core.

Dad is a mining engineer with a specialty in environmentally sound mineral extraction. And one of the major reasons for the moon base is to explore the possibility of mining precious metals there.

We Moonies are barred from broadcasting, texting, or transmitting anything to the public that might be “detrimental to the success of Moon Base Alpha.”

I only got involved because I had to use the space toilet at two fifteen in the morning. On the moon this is a major endeavor, because we don’t have a toilet in our private living quarters.

I had rehydrated what I thought was beef teriyaki for dinner, but due to the blandness I was halfway through it before I realized my mistake. By then it was too late. I chucked the remnants in the trash compactor—a flagrant violation of the moon base’s food-conservation directives—and hoped for the best.

The moon’s gravity is only one-sixth that of earth’s. Zero gravity, which we experienced on the spaceship, could be fun, but one-sixth gravity is disorienting.

However, there are no sinks. And no urinals. And the toilets look as though some sadistic plumber mated a vacuum cleaner with an octopus.

Instead you essentially do your business in a plastic bag, which is then hermetically sealed, dehydrated, and sucked into a composter.

“Well, no, I can’t tell everyone,” Holtz said. “Not yet. I don’t have the authority to inform the general public. But NASA should know about this. And the government. And the National Institute of Science. There are far better scientists than I who ought to be privy to this.”

Dr. Holtz then broke into laughter. Deliriously happy, uncontrolled laughter.

My stomach was feeling better, so I thought about running after Dr. Holtz and asking what was up, but I had my hands full with the toilet repairs. In retrospect, I wish I’d said to heck with the toilet. Because Dr. Holtz didn’t end up revealing his amazing news to anyone the next morning after all.

“Your loss,” Mom chided.

Like the beds, all our chairs at MBA are inflatable: uncomfortable, unwieldy cubes of cheap, squeaky rubber.

Since the moon base is kept sterile, our clothes don’t get very dirty—which is good, as we have limited storage space and only one laundry machine at MBA.

We don’t have real waffles on the moon, of course. We only have reconstituted waffle-flavored substance. It tastes like coagulated maple syrup, but Violet loves it.

The door opens onto an iron catwalk. (Catwalks are easier to ship and install than real floors.)

Even in the confines of MBA my folks tried to limit our screen time.

I’d been girding myself for bad news, but even this caught me off guard.

Dad said, “Dash, you’re a smart kid. You’re very mature and precocious for your age, and we love that about you. But sometimes that brain of yours works a little too hard to see patterns where there might not be any.”

He had a cup of coffee and was compulsively stirring it with a spoon. Dr. Marquez rarely ever actually drinks his coffee; he simply stirs it for hours at a time.

“There’s no school today!” she shouted over her music. “And I’m having waffles!”
“Oh.” Dr. Marquez never seemed to know how to deal with Violet’s effusive happiness.

“Oh, they’ve gone through the whole gamut of emotions.” Dr. Marquez picked a chunk of dehydrated fruit out of his teeth and flicked it away. “Shock, disbelief, grief, anger, you name it.”

I went to the drink station, poured myself a cup of reclaimed water, and headed to the rec room.

Since there is no atmosphere on the moon, the only thing that ever alters the landscape is us—and humans rarely alter a landscape for the better. What was once a pristine, white blanket of moon dust has now been trampled by a million footprints and flattened by the treads of the moon rovers, which are housed in a garage near MBA.

With a whoosh the dull gray walls of the rec room vanished, and I suddenly found myself in one of the most startlingly beautiful landscapes I’d ever seen. I was standing in a meadow full of wildflowers by a pristine, blindingly blue lake, with verdant forest on one side and snowcapped mountains on the other.

I materialized right in the thick of things, at Roddy’s side. Since I’d never bothered to modify my avatar, it looked exactly like me.

“Don’t be fooled by the appearance of the Gogolaks,” he warned. “What they lack in agility they make up for in cunning and guile. Plus, one bite from them makes your brain dissolve into sludge.”

“They’re not paying any attention to us. And they don’t have any idea what our real identities are. For all they know, we’re two yahoos from Podunk.”

Roddy laughed spitefully. “Of course he did. Rather than come check on me himself.”

I tried to pick my words carefully, wary of saying anything classified.

I stared at Roddy, trying to read his expression, but in the virtual world this was almost impossible. The avatars don’t mimic the subtle movements of their players’ faces.

“Smooth move,” Roddy groused.

The Gogolaks closed the gap on me with surprising speed for creatures made out of instant dessert. Apparently, they were faster—and craftier—than I’d realized.

“A Bosnakkian Snork,” Roddy repeated curtly, as though this were something everyone had heard of before. “An alien species from the Andromeda Galaxy renowned for not making any sound at all. Haven’t you ever played Warp War?”

“A Bosnakkian Snork,” Roddy repeated curtly, as though this were something everyone had heard of before. “An alien species from the Andromeda Galaxy renowned for not making any sound at all. Haven’t you ever played Warp War?”

The slurping sound of something large and viscous came from the galleries ahead.

The moon-base commander (or MBC) serves as the de facto mayor, handling all issues to the best of his or her ability.