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Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
—MARK TWAIN
SELECTIONS FROM THE BRASS CODE
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Don’t take; seize.
Kill weeds before they take root.
Smile. Smile. Smile. Kill. Smile.
Lose your temper often. And well.
Surendar? Can’t even spell it.
If you give it enough feathers you can make anything fly.
Never let the fly know when you’re going to swat.
Workers are like dogs: Pat them on the head occasionally. And put them down when necessary.
Lie. Lie. Lie. But remember.
Move. Move. While others sleep, move.
You never know when it’s going to rain. So always carry a denial.
Find Oz. And be the Wizard.
It’s good to have a rival. It’s even better to crack his skull.
If you can’t cover your tracks, cover those who see them.
It’s merciful to go for the jugular.
Refuse to be ill. On principle.
Shake hands in public. Decapitate in private.
Friends help you get there. Everyone else is vermin.
The love of money is the root of all progress.
See El Dorado. Take El Dorado. Find another El Dorado.
The envy of others is a self-replenishing feast.
A rationalization a day keeps your conscience at bay.
Never bang your head against a wall. Bang someone else’s.
Don’t break the law. Break the Law.
Losers make hurdles. Winners hurdle them.
Geniuses are their own saviors.
You cannot serve god and Mammon.
You’re not really a conquistador until you hold the king’s head high.
Depression is for the indolent.
What’s the point of walking in another man’s shoes? Unless his shoes are better than yours?
01
ONLY A LUNATIC WOULD live on the Moon.
The Moon is a dead rock—eighty-one quintillion tons of dead rock. It’s been dead for nearly four billion years. And—inasmuch as a dead rock wants anything—it wants you dead too.
So you can go quickly. A landslide can bury you. A lava tube can collapse on you. You can plunge headlong into a crater. A meteoroid can strike your habitat at seventy thousand kilometers per hour. A micrometeorite can bust open your spacesuit. A sudden burst of static electricity can blow you apart in an airlock. A slip, a cut, a ruptured seal, a faulty oxygen tank can kill you in minutes.
Or you can go a little slower. A wiring malfunction can shut down air filters. A corrupted computer program can play havoc with climate-control systems. A particularly nasty pathogen—mutant strains of bacteria flourish in enclosed environments—can kill you in days. If you’re out on the surface, the sudden temperature plunge between sunlight and shade can leave you with thermal shock. A solar flare can toast you like a TV dinner. A vehicular breakdown can leave you suffocating in your spacesuit.
Or you can go incrementally, over the course of years. Moondust can work its way like asbestos into the deepest fissures of your lungs. Prolonged exposure to chemical vapors and gas leaks can wreck your whole respiratory system. Reduced gravity—one-sixth that of Earth—can fatally weaken your heart. Cosmic radiation—galactic rays from dead suns and black holes—can warp your cells. Not to mention a cocktail of psychological factors—sensory deprivation, insomnia, paranoia, claustrophobia, loneliness, hallucinations—that can reshuffle your mind like a deck of cards.
On the Moon, in short, you can be killed by the environment. You can be killed by accident. Or you can kill yourself.
And then of course you can always be murdered. By gangsters. By terrorists. By psychopaths. By ideologues. Or simply because you cost too much to keep alive.
Only a lunatic—or a renegade, or a pariah, or a misanthrope, or a risk junkie, or a mass murderer—would live permanently on the Moon.
02
KLEEF DIJKSTRA IS A lunatic. And a mass murderer. Twenty-eight years ago, two weeks before national elections in the Netherlands, he blew up the Amsterdam offices of the newly formed Nederlandse Volksbond, whose principles he ostensibly supported, in a failed attempt to frame pro-immigration activists and win the party a protest vote. Six people were killed and thirty injured. Later in the same month, infuriated when the Partij van de Arbeid gained an unprecedented number of seats in the House of Representatives, he loaded a Beretta ARX190, shot his way through the security cordon at the Van Buuren Hotel in the Hague, and mowed down forty-seven celebrating party members. Combining the death tolls of these two massacres and a number of smaller, separate incidents, Kleef Dijkstra is directly responsible for the murders of sixty-two people.
After his arrest, court-appointed forensic psychiatrists determined that Kleef Dijkstra was a paranoid schizophrenic. They said he had sociopathic tendencies, narcissistic personality disorder, grandiose and delusional thoughts, and psychotic episodes. He exhibited no remorse for his crimes and had even informed his examiners at one point that he would like to kill them too. The psychiatrists concluded that there was little possibility of rehabilitation, even using the most sophisticated modern techniques, and recommended long-term incarceration in a high-security penitentiary.
Many others disagreed. Notwithstanding the European aversion to capital punishment, numerous commentators in the Netherlands and elsewhere argued that Dijkstra, according to his very own values, ought to be sentenced to death. Incarceration, after all, would be costly and would always leave open the possibility that he would become a hero behind bars, mobilizing the like-minded with smuggled-out missives. Dijkstra, alarmingly magnetic in his way, had already declared that “the battle has just begun,” and that in a hundred years “there will be statues of me on street corners all across Europe.”
A solution was found. The Moon at this point was in the early stages of its development: Mining had started on Nearside, and the first hotel had been opened at Doppelmayer Base. But the long-term physical and psychological effects of lunar habitation were still largely unknown. Surface expeditions were by necessity of short duration and often had disturbing side effects: everything from radiation poisoning and temporary blindness to hallucinations and psychological meltdowns. In one famous incident a miner completely lost his mind and hacked five coworkers to death at a small prefab base in the Ocean of Storms.
So long-term prisoners, first in Russia and the United States and later worldwide, were offered the chance to serve out their sentences on the far side of the Moon. They would be separated from Earth by at least 356,700 kilometers—the distance of the Moon at its closest point—and another 3,500 kilometers of lunar rock—the diameter of the Moon itself. They would be confined to isolated habitats—“igloos”—about the size of a two-bedroom metropolitan apartment and shielded against radiation by hard-packed lunar sand, or “regolith.” They would be provided with no spacesuits or LRVs (lunar roving vehicles). All supplies would be delivered through a series of fail-proof hatches. All communications in and out, via underground fiber-optic cable, would be closely monitored. If face-to-face human interaction was absolutely necessary, the incoming visitor(s) would be accompanied by a squad of armed guards. The prisoners would be completely alone, but they would also enjoy a degree of autonomy virtually impossible in a terrestrial facility. There would be no ja
ilhouse regimen. No insults from guards and other prisoners. No communal showers. No chance, in short, of being raped, beaten, or killed. And in exchange for this liberty the prisoners only had to self-monitor and report physiological changes, exposing themselves to sustained dosages of unfiltered sunlight via skylights at regularly appointed times, as well as undergoing psychological tests via tele-link.
After two years of paperwork, Kleef Dijkstra was approved for residence in one of these lunar igloos. He exhibited no great emotion when informed. Indeed, he seemed to think it already a fait accompli, as if the decision had been guided by higher forces. Declaring that he had “much work to do,” he immediately applied for membership to the world’s foremost libraries and information databases.
Twenty-five years later, Kleef Dijkstra is one of the longest-standing Farside residents. Only the Georgian terrorist Batir Dadayev has been longer on the Moon. Both these men, along with eleven other survivors from the now retired Off-World Incarceration Program (OWIP), live in a seventy-kilometer radius within Gagarin Crater in the southern hemisphere of Farside.
Physically, all thirteen are virtually unrecognizable from their days on Earth. Their spines have lengthened, making them markedly taller. Fluid redistribution has given them barrel chests. Their faces are puffy. Their legs are spindly. Their bones are brittle, and their hearts are smaller. All over their bodies, in fact, there have been subtle adaptations to account for life in microgravity.
Mentally, however, there has been no uniform change. Some of the prisoners, like Batir Dadayev, have renounced their old ideologies. A couple have developed symptoms of early dementia. A few have mellowed to some degree, and even claim to have experienced genuine remorse. One has become deeply religious. And a dogged handful, like Kleef Dijkstra, have not changed their worldview at all.
Dijkstra, as he would happily inform you if he had a chance, came to the Moon with a specific purpose: He was going to write his political manifesto, a compendium of historical analyses, economic theories, and autobiographical details in the style of Mein Kampf (a book Dijkstra considers formative but highly amateurish). Naturally he wasn’t underestimating the security protocols designed to keep his wisdom quarantined, but he was confident that his rhetorical brilliance would win over his examining doctors—and it would take only one—and his words would leak out somehow. Or perhaps the passage of years itself would make his writings “of public interest.” In any event, it seemed only a matter of time before his manifesto achieved its just recognition.
The complete document—“Letter from Farside”—is explosive, incoherent, and riddled with factual inaccuracies and highly questionable readings of history. It’s also 3,600 pages long.
Dijkstra has been revising it now for a full two decades. His early hope of getting it widely distributed as soon as possible proved futile—his doctors were more closed-minded than he expected. But he’s not dispirited. The delay has only given him extra time to refine his arguments, augment them with more historical precedents, and even provide heavily symbolic stories—“parables”—to underline his points. And in any case it soon became obvious to Dijkstra that “Letter from Farside” is no everyday manifesto: It’s the new Bible. It will be quoted and requoted endlessly. Whole lives will revolve around it. It’s infinitely more important than his own perishing body. It’s a time capsule of transcendental genius, flung into the cosmos to places and eons he can only imagine.
Thinking these thoughts—he is currently working on Book XXVI, “Red in Truth & Law: The Brutal Reality of Successful Economies”—Dijkstra hears a distinctive cheeping sound and switches his desktop monitor to exterior display. A camera shows the scene just outside his igloo door.
A man is standing out there. On the ash-grey dust plain of Gagarin. In the lunar vacuum. With the sun glaring behind him.
Except of course that it can’t be a man. He’s not wearing a spacesuit. He’s wearing, in fact, an immaculately tailored black suit with white shirt and black tie. His black hair is razor-parted. His shoulders are broad, his physique trim, his face handsome. And he’s smiling. He looks like an old-fashioned encyclopedia salesman. Or a Mormon. But he’s obviously an android.
This is not unusual. Occasionally, when maintenance tasks need to be performed, OWIP will send around a droid. It saves them the trouble of rounding up the armed guards. And even if a prisoner were to overpower the droid somehow, or disable it, it would do him little good—there would be no pressurized vehicle to escape on, since the droids customarily travel on “moon-buggy” LRVs. And there wouldn’t be much advantage in taking a droid hostage—OWIP would just write off the unit and deny the prisoner privileges for a while.
Dijkstra punches a button to open the airlock door.
The droid steps inside, still grinning. Strictly speaking, full pressurization procedures aren’t necessary with robots, but the lunar dust still needs to be removed. So the droid raises his arms as the electrostatic and ultrasonic scrubbers whirl around him like the brushes in a car wash. Then the red lights stop flashing and the amber lights come on. Then the all-clear buzzes. Dijkstra opens the airlock’s inner door, and the droid steps inside.
“Good day to you, sir,” he says, extending a hand. “And many thanks for admitting me.”
“No problem,” says Dijkstra, flustered despite himself. He’s always liked androids—as symbols of ruthless economics—but this one is disconcertingly real, even intimidating. And his hand feels sensual—almost sexual. “Have you been sent by OWIP?” he asks hurriedly.
“Can you say that again, sir?”
“I asked if you’d been sent by OWIP.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I do not recognize that name. Is it a company, a corporation, a consortium, an office of law enforcement, or a government department?”
“It’s an international program, but never mind. You’re with a survey team, then?”
“What do you mean by ‘survey team,’ sir?”
“Geological . . . seismological . . . astronomical.”
“I am not with a survey team, sir. I am looking for El Dorado.”
“El Dorado?”
“That is what I said, sir.”
For a second Dijkstra wonders if this is some sort of joke. But then a possibility occurs to him. “You’re with one of the mining teams?”
“I am not with one of the mining teams, sir.”
“But you want to go to El Dorado?”
“That is correct, sir.”
“Well, it could be some new place I don’t know about . . .”
“So you cannot help me, sir?”
“Not if you want to go to El Dorado.”
The droid is silent. It’s impossible to say why—his goofy expression never changes—but there seems something sinister about him now. Nevertheless Dijkstra, always hungering for a chance to talk—to anything—is reluctant to let him go.
“Can I help you in some other way?” he asks. “Perhaps you’d like to—” He is about to say “refuel” but stops himself. It’s absurd, of course, but the more human the robot, the less one is likely to acknowledge its artificiality. “Perhaps you’d like to sit down for a while?”
“Do you have any high-proof alcohol, sir?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Any sort of alcohol at all?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Then do you have some other sort of beverage?”
“What about coffee—instant coffee?”
“That would be excellent, sir—I would welcome a drink of instant coffee. With fifteen teaspoons of sugar.”
“I can do that,” says Dijkstra. Clearly the droid is one of those models fueled by alcohol and glucose. In the old days they were often made that way, so they could blend in with humans. So they would have identifiable appetites—even the need to eliminate waste.
Dijkstra prepares the coffee. Water boils at a lower temperature on the Moon, but most people have gotten used to tepid brews. “May I ask who you’re with?” he inquires o
ver the bubbling pot.
“I am all by myself, sir.”
“But you must be—” Dijkstra starts to say, then holds his tongue. Maybe the droid is some sort of monitoring unit, tasked with watching him at close range. Even now, sitting primly at the table, he seems to be conducting a slow survey of the room.
“You have a very beautiful place here, sir,” the droid says, smiling.
“Thank you,” says Dijkstra. “It’s spartan, but many of history’s greatest men were spartan.”
“Are you a Spartan?”
“Well, I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
“Are you a great man?”
“That’s for history to decide.”
“Are you a conquistador?”
Dijkstra shrugs. “Not yet.”
“I am going to be a conquistador,” says the droid.
“I suppose that’s why you want to reach El Dorado.”
“That is precisely the reason, sir. Are we rivals?”
“Rivals?”
“If you also aim to be a conquistador, then we are rivals, are we not, sir?”
“Only if you want to be.”
Filling the coffee mug, Dijkstra considers the possibility that there’s something wrong with the droid. The Farside comm line—his only connection with the outside world—has been down for about twenty hours. It happens sometimes—solar fluxes and cosmic radiation can short-circuit the substations and junction boxes—so maybe this droid has a few fried circuits as well.
He comes over to the table and maneuvers into a seat, holding out the coffee. “I’ve already stirred it.”
“I am grateful, sir.”
The droid—he really is astonishingly handsome, Dijkstra thinks—picks up the mug and takes dainty sips, like a vicar at afternoon tea.
“This is good coffee,” he says.
“Thank you,” says Dijkstra. “Do you come from . . . some base?”
“I do not recall where I come from, sir. I only look forward, to the future.”
The Dark Side Page 1