Shine

by Jetse de Vries (ed)

  "We can't launch the Explorer?" someone yelled.

  Jared shook his head. "We can launch it. Chances of long-term success are almost zero."

  The room erupted in shouts. What are we working for? Why didn't you tell us? Where do we go from here?

  "Shut up!" Pavig Lok said, his voice booming on the raw steel. Slowly, the room quieted down.

  Ani looked at the frightened, angry faces in front of her. She didn't know what to tell them. Or if words would matter.

  If we could just talk to Earth, she thought.

  But she didn't dare say it.

  Because that was another thing. Another part of their perfect society.

  Roy Parekh found Nari Akimoto deep in a vineyard on the north end of Napa. She stood like a scarecrow, hands on hips, looking out over the rolling hills. The grapes had just been harvested; ragged vines exposed only a few sickly clusters, rapidly turning into raisins in the Indian-summer heat.

  "Good harvest," Nari said, as he drew near. She'd grown thin and severe since their USC days, but she was still beautiful, in an icy way.

  "Why do I have seven million dollars in my Fund of Last Resort?" Roy asked.

  "Good afternoon to you, too, dear Roy," Nari said, her eyes faraway, focused on the hazy valley below.

  "What have you been doing?"

  Nari just smiled and leaned against a trellis.

  "You actually have seven point one two million dollars in the FOLR account. One hundred thirty eight active clients and a monthly cashflow of one point two one million dollars, assuming a median policy cost of nine thousand dollars per month."

  "How do you know this?" Roy said, feeling his teeth grind.

  "A new datadigger. Quasipublix." Nari picked a bunch of grapes and shook it. Wrinkled proto-raisins fell off of it.

  "What have you done?"

  "So, you don't want this?"

  No, not yet, not yet.

  Nari snapped a quick, snakelike grin. "I saw that."

  "What?"

  "Your expression. You can thank me for giving the fund a little push."

  "Tell me what you did."

  Nari said nothing for a long time. "You think too small," she said. "The Rethink made things harder, but you can still play the big game. I have friends who rate policies. If you abstract the numbers on your FOLR, it looks amazing. No current debt, very low chance of payout, low investment, fits into catastrophic continuation plans."

  Roy remembered that Nari had worked for AIG before the Rethink. She probably had a lot of friends. Lots and lots.

  Roy shivered.

  "It can even be billed as completely carbon-neutral--a great way for an exec to up his social responsibility profile."

  "Only because everything's done off-world."

  Nari just grinned.

  "What happens when people figure it out?"

  "Who says anyone will figure it out?"

  When they really look at it--"

  A laugh. "They're looking at it. They're wishing they came up with it. But they're also signing it. Barring a complete meltdown of the world economy--enough to make all your plans moot anyway--there's nothing to worry about. So, there's nothing to worry about."

  Roy said nothing. There was always a gotcha. Always.

  But--

  --if he drew well below the median CEO salary, and if he acted in good faith to implement the FOLR, he might skate through an examination by the transparency-hawks. Even if they aired the laundry, he might be taken as a WallE, hopeless and cute and eccentric.

  "What do you want?" Roy asked.

  Nari grinned and pushed herself up off the trellis. She came up close to Roy and put her hands on his shoulders. Her hands were like steel cable wrapped in thin silicone.

  "A world where I can do this all the time," she said. Her eyes, locked on his, were wide and serious. "A quiet world, where we don't have to worry about Napa going away."

  Roy couldn't think of anything to say.

  "And twenty per cent," she said.

  "Of the FOLR?"

  Just a grin.

  "Five," Roy said.

  "Ten. Or ratings start changing."

  Silence for a time. Shadows drew long on the vineyard in the late afternoon, painting the hills in olive and black.

  It's too early. Roy thought. Then, darker: But it may also already be too late.

  "Done," Roy said.

  Ani Loera and Jun Shao trudged across a gray lunar plain towards Earthside. Their rover was twenty kilometers behind them, recharging. It had taken them one hundred seventy kilometers before dying. Ani was proud. The battery packs were of Lunar manufacture, and they had performed as well as the originals from Earth.

  "If we weren't a crazy isolationist paradise, we wouldn't be doing this," Jun said, puffing heavily over the suit-to-suit comm.

  "I like it," Ani said.

  "You like crazy isolationist paradises? That work you to death? Based on a nineteenth-century mercantile model?"

  "You've been talking to Jared."

  Jun said nothing.

  "You haven't lived until your house is an inflatable tent covered with regolith."

  "You firsters are all crazy."

  "We all are."

  "All I think is how much radiation I'm taking. And whether this mess will work." Jun nodded at their home-brew radio, an ugly tangle of solar cells and spidery antennae.

  "It will." Jared said it would be able to receive and decode some data from Earth, but he couldn't guarantee two-way communications.

  A snort. "We'll see."

  "You're a pessimist, Jun."

  "I'm a realist."

  For a while, there was no sound other than the hiss of her breathing and the crunch of her feet on the powder. Even with the 80-kilo pack on her back and the hundred or so kilos of radio equipment, she still felt like she could fly. And that was when you got in trouble. Twenty kilometers on the moon was no short walk, even without the radio gear. The suit chafed painfully on the back of her legs. She knew she could expect big, bleeding blisters.

  "Holy wow," Jun said, softly.

  Ani looked up from her feet. They'd just come over a low rise. Directly ahead of them was a three-quarter Earth, suddenly blue and white in the infinite blackness of space.

  What have I given up? The thought was sudden, overwhelming. Tears threatened; she squeezed them back and shook her head.

  "Let's get this set up," Ani said.

  Jun didn't move.

  "Radiation, hoy!" she said.

  Jun started. "Yeah." Softly.

  They planted the radio, pointed the antenna, checked the solar panels for output, did self-tests, got linkage with the antenna back at the rover, confirmed connection with Hermes.

  "Congrats," Jared's voice said. "We're getting data."

  "What are we getting?"

  "Too early to tell. Get back, we'll know by then."

  "Gotcha."

  Ani turned to take one last look at brilliant Earth. And, in doing so, she saw something she'd missed before: a line of footprints.

  Ani went to look. There were two sets, one larger, one smaller. The nameprint on both soles had been obscured by tape. The stopped about halfway down the hill in a smoothed-out area.

  Ani imagined a couple sitting there, looking out at the full Earth. Like a picnic. Except there was no chance of a basket full of fried chicken and a thermos of wine.

  Unless they'd brought a temporary shelter.

  She laughed, imagining two lovers intertwined under the full Earth. It was a billion different kinds of stupid. It was silly. It was romantic.

  "Huh," Jun said, coming up beside her.

  Ani punched his spacesuit. "Huh yourself."

  They followed the footsteps back towards the rover.

  Ani couldn't stop grinning.

  "So what are you going to do now?" Nari Akimoto asked. The news streamed on Roy Parekh's heads-up: FOLR Holdings' buyout of Intelligent Risk, a Modern Insurance Company, has been accepted. Which put hi
m at the head of a going-on-large multinational insurance firm.

  Well, him and his gang, he thought. It wasn't just him anymore. The friends from USC. The bigwigs from AIG. The guys from Morgan Stanley. Shards of FOLR Holdings, a per cent here, a half per cent there, three per cent elsewhere.

  If Nari and Thom ever wanted to screw him--

  Roy shook his head and paced in front of the big glass windows in his penthouse in the Eastern Columbia building. The lights of downtown Los Angeles spread away to the horizon, an infinite Christmas.

  "Well?" Nari held up a bottle of Cristal. "Time to celebrate?"

  No, Roy thought. He didn't want Intelligent Risk. It was something he had to do. Because of the gang.

  But he made himself smile. "Sure."

  But he didn't feel like drinking. He didn't feel like going out. He didn't want to find the latest trendy bar, painted in sharp-edged fluorescent molds and drunk on sustainability, distilling its own organic vodkas and playing grunge-remixed-happy. The record went round and round. They were still ghouls, digging up the past to recycle, one more time. If they really wanted progress, there'd be all-new music, all-new fashions, all-new ways of looking at the world. He remembered when he was a kid, the first web revolution. Yahoo and Geocities and those grocery delivery guys and Outpost were gonna remake everything, they were gonna tear everything down, it would be a whole new world.

  While listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and wearing flannel, recycled echos of echos, and really just grabbing for the money, he thought. Meaningless in the end.

  And that was the same trap he was in now. Just another cog, turning in the money machine. For a moment, he felt a deep, hot rage. He wanted to throw himself against the glass.

  His heads-up buzzed. Thom. Calling to congratulate him, no doubt. He pulled it off and set it down.

  "Cheers," Nari said, handing him a glass of champagne. He raised it, mechanically, and drank.

  She went to a framed Digg print-out on his wall. It was a small story. USC Still Looking For Students Behind Orbital Shot. A little blurb about how a home-made launch from Downtown had gotten a tiny rocket near to orbit, and the chaos of FAA and NASA investigations.

  "This was you, wasn't it?"

  Roy said nothing.

  Nari came and put her arms around him. "What are you going to do?"

  Roy sighed. I'm going to do my job as chairman of the largest insurance company on the planet, he almost said. I'm going to get old and gray, and when I die I can give a pile of cash to, well--

  Nobody. Nari didn't know he couldn't have children yet.

  A sudden thought: Or I could do something different.

  I still need to show good faith effort on the FOLR.

  It was an insane idea, a monument to idiocy. There was no way it would work. Even with the resources of Intelligent Risk.

  But.

  Goddamn it.

  It was time to take the needle off the record.

  He imagined his gang's reaction.

  And he smiled.

  This time, the meeting was a lot smaller. Just Ani Loera, Jun Shao, and Jared Gildea. And Nils, who ignored the adults for the thrills of a game on his wriststream. A handful of onlookers stood around their table at Selene's Luck Bar. Selene's had been the first to do local beer, but wheat and barley were difficult, and hops, for whatever reason, didn't want to flower. They'd moved on to wine, which was better... as long as you didn't mind the bitter chemical twang of regolith in your Cabernet. Their local oenophile had declared the moon terroir to be "scary, alien, silicose, and profound," and said there would likely be a strong market on Earth.

  But even with the small crowd, she felt the eyes. Lots of people peeping the streams, but not wanting to look at her face.

  "Let's get right to the point," she said, addressing Jun and Jared. "Do we know why the shipments have stopped?"

  Jared shook his head, twirling his wineglass with one hand. "Not entirely. Intelligent Risk still exists, but Roy Parekh is not listed as a stockholder."

  "Dead?"

  "No obituary. There's not a lot of data on him for the last five years. He appears to have become reclusive. But that doesn't explain his excision from the board. There's no corporate document recording it."

  Ani shivered.

  "There's also a new player, Unified Sustainability, which seems to have grown out of Intelligent Risk. And a bunch of other companies. There's a ruling from them that puts Risk Ventures spaceflight under their jurisdiction, but the terms are vague. There's nothing to indicate they've halted the launches."

  "Ruling?"

  Jared frowned. "They don't bill themselves as a corporation anymore. They're an 'ideals-based transnational state,' one of several large organizations with broad powers."

  "Unified Sustainability, whoo, bad news," someone said. He was a dark-haired man of about thirty. Ani glanced at her tagged stream. He was listed as Whyte Kennedy, and he had come to the moon less than a year ago.

  "Why?" Ani asked.

  "They run the show. Lot of it, anyways. The States, Philippines, lotsa Mexico, some China. They declared the post-scarcity."

  "Post-scarcity?"

  Jared nodded. "They've convinced themselves they're living in a post-scarcity economy."

  "To all, sufficiency. From all, sustainability," Whyte said.

  Jared shook his head. "But it isn't true post-scarcity. The Gross World Product isn't any larger than it was when you left, Ani. And the population is larger."

  Ani hugged herself. Spreading around limited resources wasn't post-scarcity. It also usually wasn't pretty. How thin was the spread? And who controlled it?

  She remembered Roy's words, when one of the board had challenged his grandiose moonbase. We have to be careful who we let define what is sustainable.

  "Are you scared, mommy?" Nils asked. Ani started, realizing she had been squeezing his hand tightly.

  "I'm fine, Nils," she said.

  To the others, she said, "This doesn't sound good."

  "Earth likes to put a happy face on things, but yes, they're in trouble." Jared turned to Whyte. "Why didn't you let us know about this earlier? Why didn't anyone?"

  Whyte shrugged. "We told you. Nobody believed."

  "What's Earth?" Nils asked.

  "Where we came from," Ani said.

  "What happened?" Jun said. "They could've made their own moonbase. They could have built space elevators! We had the materials when I left, ten years ago."

  "All spaceflight appears to have been consolidated in Intelligent Risk shortly after you left."

  "We will not take. We will not increase." Whyte said.

  Jared glanced at him. "It appears to be an ingrained thing. Propaganda."

  "Or skeins," Whyte said.

  "Let's leave that for now," Jared said. He glanced at Ani and mouthed, Don't ask.

  And, for the first time since she'd landed on the moon, she actually felt fear. Earth had grown strange.

  "Is it safe to assume that United Sustainability is preventing the launch of our shipments?" Ani asked.

  Jared nodded. "I'd say that's a good assumption. Remember, though, the data we have is partial. There are many protocols that won't resolve down to our level. What we have is posted on the mediawiki for everyone to review."

  "So we may be able to contact United Sustainability and work a deal with them?"

  "I would assume so."

  Whyte frowned. "No. No. No." He stood up and walked away.

  Ani shook her head. It should be simple. Tell them about the Europa Explorer, tell them about the space-based economy they could build, and show them how they could have a real postscarcity economy. Leave out the signals from the Europan seas for the moment, because that was just icing. And the shipments would start again, and everything would be fine.

  But nothing is ever that easy, is it?

  The geeks came to Roy Parekh's Special Projects basement, wearing serious masks. Inside, they were giddy.

  Roy Parekh knew g
iddy. Or at least its less-colorful cousin, happiness. It was how he felt, every day they came a little closer to making the promise of the FOLR a reality.

  The geeks worked twelve and fourteen and sixteen hour days and never complained; they left their families and lived in the Intelligent Risk Special Projects office, or picked up apartments across the street. They worked for half of what they'd been paid at their old jobs, where they'd been developing phones or planning cities or running numbers. They tracked him with their bright eyes in a scary, devoted way.

  Thank you, their expressions said. Thank you for letting us dream.

  And, at the same time, he wanted to tell them, No, thank you. Thank you for helping me do something that isn't about passing it on to my kids, or saving the world, or getting 12% return, or avoiding carbon taxes.

  As they worked, Roy made deals.

  Roy went to SpaceX, who held Intelligent Risk insurance, and said: let's joint venture to bring carbon-balanced, risk-mitigated spaceflight to place and service satellites. Also offer longer-range flights to NASA, which had just lost another Europa probe.

  It made sense, but it still wouldn't work. The basic budget was insane, unimaginable.

  Except Roy's pitch also happened to be the perfect thing to fling at the incoming Congress, who were looking for a way to fit the United States into a world with two and a half billion people who all thought they were middle class but weren't Americans.

  Spaceflight was a dirty business, and if they could get the carbon credits and resource utilization stamps to take that over for the world, maybe America could suddenly fit, and maybe the slide would stop, maybe they could stop bulldozing the unsold homes while two or three families lived next door.

  In the insanely complex world of twenty-twice, it made sense. Suddenly Intelligent Risk was de facto owner of a rocket company and backstopped by a fund that made them the largest business venture on the planet.

  And that was when Roy came back to the Special Projects basement.

  The geeks had put up a fogtank showing a solid projection of the moonbase, cut in layers beneath the lunar surface. The name HERMES hung above it; he nodded, he got that, his iBlasters had already told him Hermes was the greek god of animal husbandry, roads, travel, hospitality, heralds, diplomacy, trade, thievery, language, writing, persuasion, cunning wiles, athletic contests, gymnasiums, astronomy, and astrology.