Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  “Yes, Blight,” I said. She squeezed my fingers and dropped her stern demeanor like the mask it was.

  “Very good. Now, what shall we call it?”

  Everyone who had come to know it through Burning Man called it the Gadget. Everyone else called it the moonprinter. “Not moonprinter.”

  “Why not? It seems to have currency. You going to tell everyone the name they chose is wrong?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay, go,” she said.

  “Well, first of all, it’s not a printer. Calling it a 3D printer is like calling a car a horseless carriage. Like calling videoconferencing ‘the picturephone.’ So long as we call it an anything printer, we’ll be constrained by printerish thinking.”

  “All right,” she said. “Pretty good point. What else?”

  “It’s not printing the moon! It’s using moondust to print structural materials for prefab habitats. The way you ‘print’ a moon is by smashing a comet into a planet so that a moon-sized hunk of rock breaks off and goes into orbit around it.”

  “So what do you think we should call it?”

  I shrugged. “I like ‘the Gadget.’ ”

  I ducked as she yanked out one of her dirty, balled-up gloves and threw it at my head. She caught me with the other glove and then followed it up with a muscular, rib-constricting hug. “I love you, you know.”

  “I love you, too.” And I did. Despite the fact that I had raided my nest egg, entered the precariat, and might end up someday eating dog food, I was as happy as a pig in shit. Speaking of which.

  “Dammit, I forgot to feed Messy.”

  She gave my butt a playful squeeze. “Go on then.”

  Messy was our pig, a kunekune, small enough to be happy on half an acre of pasture grass, next to the chicken run with its own half acre. The chickens ate bugs and weeds, and we planted more pasture grass in their poop, which Messy ate, leaving behind enough poop to grow berries and salad greens, which we could eat. We got eggs and, eventually, bacon and pork chops, as well as chickens. No external fertilizer, no phosphates, and we got more calories out for less energy and water inputs than even the most efficient factory farm.

  It was incredibly labor-intensive, which was why I liked it. It was nice to think that the key to feeding nine billion people was to measure return on investment by maximizing calories and minimizing misery, instead of minimizing capital investment and maximizing retained earnings to shareholders.

  Messy’s dinner was only an hour late, and she had plenty of forage on her half acre, but she was still pissed at me and refused to come and eat from my hand until I’d cooed at her and made apologetic noises, and then she came over and nuzzled me and nipped at my fingers. I’d had a couple dogs, growing up, but the most smartest and most affectionate among them wasn’t a patch on a pig for smarts and warmth. I wasn’t sure how we’d bring ourselves to eat her. Though, hell, we managed it with the chickens, which were smarter and had more personality than I’d ever imagined. That was the other thing about permaculture: it made you think hard about where your food came from. It had been months since I’d been able to look at a jar of gas-station pepperoni sticks without imagining the animals they had once been.

  Messy grunted amiably at me and snuffled at my heels, which was her way of asking to be let out of her pasture. I opened the gate and walked around to the small part of the house’s yard that we kept for human leisure. I unfolded a chair and sat in it and picked up her ball and threw it and watched her trot off excitedly to fetch it. She could do this for hours, but only if I varied where I threw it and gave her some tricky challenges.

  Maya called them the “brickshitters,” which was hilarious except that it was a gift for the Green Moon crowd, who already accused us of shitting all over the moon. Blight wanted “homesteaders,” which, again, had all kinds of awful baggage about expropriation of supposedly empty lands from the people who were already there. She kept arguing that there were no indigenous people on the moon, but that didn’t matter. The Green Moon people were determined to paint us as rapacious land grabbers, and this was playing right into their hands. It always amazed me how two people as smart as Blight and Maya could be so dumb about this.

  Not that I had better ideas. “The Gadget” really was a terrible name.

  I threw the ball and thought some more.

  WE ENDED UP CALLING it “Freelunch.” It wasn’t my coinage, but as soon as I saw it, I knew it was right. Just what Pug would have wanted. A beacon overhead, promising us a better life if only we’d stop stepping on one another to get at it.

  The name stuck. Some people argued about it, but it was clear to anyone who did lexicographic analysis of the message boards, chats, tweets, and forums that it was gaining with that Internet-characteristic, winner-take-all, hockey-stick-shaped growth line. Oh, sure, the localization projects argued about whether free meant “libre” or “gratis” and split down the middle. In Brazil, they used “livre” (Portugal’s thirty-years-and-counting technocratic “interim” managers translated it as “grátis”).

  More than eight thousand of us went to Macapá for launch day, landing in Guyana and taking the new high-speed rail from Georgetown. There had been dozens of Freelunch prototypes built and tested around the world, with teams competing for funding, engineer time, lab space. A co-op in Asheville, blessed by NASA, had taken over the production of ersatz regolith, a blend whose composition was (naturally) hotly debated.

  The Brazilian contingent went all out for us. I stayed up every night dancing and gorging, then slept in a different family’s living room until someone came to take me to the beach or a makerspace or a school. One time, Maya and Blight and I were all quartered in a favela that hung off the side of an abandoned office tower on impossibly thin, impossibly strong cables. The rooms were made of waxed cardboard and they swayed with the wind and terrified me. I was convinced I’d end up stepping right through the floor and ended up on tiptoes every time I moved. I tried not to move.

  Celesc Lifter SA had a little VIP box from which customers could watch launches. It held eight people. The seats were awarded by lottery and I didn’t get one. So I watched the lift with everyone else (minus eight), from another favela, one of the old, established ones with official recognition. Every roof was packed with viewers, and hawkers meandered the steep alleys with bulbs of beer and skewers of meat and paper cones of seafood. It was Celesc’s ninety-third lift, and it had a 78 percent success rate, with only two serious failures in that time. No fatalities, but the cargo had been jettisoned over the Pacific and broke up on impact.

  Those were good odds, but we were still all holding our breath through the countdown, through the first flames and the rumble conveyed by a thousand speakers, an out-of-phase chorus of Net-lagged audio. We held it through the human-piloted takeoff of the jumbo jet that acted as a first stage for the lifter and gasped when the jet’s video stream showed the lifter emerging from its back and rising smoothly into the sky. The jet dropped precipitously as the lifter’s rockets fired and caught it and goosed it up, through the thin atmosphere at the edge of space in three hundred seconds.

  I watched the next part from the lifter, though others swore it was better from Al Jazeera’s LEO platform, framed against the earth, the day/night terminator arcing across the ocean below. But I liked the view from the lifter’s nose, because you could see the moon growing larger, until it dominated the sky.

  Decades before, the Curiosity crew had endured their legendary “seven minutes of terror” when its chute, rockets, and exterior casings had to be coordinated with split-second timing to land the spunky little bot on our nearest neighbor without smashing it to flinders. Landing the first Freelunch on the moon was a lot simpler, thankfully. We had a lot of things going for us: the moon was close enough for us to get telemetry and send new instructions right up to the last second, it exerted substantially less gravity than Mars, and we had the advantage of everything NASA had learned and published from its own landing missions.
And let us not forget that Earth sports a sizable population of multigenerational lunar lander pilots who’ve trained on simulators since the text-based version first appeared on the PDP-8 in 1969.

  Actually, the last part kind of sucked. A lot of people believed they were qualified to intervene in the plan, and most of them were not. The signal:noise ratio for the landing was among the worst in the whole project, but in the end the winning strategy was the one that had been bandied about since the ESA’s scrapped lunar lander competition, minus the observational phase: a short series of elliptical orbits leading to a transfer orbit and a quick burn that set it falling toward the surface. The vision systems that evaluated the landing site were able to autonomously deploy air jets to nudge the descent into the clearest, smoothest patch available.

  Celesc’s lifter released the Freelunch right on time, burning a little to kick itself back down into a lower orbit to prepare for descent. As their vectors diverged, the Freelunch seemed to arc away, even though it was actually continuing on the exact curve that the lifter had boosted it to. It dwindled away from the lens of AJ’s satellite, lost against the looming moon, winking in and out of existence as a black speck that the noise-correction algorithms kept erasing and then changing their mind about.

  One by one, all the screens around me converged on the same feed: a split screen of shaky, high-magnification real-time video on one side, a radar-fed line-art version on the other. The Freelunch wound around and around the moon in four ever-tightening orbits, like a tetherball winding around a post. A tiny flare marked its shift to transfer orbit, and then it was sailing down in a spiral.

  “Coming in for a landing,” Blight said, and I nodded, suddenly snapped back to the warm Brazilian night, the smell of food and the taste of beer in my mouth.

  It spiraled closer and closer, and then it kicked violently away, and we all gasped. “Something on the surface,” Blight said.

  “Yeah,” I said, squinting and pinch-zooming at the view from its lower cameras. We’d paid for satellite relay for the landing sequence, which meant we were getting pretty hi-res footage. But the moon’s surface defies the human eye: tiny pebbles cast long, sharp shadows that look like deep cracks or possibly high shelves. I could see ten things on the landing site that could have been bad news for the Freelunch—or that could have been nothing.

  No time. Freelunch was now in a wobbly, erratic orbit that made the view from its cameras swing around nauseously, a roil of Earth in the sky, mountains, craters, the ground, the black sky, the filtered gray/white mass of the sun. From around us came a low “Wooooah!” from eight thousand throats at once.

  Maya switched us to the magnified AJ sat feed and the CGI radar view. Something was wrong—Freelunch was supposed to circle two or three times and land. Instead, it was tumbling a little, not quite flipping over on its head, but rolling more than the gyros could correct.

  “Fuck no,” I whispered. “Please. Not now. Please.” No idea who I was talking to. Pug? Landing was the riskiest part of the whole mission. That’s why we were all here, watching.

  Down and down it fell, and we could all see that its stabilizers were badly out of phase. Instead of damping its tumble, the stabilizer on one side was actually accelerating it, while the other three worked against it.

  “Tilt-a-whirl,” Maya said. We all glared at her. In a few of the sims that we’d run of the landing, the Freelunch had done just this, as the stabilizers got into a terminal argument about who was right. One faction—Iowa City–led, but with supporters around the world—had dubbed it the Tilt-a-whirl and had all kinds of math to show why it was more likely than we’d estimated. They wanted us to delay the whole mission while they refactored and retested the landing sequence. They’d been outvoted but had never stopped arguing for their position.

  “Shut up,” Blight said, in a tight little voice. The tumble was getting worse, the ground looming.

  “Fuck off,” Maya said absently. “It’s the Tilt-a-whirl, and that means that we should see the counterfire any . . . second . . . now!”

  If we hadn’t been watching closely, we’d have missed it. The Freelunch had a set of emergency air puffers for blowing the solar collectors clear if the mechanical rotation mechanism jammed or lacked power. The Tilt-a-whirlers had successfully argued for an emergency command structure that would detect tumble and deploy the air jets in one hard blast in order to cancel out the malfing stabilizer. They emptied themselves in less than a second, a white, smudgy line at right angles to the swing of the Freelunch, and the roll smoothed out in three short and shortening oscillations. An instant later, the Freelunch was skidding into the lunar surface, kicking up a beautiful rooster-tail plume of regolith that floated above the surface like playa dust. We watched as the moondust sifted down in one-sixth gee, a TV tuned to a dead channel, shifting snow out of which slowly emerged the sharp angles of the Freelunch.

  I registered every noise from the crowds on the roofs and in the stairways, every moan and whimper, all of them saying, essentially, “Please, please, please, please let it work.”

  The Freelunch popped its protective covers. For an instant they stayed in place, visible only as a set of slightly off-kilter corners set inside the main boxy body of the lander. Then they slid away, dropping to the surface with that unmistakable moon-gee grace. The simultaneous intake of breath was like a city-sized white-noise generator.

  “Power-on/self-test,” Maya said. I nodded. It was going through its boot-up routines, checking its subsystems, validating its checksums. The whole procedure took less than a minute.

  Ten minutes later, nothing had happened.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Patience,” Blight said. Her voice had all the tension of a guitar string just before it snaps.

  “Fuck patience,” I said.

  “Patience,” Maya said.

  We took one another’s hands. We watched.

  An hour later, we went inside.

  THE FREELUNCH HAD NOTHING to say to us. As Earth spun below the moon, our army of HAM operators, volunteers spread out across the equator, all tried valiantly to bounce their signals to it, to hear its distress messages. It maintained radio silence.

  After forty-eight hours, most of us slunk away from Brazil. We caught a slow freighter up the Pacific Coast to the Port of Los Angeles, a journey of three weeks where we ate fish, squinted at our transflective displays in the sun, and argued.

  Everyone had a theory about what had happened to the Freelunch. Some argued that a key component—a sensor, a power supply, a logic board—had been dislodged during the Tilt-a-whirl (or the takeoff, or the landing). The high-mag shots from the Al Jazeera sat were examined in minute detail, and things that were either noise or compression artifacts or ironclad evidence of critical damage were circled in red and magnified to individual pixels, debated and shooped and tweaked and enhanced.

  A thousand telescopic photos of the Freelunch were posted, and the supposed damage was present, or wasn’t, depending on the photo. It was sabotage. Human error. Substandard parts. Proof that space was too big a place for puny individual humans, only suited to huge, implacable nation-states.

  THERE AIN’T NO SUCH THING AS A FREELUNCH, the /b/tards trumpeted, and took responsibility for all of it. An evangelical in Mexico claimed he’d killed it with the power of prayer, to punish us for our hubris.

  I harbored a secret hope: that the Freelunch would wake up someday, having hit the magic combination of rebooting, reloading, and reformatting to make it all work. But as the Freelunch sat there, settled amid the dust of another world—well, moon—inert and idle, I confronted the reality that thousands of people had just spent years working together to litter another planet. Or moon.

  Whatever.

  THAT WASN’T A GOOD year. I had another cancer scare because life sucks, and the doc wanted a bunch of out-of-policy tests that cost me pretty much everything left in my account.

  I made a (very) little money doing some writing about the Freel
unch project, postmortems and tit-for-tats for a few sites. But after two months of rehashing the same ground, and dealing with all the stress of the health stuff, I switched off from all Freelunch-related activity altogether. Blight had already done it.

  A month later, Blight and I split up. That was scary. It wasn’t over any specific thing, just a series of bickery little stupid fights that turned into blowouts and ended up with me packing a bag and heading for a motel. The first night, I woke up at 3 A.M. to vomit up my whole dinner and then some.

  Two weeks later, I moved back in. Blight and I didn’t speak of that horrible time much afterward, but when we held hands or cuddled at night, there was a fierceness to it that hadn’t been in our lives for years and years. So maybe we needed it.

  Money, money, money. We just didn’t have any. Sold the house. Moved into a rental place, where they wouldn’t let us keep chickens or pigs. Grocery bills. Moved into another place, this one all the way out in Fresno, and got a new pig and half a dozen new chickens, but now we were a three hours’ drive from Minus and our friends.

  Blight got work at a seniors’ home, which paid a little better than minimum wage. I couldn’t find anything. Not even gardening work. I found myself sitting very still, as though I was worried that if I started moving, I’d consume some of the savings.

  She was working at a place called Shadow Hills, part of a franchise of old folks’ homes that catered to people who’d kept their nest eggs intact into their long senescences. It was like a stationary cruise ship—twenty-five stories of “staterooms” with a little living room and bedroom and kitchenette, three dining rooms with rotating menus, activities, weekly crafts bazaars, classes, gyms and a pool, a screening room. The major difference between Shadow Hills and a cruise ship—apart from Fresno being landlocked—was the hospital and palliative care ward that occupied the tenth and eleventh floors. That way, once your partner started to die, you could stay in the stateroom and visit her in the ward every day, rather than both of you being alone for those last days. It was humane and sensible, but it made me sad.