Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  Conn accepted a salaried position with Peo between junior and senior year. Thirty hours a week, half-decent pay but not bank-breaking. At the same time, she moved into a twenty-fourth floor apartment in a tower just west of the Loop. It took an hour and a half each day off her commutes.

  Grant spent the summer between junior and senior year in Brownsville, Texas, Dyna-Tech’s spaceflight operations headquarters, where the rockets launched from. Peo had Al Claussen taking aerospace engineering classes as well, an hour away at Texas A&M, and mission commander Callie Leporis took advantage of having everybody together in town to accomplish some important mission planning objectives.

  Grant had Conn come down for a few days over the summer. It was right after she moved, so she welcomed the break. Conn tried not to goggle at everything and everyone as Grant took her around on a comprehensive tour. Everybody was already familiar with Conn, at least everybody who had to deal with Peo. She tried not to stammer when meeting Callie and Al in person, and Grant said she did OK. Conn returned to Chicago more convinced than ever that she was doing exactly the right thing with her life.

  Once on the payroll, Conn took on more responsibility. She still screened and wrote correspondence, but she gradually began sitting in on meetings remotely and taking notes and providing her own input on company issues and ideas. The people in Brownsville who hadn’t been familiar with her became familiar with her, and Conn could sense that she was well-liked there. The company officers, in Sunnyvale, northern California, had a different reaction to Conn becoming more involved in management matters. Peo was unwavering in her trust of Conn, and no one in Sunnyvale ever said anything—anything that got back to Conn. But she could tell by the way, for example, Skylar Reece stiffened when Conn inserted herself in a meeting that her reception in Sunnyvale wouldn’t be the same as Brownsville. That was OK with her.

  She had made herself indispensable.

  FOUR

  The Animation

  November, 2031–February, 2032

  Conn Garrow, of all people, had missed what came to be known as the “moon shower.” The night sky on the north side of Chicago was close and gray that evening, otherwise Conn might have been looking at the moon when it happened. At fourteen years old, she had looked at the moon every chance she got.

  Theories about what the moon shower was, and what it meant, abounded at the time. But with the certainty of a teenager, Conn knew it was a survey of the moon performed by extraterrestrial technology. What else could it have been?

  Conn saw enough of the moon shower on YouTube to know what happened by heart. There were several herky-jerky recordings made by fones after the phenomenon had already started. But the most-watched amateur video of all time came to be when a young, earnest boy in Carrabassett Valley, Maine used his Wear to record the moon through his new department-store telescope. His timing was historic—it was 10:34 p.m. US eastern time, March 5, 2024. Through his eyes, the smudgy lunar crescent resolved into detail. Along the terminus, shadows and shades brought the pocks and crags of the moon into sharp relief. The young astronomer, Maddox Watson, narrated, pointing out particular seas and craters—until abruptly, a series of tiny white lights winked into existence on the dark part of the disk. Earning the thanks of a grateful world, Maddox went silent and remained still. The lights were stationary for 3.42 seconds. Maddox started to ask “wh—,” then he shut up again as the lights went into motion, careening around the disk at random angles, impossibly quick, trailing phantom light behind them. It looked like the crescent moon was spitting out tiny pricks of light, or like someone was arc welding the moon, producing a shower of sparks. Thirteen-point-five-three seconds after they first appeared, the lights halted, burst with extra intensity, and then were gone, as though they had never been. The video ended with Maddox wondering aloud, “what was that?” with the voice of the world, for millions of naked eyes also saw at least part of the display.

  It wasn’t a mass hallucination, or a hoax, or something coming apart in Earth’s atmosphere, Conn knew. No human space agency had done it. No human space agency could have.

  She knew somebody had been up there, on her moon. When days became weeks became months after the moon shower and there was no further activity, the world stopped thinking about the event. Not Conn. To her, it was evidence that the surveyors had found what they were looking for on the moon, and would be back—or were there even now. Her m-file on the moon shower strained at the seams. Conn wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that no one on Earth had accumulated as much material on the event as she had.

  It had been almost eight years without anything else happening. Conn never wavered in her belief that something else would.

  # # #

  In November, senior year, Peo, Conn and Pritam, Peo’s graduate assistant, were at lunch, coincidentally on the ninth anniversary of the liftoff of Peo’s flight to the moon. Conn was aware of the date. She wasn’t sure if Peo was.

  “China’s finally sending people to the moon, they say,” Peo said.

  “I saw that,” Conn said. She had read the e-mail from Peo’s contact, Gale Jennings, telling Peo that China had made a sudden decision to schedule a crewed moon mission. Conn didn’t know who Gale Jennings was or why he would know about it, but Peo didn’t seem the least bit skeptical.

  “Gale’s in sales, when you get right down to it,” Peo said. “He works China, Korea, Southeast Asia. Not Japan, I don’t know why. You need a lobbyist over there, you hire Gale. You want information on a new market, an acquisition target, new regulations, whatever, you buy it from him. China probably has their version of Gale in North America, and he personally knows the President, half the Senate, two thirds of Fortune 500 CEOs and Sarabeth Allen.”

  “And you have him on retainer.”

  Peo smiled. “We go back, too. I think the moon info was free.”

  “What do you think it means? China going to the moon,” Pritam asked.

  “With China, it’s hard to tell. They had the tech to send people to the moon ten years ago, but they can never get everybody in the government pointed in the same direction. Maybe the stars have finally aligned.”

  In a year and a half working for her, Conn had never asked Peo about her moonshot. The training for it, she would talk about a little. Obliquely, she would talk about its aftermath, about being shut out from trying again. But never the mission itself. Conn had seen right away that Peo avoided the subject as best she could. But today, Conn’s curiosity overcame her.

  “How do you think it’ll feel? Seeing other people on the moon,” she asked carefully.

  “Took them long enough,” Peo said.

  “Do you hope one of them is a woman?”

  Peo, formerly the presumptive first woman on the moon, thought about her answer. “I do,” she finally said.

  “I was twelve,” Conn said. “Not your typical twelve year old—I was watching feeds from Mars rovers and lunar prospectors when I was eight.” Peo smiled. “I was just...in awe. To think there was someone in the world who decided she wanted to go to the moon, and did it. You couldn’t shut me up about becoming an astronaut after that.”

  “We were watching too, on the other side of the world,” Pritam said. “My parents wanted me to become an astronaut. Then Cole Heist and his crew were killed landing on Mars, and I didn’t hear another word about it.” He seemed embarrassed, like he hadn’t meant to go that far into the story.

  “What happened to you?” Peo asked Conn. Conn didn’t understand at first, then gleaned that she meant Conn deciding against becoming an astronaut.

  Conn never had told Peo about her condition. She had never been brave enough. She was reluctant, with Pritam there, but she owed Peo an honest answer. She swallowed. “I was diagnosed bipolar-A when I was seventeen. Without drugs, I’m either Wonder Woman or a puddle of goo.”

  Peo considered her. “So NASA won’t take you.”

  “That’s my understanding.”

  “Oh, you’re right, I’m a
fraid. I wonder how many kids like you NASA misses out on because there are no Rite-Aids in space.”

  “I guess their argument would be that their astronaut pool is healthier and stronger that way.”

  “Sure. But smarter, more creative, better managers, better teammates, better improvisers? ‘Nope, sorry, you’re lactose intolerant, we can’t train you.’ I can’t see the logic in it.”

  Conn couldn’t, either.

  She asked Peo and Pritam to keep her condition to themselves.

  # # #

  Grant and Conn celebrated her birthday together in January. Grant surprised Conn with a painting of an astronaut on the moon painted by moon-walker Alan Bean. Conn knew for a fact that Grant’s job didn’t pay him enough for him to afford such a thing, and she deeply appreciated it. But part of her was also troubled by it. For his birthday, in November, Conn had gotten him a paperweight shaped like Saturn off bEtsy. That seemed to her to be more in keeping with where their relationship was and where it was heading.

  The first week of February, everything iced over, deep. Mounds of snow were encrusted in two-inch thick shells. Ice sheeted the roads and sidewalks, and the city all but ordered residents to stay indoors. People who had to go outside walked as gingerly as if the ice might break and submerge them. The careless slipped and bruised their knees, elbows, tailbones; twisted ankles and torn menisci crammed hospital emergency rooms. The city didn’t dig its way out so much as hack its way out, like jungle explorers through overgrowth.

  Then a blizzard dumped twenty inches of snow on the Windy City, a couple days in the forties melted the top layers, and another freeze came. Illinois Tech was closed Monday and Tuesday, re-opened Wednesday, then went dark again starting Thursday, anticipating treacherous travel, still a commuter school.

  Conn was bored. Grant was snowed in, as she mostly was. No school, only urgent work matters to take care of.

  The supermarket adjacent to her building managed to stay open every day, so Conn didn’t lack anything while she was snowbound. She spent a couple days with a neighbor who was a 2L in Illinois Tech’s law school down the street. It was obvious, including when he said so, that he was interested in a closer relationship with Conn. He was so close to regaining his humanity after giving it up as a 1L—but Conn wasn’t looking for someone. She realized anybody would come up short in comparison to Grant: boy wonder, astronaut, adventurer, happy, confident, cute...the revelation almost troubled her. Was she with Grant until someone better came along? And if so, did that mean she was with Grant forever?

  By February tenth, things were halfway back to normal. Conn and Grant both returned to classes and to their work for Peo. Her first day back to work, Conn was interested to see a v-mail from Gale Jennings.

  In the v-mail, his hair was messy, his face sheened with sweat. He wore a gorgeous, slate-colored silk suit jacket that was badly rumpled. Today, he had glasses, unlike the other times Conn had seen him.

  The message was brief: “I have something for your alternate e-mail. Urgent.” That would be Peo’s double-encrypted account using a sophisticated technology called Wawigdin, which had never, to anybody’s knowledge, been successfully hacked. Conn had never been given access to it, and Peo never talked about what she sent and received from there.

  Conn brought the message to Peo’s attention immediately. Peo tapped away on her tablet, accessing her Wawigdin e-mail, Conn presumed. Conn left her alone.

  Peo seemed distracted and troubled for the rest of the day, and the next.

  “Is everything OK?” Conn asked over the next day’s lunch in the office.

  “Depends on how you look at it,” Peo said. She dunked another Chick-fil-A waffle fry in ketchup and ate it. “I can show you, if you like.” She sounded conspiratorial. Conn’s curiosity was piqued.

  # # #

  Peo shut the office door, and snow began to flurry outside the window. She pulled the blinds and motioned Conn to her side behind the desk.

  “That NDA you signed”—the nondisclosure agreement that forbade Conn from revealing any sensitive Dyna-Tech information outside of work—“it’s still in force.” Conn wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question. She nodded.

  Peo swiped a few instructions into the Wear on her arm. “Wait.” She rooted around for her tablet. She found a cable as well, and Conn’s heart thumped. This was sensitive enough that Peo didn’t want to cast the screen onto the tablet wirelessly.

  On the tablet screen, an animation began. A large sphere in the center of the display, and a smaller sphere out near the border, foreshortened to show its smaller scale. The larger sphere was the orange-brown color of burnished wood, the smaller a dull gray, with almost a metallic sheen.

  The smaller sphere began to spin, and to orbit the larger. A planet around a star.

  The planet orbited twice. Then the animation froze, and the perspective shifted to a bird’s eye view, directly above the spheres. The planet began another orbit and then halted a little more than halfway around the star.

  Zoom in on the planet. As it grew in size on the screen, a second, much smaller, silver-white sphere appeared to the side of it. The picture focused on the new sphere and continued to zoom in. When the new body filled three-quarters of the screen, an arc drew itself across the sphere, and one side of the arc went dark. The result looked like a gibbous moon.

  Conn was transfixed.

  “FALCON” appeared on the screen, so large that it was wider than the moon. Then the screen went blank.

  Peo’s face was inscrutable.

  “OK. What was that?” Conn asked.

  Peo sighed. “If you figure it out, please let me and Gale Jennings know,” she said.

  FIVE

  Headway

  February, 2032

  The only context Gale was able to provide was that the source of the animation was the Chinese government, who were not themselves the creators. The person who had passed the file along believed it to be of utmost importance. Gale had to play James Bond to receive the thing and then get it to Peo, he said. That accounted for his ruffled appearance in the v-mail.

  Peo and Conn had no idea what could be so important. They couldn’t even be sure what the animation represented. The large, center sphere could be the sun, the smaller could be the Earth, and the smallest the moon, but that wasn’t necessarily so. The “moon” was near to the right color, but wasn’t blotched with maria and pocked with craters. And wouldn’t the Earth be represented in blue and green and brown and white, and as the third planet from the sun in order to show context? Also, the planet in the animation had a perfectly round orbit, not the oblong orbit of the Earth.

  Cheap software? Was the simplicity a lack of sophistication? Conn didn’t think so. She believed the simplicity was intentional, because there were no indicia of any popular software, no telltale watermarks or design quirks. This was either in-house tech or one of the more expensive design suites.

  “Or some college kid using mom or dad’s software. No offense to you as a college kid,” Peo said.

  The women puzzled over it, but didn’t yet share Gale Jennings’s opinion of how important it was. That would change.

  # # #

  For Valentine’s Day—or rather, the Friday the 13th before—Grant had a dozen roses delivered to Conn during each of her classes. Peo’s office smelled great that afternoon. Conn gave the third dozen to Susan, the MMAE department admin. Conn forced a smile and a polite laugh when Susan pointed out how romantic Grant’s gesture had been.

  “We talked about dinner at Phil Stefani’s,” Conn reminded Grant later. She’d made Valentine’s Day reservations at the upscale steakhouse weeks before. “We talked about that being what we got each other for Valentine’s Day.”

  “I know, you’re right,” Grant said.

  “So you decided to get me roses, why? To embarrass me?”

  “No, Conn, of course I didn’t mean to—”

  “I didn’t get you anything.”

  “I don’t wan
t anything,” Grant said, a little defensively.

  “I didn’t want anything either, Grant!” Conn was conscious of her raised voice, but didn’t lower it. “But I got to sit still and smile my way through that...display of yours. People made fun of me.”

  “They’re jealous.”

  “No, they were amused. That’s generally why people laugh.”

  Grant was starting to realize he wasn’t taking this seriously enough. Conn had learned to spot the exact moment. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t think. Of course that was embarrassing. The last thing I wanted to do was give you a rotten day.”

  Dinner at Phil Stefani’s was delicious. The table talk was a little tense.

  # # #

  Conn was nagged by the feeling that the meaning behind the animation was just beyond her reach. She just didn’t have the context necessary to decipher it. The Monday after she first saw it, Gale Jennings got back in touch, this time arranging to talk to Peo live over her Wawigdin account. Conn was allowed to be present, off-screen and quiet, for the call. Gale wondered if Peo had been able to make heads or tails of the animation.

  “We think it’s the sun, moon, and Earth, obviously,” Peo said. “We think it was produced with very good software. That’s about it.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Gale asked.

  “My assistant Conn and me. I respect that you went to a great deal of trouble to ensure only I saw it, but I wanted her take on it. She’s under an NDA.”

  “No, no problem! I know you say she’s awfully bright, so good idea.”

  Conn, off-screen, felt herself turn red. Peo motioned her toward the screen. She could participate now.

  Gale went on, “I’ve learned the US and Indian governments have this, too. Both are keeping it as close to the vest as China. Nobody seems to know what it represents.” That was curious. Peo raised an eyebrow.