Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  But he kept us company, and when he was awake, he kibbitzed in a sleepy voice. Sometimes he was too stoned and ended up making no sense, just tapering off into mumble-mumble, but he had surprisingly lucid moments, when his eyes would glitter and he’d raise his trembling arm and point at something on the whiteboard or someone’s screen and bust out a change or objection that was spot-on. It was spooky, like he was bringing us insights from the edge of death, and we all started jumping a little when he’d do it. In this way, little by little, the project’s road map took shape: the order of lifter consortia to try, the approaches to try with each, the way to pitch the kickstarter, and even the storyboard for the video and engineering suggestions for sifting regolith.

  Pug slept on his hospital bed in the living room. In theory, we all took turns sleeping on the sofa next to him, but in practice, I was the only one who could sleep through the groans he’d make in his sleep but still wake up when he rasped hoarsely for his bedpan. It was just after two, one night, when he woke me up by croaking my name, “Greg, hey, Greg.”

  I woke and found that he’d adjusted the bed to sit up straight, and he was more animated than he’d been in weeks, his eyes bright and alert.

  “What is it, Pug?”

  He pointed at a crack in the drapes, a sliver of light coming through them. “Full moon tonight,” he said.

  I looked at the blue-white triangle of light. “Looks like it,” I said.

  “Open the curtains?”

  I got up and padded to the window and pulled the curtains back. A little dust rained down from the rods and made me sneeze. Out the window, framed perfectly by it like an HD shot in a documentary, was the moon, so big and bright it looked like a painted set lit up with a spotlight. We both stared at it for a moment. “It’s the moon illusion,” he said. “Makes it seem especially big because we don’t have anything to compare it to. Once it dips a little lower on the horizon and the roofs and tree branches are in the same plane, it’ll seem small again. That’s the Sturgeon moon. August’s moon. My favorite moon, the moon you sometimes get at the Burn.” It was almost time for the Burn, and my email had been filled with a rising babble of messages about photovoltaics and generators, costumes and conductive body paint, bikes and trailers, coffee and dry ice, water and barbecues and charcoal and sleeping bags. Normally, all this stuff would be a steadily rising chorus whose crescendo came when we packed the latest Gadgets into the van, wedged tight amid groceries and clothes and tents, and closed the doors and turned the key in the ignition.

  This year, it was just an annoying mosquito-whine of people whose lives had diverged from our own in the most profound way imaginable. They were all off for a week of dust and hedonism; we were crammed together in this dark, dying room, planning a trip to the moon.

  “Outside,” he said, and coughed weakly. He reached for his water bottle and I helped him get the flexible hose into his mouth. “Outside,” he said again, stronger.

  I eyed his hospital bed and looked at the living room door. “Won’t fit,” I said. “Don’t think you can walk it, buddy.”

  He rolled his eyes at the wall, and I stared at it for a moment before I figured out what he was trying to tell me. Behind the low bookcase, the garbage can, and the overstuffed chair, that wall was actually a set of ancient, ever-closed vertical blinds. I dragged the furniture away and found the blinds’ pull chain and cranked them back to reveal a set of double sliding doors, a piece of two-by-four wedged in the track to keep them from being forced open. I looked back at Pug and he nodded gravely at me and made a minute shooing gesture. I lifted out the lumber, reaching through a thick pad of old cobwebs and dust bunnies. I wiped my hand on the rug and then leaned the wood against the wall. I pulled the door, which stuck at first, then gave way with a crunchy, squeaky sound. I looked from the hospital bed to the newly revealed door.

  “All right, buddy, let’s get this show on the road. Moon don’t wait for no one.”

  He gave me a thumbs-up and I circled the bed, unlocking each of the wheels.

  It was a good bed, a lease from a company that specialized in helping people to die at home. If that sounds like a ghoulish idea for a start-up, then I’m guessing you’ve never helped a friend who was dying in a hospital.

  But it was still a hell of a struggle getting the bed out the door. It just fit, without even a finger’s width on either side. And then there was the matter of the IV stand, which I had to swing around so it was over the head of the bed, right in my face as I pushed, until he got wedged and I had to go out the front door and around the house to pull from the other side, after freeing the wheels from the rubble and weeds in the backyard.

  But once we were out, it was smooth rolling, and I took him right into the middle of the yard. It was one of those perfect L.A. nights, the cool dividend for a day’s stifling heat, and the moon loomed overhead so large I wanted to reach out and touch it. Pug and I were beside each other, admiring the moon.

  “Help me lower the back,” he said, and I cranked the manual release that gently lay the bed out flat, so he could lie on his back and stare up at the sky. I lay down in the weeds beside him, but there were pointy rocks in there, so I went inside and got a couple of sofa cushions and improvised a bed. On my way out the door, I dug out a pair of binoculars from Pug’s Burning Man box, spilling fine white dust as I pulled them free of the junk inside.

  I held the binocs up to my eyes and focused them on the moon. The craters and peaks came into sharp focus, bright with the contrast of the full moon. Pug dangled his hand down toward me and wriggled his fingers impatiently, so I got to my feet and helped him get the binoculars up to his face. He twiddled the knobs with his shaking fingers, then stopped. He was absolutely still for a long time. So long that I thought he might have fallen asleep. But then he gently lowered the binocs to his chest.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said. “There’ll be people there, someday.”

  “Hell yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

  “Maybe not for a long time. Maybe a future civilization. Whatever happens, the moon’ll be in the sky, and everyone will know that there’s stuff waiting for them to come and get it.”

  I took the binocs out of his loose fingers and lay back down on my back, looking at the moon again. I’d seen the Apollo footage so often it had become unreal, just another visual from the library of failed space dreams of generation ships and jetpacks and faster-than-light travel. Despite all my work over the past weeks and months, the moon as a place was . . . fictional, like Narnia or Middle Earth. It was an idea for a theme camp, not a place where humans might venture, let alone live there.

  Seen through the binocs that night, all those pits, each older than the oldest living thing on Earth, I came to understand the moon as a place. In that moment, I found myself sympathizing with the Green Moonies, and their talk of the moon’s pristineness. There was something wonderful about knowing that the first upright hominids had gazed upon the same moon that we were seeing, and that it had hardly changed.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. I was getting drowsy.

  “Jewel,” he said, barely a whisper. “Pearl. Ours. Gotta get there. Gotta beat the ones who think companies are people. The moon’s for people, not corporations. It’s a free lunch. Yours, if you want it.”

  “Amen,” I said. It was like being on a campout, lying with your friends, staring at the stars, talking until sleep overcame you.

  I drifted between wakefulness and sleep for a long, weird time, right on the edge, as the moon tracked across the sky. When I woke, the birds were singing and the sun was on our faces. Pug was lying in a stoned daze, the button for his drip in his loose grasp. He only did that when the pain was bad. I brought his bed inside as gently as I could, but he never gave any sign he noticed, not even when the wheels bumped over the sliding door’s track. I put things back as well as I could and had a shower and put breakfast on and didn’t speak of the moon in the night sky to Blight or Maya when they arrived later that morning. />
  PUG DIED THAT NIGHT. He did it on purpose, asking for ketamine in a serious voice, looking at each of us in turn as I put the pills in his hand. “More,” he said. Then again. He looked in my eyes and I looked in his. I put more tablets in his hand, helped him find the hose end for his water as he swallowed them. He reached back for the morphine switch and I put it in his hand. I took his other hand. Blight and Maya moved to either side of me and rested their hands on the bed rail, then on Pug, on his frail arm, his withered leg. He smiled a little at us, stoned and sleepy, closed his eyes, opened them a little, and nodded off. We stood there, listening to him breathe, listening to the breath slowing. Slowing.

  Slowing.

  I couldn’t put my finger on the instant that he went from living to dead.

  But there was a moment when the muscles of his face went slack, and in the space of seconds, his familiar features rearranged themselves into the face of a corpse. So much of what I thought of as the shape of Pug’s face was the effect of the tensions of the underlying muscles, and as his cheeks hollowed and slid back, the skin on his nose stretched, making it more bladelike, all cartilage, with the nostrils flattened to lizardlike slits. His lips, too, stretched back in a toneless, thin-lipped smile that was half a grimace. His heart may have squeezed out one or two more beats after that; maybe electrical impulses were still arcing randomly from nerve to nerve, neuron to neuron, but that was the moment at which he was more dead than alive, and a few moments after that, he was altogether and unmistakably dead.

  We sat there in tableau for a moment that stretched and stretched. I was now in a room with a body, not my friend. I let go of his hand and sat back, and that was the cue for all of us to back away.

  There should be words for those moments, but there aren’t. In the same way that every human who ever lived has gazed upon the moon and looked for the words to say about it, so have we all looked upon the bodies of the ones we’ve loved and groped for sentiment. I wished I believed in last rites, or pennies on the eyelids, or just, well, anything that we could all acknowledge as the proper way to seal off the moment and return to the world of the living. Blight slipped her hand in mine and Maya put her elbow through my other arm and together we went out into the night. The moon was not quite full anymore, a sliver out of its huge face, and tonight there were clouds scudding across the sky that veiled and unveiled it.

  We stood there, the three of us, in the breeze and the rattle of the tree branches and the distant hum of L.A. traffic and the far-off clatter of a police helicopter, with the cooling body of our friend on the other side of the wall behind us. We stood there and stared up at the moon.

  ADAPTING THE GADGET TO work in a lunar environment was a substantial engineering challenge. Pug had sketched out a map for us—gathering regolith, sorting it, feeding it onto the bed, aligning the lens. Then there was propulsion, which was even more important for the moon than it was on Earth. We’d drop a Gadget on the Playa in July and gather up its tiles a couple of months later, over Labor Day. But the moonprinter might be up there for centuries, sintering tetroid tiles and pooping them out while the humans below squabbled and fretted and cast their gaze into the stars. If we didn’t figure out how to keep the Gadget moving, it would eventually end up standing atop a bed of printed tiles, out of dust and out of reach of more dust, and that would be that.

  This wasn’t one Pug had a solution for. Neither did I, or Blight, or Maya. But it wasn’t just us. There was a sprawling wiki and mailing list for the project, and at one point, we had three separate factions vying to go to the moon first. One was our project, one was nearly identical in goals except that its organizers were totally committed to a certain methodology for sealing the bearings that our side had voted down.

  The third faction—they were weird. /b/ was a clutch of totally bizarro trolls, a community that had cut its teeth drawing up detailed plans for invading Sealand—the offshore drilling platform that had been converted to an ill-starred sovereign data haven—moved on to gaming Time magazine polls, splintered into the Anonymous movement with all its many facets and runs and ops, fighting everyone from the Church of Scientology to the Egyptian government to the NSA and that had proven its ability to continuously alter itself to challenge all that was sane and complacent with the world, no matter what it took.

  These people organized themselves under the banner of the Committee to Protect Luna (SRSLY), and they set out to build a machine that would hunt down our machine, and all the tiles it dropped, and smash it into the smallest pieces imaginable. They had some pretty talented engineers working with them, and the designs they came up with solved some of the issues we’d been wrestling with, like a flywheel design that would also act as a propulsive motor, its energy channeled in one direction so that the Gadget would gently inch its way along the lunar surface. They produced innumerable videos and technical diagrams showing how their machine would work, hunting ours down by means of EMF sensors and an onboard vision system. For armament, it had its own sinterer, a clever array of lenses that it could focus with software-controlled servos to create a bug-under-a-magnifying-glass effect, allowing it to slowly but surely burn microscopic holes through our robot.

  The thing was, the technical designs were absolutely sound. And though 90 percent of the rhetoric on their message boards had the deranged tinge of stoned giggles, the remaining 10 percent was deadly serious, able to parrot and even refine the Green Moon party line with stony earnestness. There were a lot of people in our camp who were convinced that they were serious—especially after they kickstarted the full load for a killer bot in thirty-six hours.

  I thought it was trolling, just plain trolling. DON’T FEED THE TROLLS! I shouted online. No one listened to me (not enough people, anyway), and there was an exhausting ramble about countermeasures and armor and even, God help us all, a lawsuit, because yeah, totally, that would work. The wrangle lasted so long that we missed our launch window. The leaders of the paranoiac faction said that they’d done us all a favor by making us forfeit the deposit we’d put down, because now we’d have time to get things really right before launch time.

  Another group said that the important thing wasn’t countermeasures, it was delay—if we waited until the /b/tards landed their killer bot on the moon, we could just land ours far enough away that it would take five hundred years for the two to meet, assuming top speed and flat terrain all the way. That spun out into a brutal discussion of game theory and strategy, and I made the awful mistake of getting involved directly, saying, “Look, knuckleheads, if your strategy is to outwait them, and their goal is to stop us from doing anything, then their optimal strategy is to do nothing. So long as they haven’t launched, we can’t launch.”

  The ensuing discussion ate my life for a month and spilled over into the real world, when, at an L.A. burners’ event, a group of people who staunchly disagreed with me made a point of finding me wherever I was to make sure I understood what a dunderhead I was.

  I should have known better. Because, inevitably, the /b/tard who was in charge of the money fucked off with it. I never found out what he or she did with it. As far as I know, no one ever did.

  After that, I kept my mouth shut. Or rather, I only opened it to do things that would help the project go forward. I stopped knocking heads together. I let Maya do that. I don’t believe in generalizations about demographics, but man, could that girl argue. Forget all that horseshit about “digital natives,” which never meant anything anyway. Using a computer isn’t hard. But growing up in a world where how you argue about something changes what happens to it, that was a skill, and Maya had it in ways I never got.

  “WHAT’S WRONG WITH CALLING it the Gadget?”

  Blight looked up from her weeding and armed sweat off her forehead, leaving behind a faint streak of brown soil. She and I traded off the weeding and this was her day, which meant that I got to spend my time indoors with all the imaginary network people and their arguments.

  “Leave it, Greg,” she
said, in that tone that I’d come to recognize as perfectly nonnegotiable. We’d been living together for two years at that point, ever since I sank a critical mass of my nest egg into buying another launch window and had had to remortgage my house. The vegetable garden wasn’t just a hobby—it was a way of life and it helped make ends meet.

  “Come on,” I said. “Come on. We’ve always called it ‘the Gadget.’ That’s what Pug called it—”

  She rocked back on her heels and rose to her feet with a kind of yogic grace. Her eyes were at half-mast, with that cool fury that I’d come to know and dread.

  “Pug? Come on, Greg, I thought we agreed: no playing the cult of personality card. He’s dead. For years now. He wasn’t Chairman Mao. He wasn’t even Hari Seldon. He was just a dude who liked to party and was a pretty good engineer and was an altogether sweet guy. ‘That’s what Pug called it’ is pure bullshit. ‘The Gadget’ is a dumb name. It’s a way of announcing to the world that this thing hasn’t been thought through. That it’s a lark. That it’s not serious—”

  “Maybe that’s good,” I said. “A good thing, you know? Because that way, no one takes us seriously and we get to sneak around and act with impunity until it’s too late and—”

  I fell silent under her stony glare. I tried to keep going, but I couldn’t. Blight had the opposite of a reality distortion field. A reality assertion field.

  “Fine,” I said. “We won’t call it the Gadget. But I wish you’d told me before you went public with it.”

  She pulled off her gardening gloves and stuffed them into her pockets, then held out her hands to me. I took them.

  “Greg,” she said, looking into my eyes. “I have opinions. Lots of them. And I’m not going to run them past you before I ‘go public’ with them. Are we clear on that score?”

  Again, I was stymied by her reality assertion field. All my stupid rationalizations about not meaning it that way refused to make their way out of my mouth, as some latent sense of self-preservation came to the fore.