Trees from all different plants dotted the landscape. Some had white bark, and some had gold. He saw a veebee tree from planet Prato D’vessa, whose skin formed webbed indigo veins, giving the illusion that the whole organism was a piece of marble. Another tree, whose name he couldn’t place, came from a planet whose soil was rich in iron. When the tree reached maturity, iron deposits formed around its thinnest branches. The meat of the tree then withdrew from the walls of the deposits, and the now-hollow tubes rattled against one another in the wind, creating a sound like chimes.
The camera was positioned cleverly so as the true size and breadth of the garden was hidden. It focused on a cobbled path on which three people walked hand-in-hand, their backs to the camera. The voice continued.
“I have watched the suffering of mankind long enough. I have heard your prayers. I have come to make you whole again, my children. What you call the silver swamp, I call my eye. I study you and, with my eye, I find you worthy. I hereby announce that any child of mine who steps foot on my eye shall be absolved of all sin. I will bring you into my warm embrace. I shall reward you with all you have ever dreamed.”
The video cut to a lab. In it, Sarah Coverman was working feverishly. She wore clear plastic eye protection. She wore thick safety gloves. Admiral Vogel watched as she poured the contents of a test tube into a flask. She looked at the camera and began speaking.
“All I ever wanted to do in life was find a cure for the Waste. Thanks to God, I’ve finally done it. There’s no more Waste in heaven. We all work hard,” she said. “We all know what it’s like to face adversity. But too few people know the joy of success. With God, we can all know it.”
The feed cut to Jamie Curtiss. He was putting down a violin. “My whole life, I was pushed to succeed. I was thrust into academics and pressured to study science. What I really wanted to do was become a musician. Thanks to God, I can play every day. Good, too, I like to think. I never miss a note or slip up. The sounds I imagine in my head pour forth from my instruments.”
The camera cut again, this time to Rico Diaz. Of all places, he was on a tennis court. He broke from a stance and approached the camera, wiping sweat from his brow.
“When I was in college, I tore my ACL playing tennis. I had surgery, went to rehab, all of that, but every day of my life, that knee ached. I couldn’t play, I could go for hikes, I couldn’t even walk through the mall. Thanks to God, I’m all better.”
Rico tossed his racket into the air. It span once, and he caught it.
“Heaven is wonderful. The only limit here is your imagination,” Rico went on. He cleared his throat before continuing. “My only complaint is that it’s too lonely. I’d like to play against someone with some talent.”
With that, Rico took a few steps backwards and procured a tennis ball from one pocket. He batted it off the court surface twice, then served it over the net.
The view changed back to the garden, this time from another angle, showing the three walking towards the audience, faces alight with radiant smiles. The voice overlay concluded, “All this and more await you, my children. Your prayers have been answered.”
6.
The first moon offering came not from a radical, but from a Zettafleet pilot who sold out. It took a full year before ships really started rolling back through the Webgates into the Sol system. During this time, six more moon callings followed.
It was also determined, without a doubt, that the lunazoe, or at least the ghosts that called it their home, had a persistent consciousness. During one moon comm, Lunazoe Radio Expert Jason Reidberg became frustrated with Jamie Curtiss. He insisted that Jamie was dead.
“That’s simply not true,” Jamie replied. The moon comm ended thereafter.
Jamie Curtiss was prominent in the following moon vision. “The United States Space Navy tells me I’m dead, but the truth is, I’ve never been more alive. Since I’ve come to heaven, I’ve written my first book.”
The apparition held up a hardback novel with a shadowy cover. It read The Lake of Two Worlds by Jamie Curtis.
Guidelines were created for the Lunazoe Radio Experts after that one. Under no circumstances were the operators to give any information to the lunazoe. They were to ask questions, only. Not that it mattered much with all the bootleg signals coming from Earth, but the admiral had a duty to try.
Each meeting of the LEC—which now met much more frequently—the president would ask if it was really Sarah, Jamie, and Rico in the videos and on the radio, or if the lunazoe was masquerading as human. Each meeting, nobody had an answer for him. That was until Nora Dobbs spoke up one week.
“Our psychologist suggests it doesn’t much matter,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter?” the president replied. “It’s the only thing that matters.”
“Not quite,” Nora answered. “We saw the scientists die. You’ve seen the footage. They are dead without question. Now, we’ve also seen the videos and heard their voices. We know without question that these renderings, if that’s what you want to call them, are absolutely perfect. They even possess some, if not all, of their original memories, though there is the convenient gap where they should remember their deaths. Needless, the renderings in the moon callings can do anything their originals could. Much more, it appears. What we really see is the same debate we’ve faced with any transhumanism discussion.”
The president was not familiar with transhumanism discussion, so Nora continued.
“If you upload your brain to a computer, is it still you? In one sense, it is a direct continuation of consciousness from your living body. It would certainly believe it is you. But what of your original self? Proponents of transhumanism often imagine this taking place on your death bed, and your real body dies during or after the process. So did you die or not? What if the computer your mind is stored on is powered down? Are you dead until it turns back on again? What if you copy your brain like any other computer file? Are they both you? What if one is left on while the other is turned off as a backup? What if your data becomes infected with a virus and they have to restore your mind from a backup which hadn’t been powered on in years? Did you die? The backup was you, but wasn’t the same as the one that was erased. At some point, these questions become purely philosophical. Our understanding of life, consciousness, and the relationship between the two simply isn’t evolved enough to handle it. If the renderings are identical to the originals in every way, by what argument are they not them? Either way, further debate on the topic is pointless.”
The president looked to Admiral Vogel in response.
“I think she’s right on that last part,” Vogel replied. They had more than enough to worry about. Three potential civilian casualties no longer outweighed the risk.
After Jason’s slip-up, he was removed from radio duty and put back on the maser cannons. As luck would have it, Delta-V ordered a full-scale assault on the silver swamp. Every cruiser in orbit—and there were over a hundred now—directed their cannons for a 24/7 purge of the slush. Jason thought he would loathe being with Erin again, especially with her bragging that her conspiracies were right all along, but with actual work to accomplish, he found his time with her enjoyable.
Erin read out voltages and temperatures. Jason converted them into power levels and patterns. The viewfinder showed a swamp that had turned into a rolling boil. Nothing could survive in there, Jason knew.
It was May 16th when the 77th day passed since the last moon calling. This marked the longest period between any two callings since they started eighteen months earlier. It was the best evidence they had that the concentrated strikes were working. A celebration was scheduled that night.
Jason cast a sideways glance at Erin. He imagined them cuddling in the corner, leaning against each other and sipping their cheap USSN beer. He imagined bringing her back to his cabin for the night, tossing and tumbling unit they both passed out from exhaustion. The alarms sounded.
Another moon plume. Jason called out to his radar m
an, a quiet fellow by the name of Burns. Burns stuttered. He could find nothing leaving the moon’s surface. The airspace beneath them was as empty as the vacuum of space should be.
Still, the alarms sounded. The floor rolled beneath Jason’s feet. Then US3 Hamilton turned a slow barrel roll, turning over like a dog begging to have its belly rubbed. A ship was approaching the quarantine zone.
“This is Captain Hawley of the US3 Hamilton,” the captain hailed from the command deck. “Please identify yourself.”
“I am Captain Kestin of Kestin’s Joy,” a voice returned.
“Captain Kestin. You are approaching restricted space. Turn away immediately.”
“All my weapons are deactivated. I wish no harm to anybody. I request passage so that I might make an offering to God and land my ship on His Eye.”
They had all been waiting for this day. Hawley’s officers regarded him closely.
“Change course or we will fire upon you. We’ll do our best to only disable your engines. You’ll be taken alive and tried for your crimes against the United Space under jurisdiction of the United States Space Navy. You have ten seconds to comply. Do you understand me?”
There was tension in the command deck while the officers waited. Kestin didn’t respond, but after seven seconds, the chief navigator confirmed, “Kestin’s Joy is changing course.”
By order of Admiral Camry Vogel, the quarantine zone was expanded. This came at great expense to local spacelines who relied on the moon for gravity assists. The wider course they now had to take to avoid the quarantine was slower and less fuel efficient. The president balked when the industry claimed it would cripple their growth by 8% in the next year. Thanks to the moon panic, they were up over 3000% since the day he took office.
The Space Navy began turning away about one ship every month. They had to fire a warning shot once. When that pilot returned to port, he was arrested. His passengers, who had paid to be couriered to the moon, were all charged with conspiracy. Encroachment on the quarantine slowed after that.
On Earth, Michael rubbed his newly transplanted calf muscle. Parts of the tibia and fibula of his right leg had been sawed off, then extended with titanium rods. Michael would stare at the limb for an hour at a time, marveling at a leg that was the proper length. His baby doll foot still hung at the end, but the calf could actually flex it up and down a hair.
There was so much pain. The skin was stretched so taut that Michael feared it would burst like an overinflated balloon. His success had brought money, and with that, the ability to afford exclusive treatment. Still, he had a number of surgeries ahead of him, so he opted out of the skin graft. Bearing the pain was the price he was willing to pay if it meant he’d be able to walk again, even if with aid. Besides, his existing skin looked okay—just a bit mottled near his ankle.
It was time to put it away, though. Michael rubbed a cream over the screaming flesh. It was the same kind of stuff pregnant mothers put on their bellies. Then, he wrapped it in the cotton gauze like the doctor showed him and lit a joint to ease the pain. The skin inflammation was superficial, and the weed worked reasonably well. It wasn’t like the deep cramps of the Waste that he had to get baked out of his mind to forget.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t reason to drink, though. Michael had missed out on too many card games over the past two years. He had been swept up in work, but now he had an intern and could drag himself away from the terminal.
Marty, Randall, and Geoffrey hooted when Michael wheeled in. The Big Shot, they called him. Mr. Celebrity. “Oh, we’re so honored,” they said.
Michael took the ribbing in good humor. They talked about sports. They bitched about their benefits. They had a grand time. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the moon callings. The growing rumor was that lunazoe could cure Waste.
“Would you do it? If it were true?” Randall asked. With his lisp, it came out ‘ould y’ do it? I’ it ‘ere hoo? The others had known him long enough that they didn’t even hear the lisp any longer.
“No way,” Michael answered. “I’ve got money, now. I’m buying myself new legs.”
Randall wasn’t having it. He had money, too. He had tenured for forty years as an astrophysics professor before he had come down with Waste. Michael and the others didn’t know how much he made or what he had stashed away, but he lived simply and spent little. Michael was forced to admit that it took him over a year to get the muscle graft for his calf. The waiting list for a new right foot was over twice as long. It wasn’t just the shortage of body parts; there weren’t enough doctors to reattach them all.
Michael’s best-case scenario was another two and a half years for the new foot, eighteen months of physical therapy, and then the possibility that he could get around on crutches. Over five years of pain and struggle to regain some use of one leg. With the knee replacement, his other leg would take even longer, and there wasn’t a lot of existing tissue left in his leg for the doctors to work with. That’s if he could even afford it.
“It would never be perfect,” Randall told him, and it was true. Modern medicine just couldn’t rebuild people wholesale. It could do a lot, but it couldn’t perform miracles. The surgeons weren’t God. “The Lunazoe says it can make you one hundred percent. So what if it were true?”
Michael looked at the gang. Randall would need a dozen operations to fix his chest. And Geoffrey? Michael had no idea how much work it took to rebuild someone’s spine. For them, Michael could understand the lure of the moon callings. Then he looked at Marty. Marty had propped his withered arm up on the table. The fingers on his left hand twisted in every direction. It was the kind of hand a cartoon character would have after someone stepped on it. Marty wasn’t so bad off. He could be fixed easier than Michael could.
No, Michael wouldn’t go to the moon if the callings were true, but he could understand why some would. He had been covering the immigration of Waste victims to Earth. He had seen the spaceports unloading hundreds of disfigured bodies. Many governments across the United Space were subsidizing the trips for their passengers. Millions of cripples would strain any economy. If they were willing to relocate to Earth for some glimmer of hope, then it was worth footing part of the bill.
The refugees were some of the most grotesque beings Michael had ever seen. They were worse than what was played on commercials to illicit charity. He saw people whose soft tissue had wasted, but not their skeletons. Eventually, flesh and muscle tore and pulled away from the bone altogether. Others had the opposite problem. Their arms and legs sagged like jelly while deformed bones jutted out under their skin in odd shapes, like a dog or an animal had put on a human skin suit and was trying to shuffle around. Hundreds had tubes and equipment sewn into their bodies, replacing organs that had turned to into fatty flaps. Some had organs surgically placed outside of torsos that had shrunk too much to hold them. All matter of deformities was afoot. Michael had written about it extensively. Even as he sat, drinking and gambling, thousands were pouring in at spaceports around the globe. They would cause an economic collapse if their lunar salvation proved as fruitful as the rest of history’s deities.
It was one of these truly hopeless cases that brought about the first moon offering. The refugees were survivors in the worst kind of way. They had been rich and powerful people before the disease. Their wealth couldn’t help them. The galaxy’s best surgeons couldn’t put them back together. They had lived for decades with nothing but the hope that—one day—there would be some sort of miracle cure. The lunazoe finally gave them that hope.
The sellout was Captain Cueball of the Zettafleet. His real name was Linus Hall. Linus started balding when he was only twenty. Sick to his stomach, he took a razor to his scalp and shaved his head clean. A lifetime later, when he was a successful captain and could afford hair growth treatments, he was so used to hairlessness that he never even considered it. Saves him money on shampoo, he said. More people knew him by his nickname than his real name.
Steven Gorski thoug
ht he had sat on his wallet too long. He tried to look casual in meetings, sitting to the side like he had a hemorrhoid, but he sensed a judgment of him, real or imagined. He rubbed his ass for three days and made an appointment with a masseuse before he felt the dimple in his butt cheek while showering.
His wife found him nude, bent over in front of a mirror, poking at himself like some sort of fetishist. She inspected the dimple. When she prodded it with her finger, there was little resistance. The way his skin sloshed made hers crawl. It was Waste, she told him. She checked into a hotel that night. Steven spoke with her over PPC a handful of times after that before he could no longer vocalize.
Extreme fatigue beset Steven. When he looked in the mirror, he saw not the handsome face and strong jaw he had admired since adolescence, but a haggard and gaunt looking man at least fifty years his senior. The scale showed he had lost almost five pounds that day.
A week had passed since discovering the dimple. A doctor had told him that he was fortunate to have caught it when he did. He’d suffer some Waste, as so many did, but with his illegally procured vaccines and drugs, he’d avoid the worst. The doctor finished with a very ominous qualifier: as long as it was not an aggressive case.
The first morning of the next week, Steven woke up to a sensation of pins and needles that told him his left arm was still asleep. He reached to rub it, but felt only empty sheets beside him. For a horrifying moment, Steven thought his arm completely missing. Then he found it. It was reaching backwards, like he was giving himself a pat on the back. When he gritted his teeth and pulled the arm down, it snapped back the moment he let it go.
In a month, Steven could use neither of his arms or legs. Left to his own devices, he’d roll onto his stomach like a man hogtied. He’d scream as his numb, twitching fingers tickled the soles of his feet. The personal caretaker he’d hired soon had to be supplemented with a second caretaker. The women strapped sandals on his feet.
Moon Panic Page 6
