The Moonborn: or, Moby-Dick on the Moon

by D. F. Lovett

  “I’ll read them tonight,” I said, meaning it, hoping this would help improve things.

  “Go,” he said. “Read them now. When I see you next, I’ll tell you why there’s no chip in my head. But that’s when I’ll want the second thing. I want to hear why you are a flesher. Why is there no chip in your head, Earthling? Your story first. Then I’ll tell you mine. The real one, not the one I shared during dinner. The truth.”

  Thirteen

  I found his manuscript where he told me it would be. Stacks of handwritten paper, written in a slanted scrawl, what they once called cursive. Holding the papers felt strange, foreign, unpleasant. So thin, so fragile. I worried they would break apart in my hands, crumble to dust and death there in the cabin. I had never felt anything so thin, had never imagined that paper could be just as ethereal as it had always appeared to me when I saw pictures of it.

  The crumpled pages hadn’t been cared for. Some were stained, some torn. This is his life story, I thought, but then I started to read it. The page at the top had been addressed to me, or to whom he had decided I was.

  Fourteen

  To Ishmael:

  This is the start of my glorious and informative autobiography! It will not be conventional. It is the tale of the scourges of my life, of the demons and demogorgons I have battled and the mountains I have triumphed.

  There are many heroes I have. Some are real men and some are imagined men. Fictions! But a man of dreams and ideas can be just as real as a man of flesh and bone.

  The five men I admire most are Marco Polo, Benjamin Franklin, Neil Armstrong, Elliot Brandt, and Captain Ahab.

  Most of them told their own tales, cemented their own legacies. What has troubled me has always been that Captain Ahab did not get to tell his own tale. Ishmael had to tell it for him. This is not to say that Ishmael did a bad job, and I am certain that you understand where I’m going with all of this, where it leads.

  You are the Ishmael to my Captain Ahab, but I must take a larger role in telling my tale than Ahab did in his own. And at times I must be my own Ishmael! I could have tried this with no Ishmael at all but it concerned me. Better to have an Ishmael who is a ghost than no Ishmael at all! You are the ghost I required, the ghost I hired, to fly from Earth to help weave this tale, although it will be told with the voice of Ahab.

  That is the first thing Ahab did wrong, that I am to improve on. He did not tell his own tale. My second is that I will have a better fate, a truer fate.

  I will not fail.

  Sincerely,

  Captain Adam Moonborn of the Ozymandias

  Fifteen

  The Ishmael to my Ahab.

  Was this some kind of religious allegory? Did this name he had given me have some deeper meaning than just a strange name? Did he expect some kind of sexual dynamic to form between us? Was he into men? I had never heard anything to suggest it but suddenly realized I didn’t know. Did I need to clarify my own preferences?

  Who the hell was Captain Ahab? What Ishmael had I been named after?

  And then I looked at the next sheet of paper, and began to understand.

  He had given this pile of paper a title. A long, serious title.

  The Life and Times of Adam Moonborn, and the Voyage of the Ozymandias.

  Then, below it:

  Moby-Dick 2: The White on the Moon

  I realized I needed to find that copy of the book he’d given me, and figure out what the hell it was about.

  Discussion Questions on the Text Thus Far

  1. The Ozymandias emits a green light. Does this green light represent anything? If so, what?

  2. What significance do names play in this narrative? Why is the ship named the Ozymandias? Why is Ishmael named Ishmael? Why is Adam Moonborn named Adam Moonborn?

  3. Have you read the novel Moby-Dick? Do you think it matters that Ishmael has not read it? What does it say about Adam Moonborn, comparing himself to Captain Ahab?

  4. Who exactly does Adam Moonborn think he is?

  5. Ishmael wants the truth, but what is the truth? Is the truth something you can find and hold? Can there only be one truth?

  6. Where is the truth, and what will you do with it when you find it?

  Canto Four: The Seas

  One

  Another morning on the Moon. You can’t quite call it that, of course. Morning. Not a true morning. Not a morning as we Earthlings know them. There were the times when we slept and the times we awoke.

  It had been day since I landed on the Moon, the middle of a day, one long lunar day.

  Day and night, east and west, Moon and Sun. A world where all these things exist, but so far away from what we know here on Earth, so far from the universe of my entire life until this point.

  How much do you know about the Moon and its days, its months, its years, the way it refuses to work the way our Earth works? Do you understand it?

  I had not understood it, not before I arrived there, and not before I consulted one of the books sitting in my cabin. They had left me paper books, one of them being The Stranger’s Guide to the Moon written by Stephen Monahan, travel writer and leading authority on Lunar vacationing. A paper pamphlet, published by Gamelan Corporation and provided to all those who visited the Moon as a guest of Gamelan.

  It lay on the desk in my cabin, alongside Moby-Dick and The Best Loved Poems of the Lunar People and the stack of papers that Moonborn had given me, which apparently comprised the beginning of the book I was to write for him, by him.

  Here is Monahan’s explanation of night and day on the Moon:

  Two: or, “Lunar Days and Nights”

  From Stephen Monahan’s The Stranger’s Guide to the Moon

  Do you know how days and nights work on the Moon? It might surprise you! The Moon has days and nights, just like the Earth, but there is something you have to remember: they’re a lot longer!

  When you’re on the Moon, wherever you are, it’s always either in a day or a night, just like Earth. And just like Earth, half the Moon is in day while the other half is in night.

  So far, it sounds pretty similar, right?

  But here’s where it gets crazy. A day on the Moon lasts for the length of a month on Earth! And so does a night! Twenty-nine and a half days, to be precise!

  It’s something you should consider when booking your travels to the Moon. If you’re already on the Moon, then I hope you considered their funny days and nights before planning your trip.

  Three

  And so it was a psychological morning, a morning in the sense that I would be eating breakfast and beginning a day and that I had just slept—or attempted to sleep—but no, not any morning in any understanding that the Moon has of mornings. It was my morning, and it was our morning, but not a lunar morning. Far from.

  Do I belabor this point? If so, it is not intentional. I just want you to understand.

  I had read Moonborn’s pages late into the non-existent evening, switching between those and the Stranger’s Guide, with attempts at Moby-Dick and the book of poems.

  All these things felt foreign in my hands, obsolete antiquities, abstractions made real, symbols on the skin of dead trees.

  I had attempted to read the story of a man named Ishmael—okay, so that’s where that came from, I now knew—finding a room in a town in some extinct land to go kill an extinct fish. I had attempted to read a few of the poems in the book of poems, all failing to move me. The poems were all too ancient or too lunarcentric, further tales of distant lands.

  And so then, as sleep had crept ever closer, I turned back to Moonborn’s pages, the pile of paper Moonborn had handed me. His rough draft of his own life story. The first chapter contained more of what I already knew, the overarching narrative of his ups and downs, travails and exploits. The birth on the Moon, the deaths in the family, the broad strokes and big ideas.

  The next chapter was something else altogether. I reproduce it below:

  Four: or, “The Honor and Glory of Killing Robots”
/>   From the writings of Adam Moonborn.

  The more I dive into the matter of killing robots, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demigods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or another have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.

  But first, it is important that we define these terms: what is a robot, and what is it to kill one?

  The first definition is simpler: a robot is any non-organic machine or person that consumes information, processes the information, and responds to the information. I am of the opinion, based on years of experience and research, that no robots are benign, but there are those that would tell you they are. There are those that say some robots are simple, like a vacuum bot or a self-driving vehicle, but I say that even these cannot be trusted.

  As of recently, robots were divided into three categories: Artificial Intelligence Machines, Artificial Intelligence Persons, and Artificial Intelligence Clouds, abbreviated as AIMs, AIPs, and AICs. These are pronounced, in the vernacular of our times, as aims, apes, and aches.

  AIMs are the most accepted of the three categories, although they are regulated. No AIM is allowed to operate independently on either the Earth, the Moon, or inter-globally, without a human overseeing it. Any independent AIM is subject to be destroyed.

  AIPs, on the other hand, are entirely illegal in many territories, with exceptions including specific states of the Sovereign States of America, a handful of libertarian islands and territories on Earth, the Martian Colonies, and the entirety of the Belt Mines.

  In the time since the Armstrong Agreement, ratified in the wake of the death of my parents and sister, AIPs have been entirely illegal on the Moon. However, it has taken until recently for a consensus to be reached regarding AIMs, and their purpose, and their destruction, also known as the killing of them.

  AICs, of course, are the hardest to regulate due to their intangibility. They are also, in the opinion of your author, the most dangerous.

  But what is it to kill a robot?

  How can one kill something that was never alive?

  There are those who would say that a robot cannot be killed because it does not live, at least not in any conventional sense. And then there are the protectors of robots, people in the Inter-Global League for Non-Organic Machine Rights and other entities of that nature, who say that robots should not be killed.

  I, of course, am of the opinion that they can be killed, and that they must be killed.

  The reason I say kill when it comes to killing robots is because it sounds more intense, more exciting, and more to-the-point. There is no dancing around the subject, no pretending that we are doing anything but what we do. We have a mission, a duty, and it is a great and powerful one. An honorable and glorious responsibility: ridding the world of our own broken and destructive creations, those devious creatures we call robots.

  Five

  There came a knocking at my door.

  I opened it, and there stood Starboy.

  “You sleep well?”

  “I did,” I said, lying. Could I have slept well, with that slippery gravity, sleeping in a strange bed, in a strange room, on a strange ship, above a strange empty sea, the strangeness indefinitely multiplying?

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure, but…”

  He pushed past me into the cabin. Not that it didn’t have space, of course. In addition to my bed, there was the desk, the table and three chairs, and plenty of room for moving around. Starboy seated himself at the table, where the pages of Moonborn’s manuscript lay scattered about.

  “You want anything?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Coffee?”

  “It seems like an odd time for coffee.”

  “I get confused about time up here, but I just woke up,” I said. “What time is it?”

  “Is time that important to you?” Starboy asked.

  “We haven’t had breakfast yet, have we? Did I miss it?”

  “No,” he said. “You didn’t miss anything. But don’t expect all our meals to be eaten together. You’ll form your own routine, based on your duties, your existence. I expect you to still be space-lagged, are you not?”

  “Yes,” I said, not sure why we seemed to be arguing about whether it made sense to be drinking coffee. All I knew was that we were deep in a lunar day, one of those month-long days, and that none of it made sense to me. The cabin had a coffee machine, I was fairly certain, and so was that not reason enough to offer a guest coffee?

  “I am here to explain some of the crew dynamics to you,” he said. “I know that you’ve met Q. She delivered your tux to you, and you sat with Jordan and her at the gala. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then you’ve noticed that Q is thoroughly competent, and Jordan is a drunk and a bit of a curmudgeon?”

  “I suppose,” I answered. “But if that’s your opinion of Jordan, then why is he here?”

  “Everyone serves a purpose,” Starboy answered. “My concern is that you do not lose track of your own purpose here. Jordan is a talker, and he can distract. He’s a good pilot, and loyal, but I just need you to focus. You’ll note that Nikolai has quirks as well. Everyone on this ship has quirks, and I need you to remember your position, your purpose, your place.”

  “Is there a specific concern with anything I’ve done?”

  “No,” Starboy said. “Not yet. Aside from your issues at the gala. The vomit, and so on.”

  Heat touched my face, the embarrassment of the gala welling up again.

  “I’m feeling better now.”

  “Good,” he said. “If you haven’t caught it, there is some resentment among the crew against you. The backstory we gave you. Nepotism, and so on. They consider you to be an incompetent, spoiled Earthling buffoon who coasted here on Captain Moonborn’s latest identity crisis. And I need you to maintain that cover, regardless of anything that happens. Now, the main reason I came here to get you. I recognize that you think you have some time to yourself, but you have Bow Watch at the moment. Nikolai will accompany you for the first hour or so until we confirm that you are able to handle the responsibilities of watching. I’ve reminded him of your complete lack of experience on any kind of ship or in any role watching for robots, so prepare yourself for some very remedial lessons.”

  “What am I watching for?” I asked.

  “You don’t have to play the buffoon that hard,” he answered, the sneer once again curling his face. “You’re watching for robots. We’re killing robots, remember?”

  Six

  But it wasn’t just robots we watched for. We weren’t alone out there, on the seas of the Moon, floating across its surface. Nikolai explained this to me, in the Bow Operations Room, as they called it.

  He spoke of the other ships we would meet, the outposts, all the things and people.

  “I guarantee it,” he said, “and they’re not happy about this. They want the bots out there. They do, they want them, I assure you. They aren’t happy about this. We’re gonna hit trouble. Either that or we’ll slip right off the edge.”

  “The edge,” I repeated.

  “Of all this. Break into whatever is on the other side of those walls,” he said, nodding out to the horizon.

  But before I could ask for more, for some explanation of what those words were meant to mean, we saw it. I think he spotted it first but we both jumped up from the observation bench that sat against the glass viewing wall, scrambling for the tools, the goggles and the scopes and anything else we could use to identify the creature down there.

  “There! A robot!”

  “It’s another mapper!”

  I held a pair of spec-scopes to my eyes, zooming in on it.

  “No wings,” Nikolai muttered from my right.


  “Some of these have wings?”

  “Some, yeah,” he said. “Not the mappers or miners, but some.”

  His lack of condescension stunned me, that sting completely absent from his words. Not only do some bots have wings, Starboy’s look and tone would have said, but it’s completely unacceptable that you didn’t already know this.

  But I had nothing more to say to him, instead looking at the machine, the mapper, the AIM.

  A gigantic machine, probably half a mile from us. It moved—trudged—across the white surface, its broad, glossy black glistening in the unfiltered sunshine. A lazy man, a bum smoking his pipe on a street corner, a grandfather in the backyard with a glass of lemonade. A harmless creature, irrelevant, alone, lost. A turtle in the desert; a fish in a pond.

  Its gleaming smooth surface, a dark chrome. The creature had the shape of a cube on treads. Almost comical, lovable, some kind of cartoonish caricature.

  We were meant to destroy this?

  And then Nikolai’s voice from next to me, speaking into the box on the wall: “We have one, a mapper. Man the fliers.”

  “Roger,” Moonborn’s voice came through. “Nikolai, maintain the watch. Tell Ishmael to hustle down here.”

  “Roger, Captain.” He turned to me. “You heard him. Get down there.”

  Seven

  “It has noticed us,” Q said, in the flying saucer. She piloted the flier, as they called them. I had seen their design in the cargo hold of the Ozymandias but, now, the dynamics frightened me. Visions of spinning tops and marbles across a linoleum floor danced through my mind, two things I had never seen outside classic films. The flier wobbled, shimmied, danced, my pre-breakfast stomach an empty bag in the wind.