by D. F. Lovett
There are those who might call this unfair. There are those who will fight me on this, who will claim that I cannot declare which bots are loose and which are fast. But what is this world if we do not have rules? And tell me any rule that cannot be called unfair by the those who disagree with it?
But consider these Loose Bots and tell me if these are not the very workings of the world.
What was America in 1492 but a Loose Bot, waiting for that scoundrel Columbo to destroy it? What was Poland to the Czar? What was the Moon to America, and later to Brandt? What was Mars to Musk but a Loose Bot? What are the Asteroids but a hundred thousand Loose Bots?
What are the Rights of Human and the Liberties of the Moon but Loose Bots? What are all men’s minds but Loose Bots? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose Bots? What is every globe but a Loose Bot?
And what are you, dear reader, but a Loose Bot and a Fast Bot, too?
Twelve
“We cannot trust a word from that man’s mouth,” Moonborn told us in the library. Six of us had gathered there. Only Starboy was missing, the pilot once again. His absence held meaning, indicating Moonborn’s need to speak to all of us was outweighed by the need to pilot the ship away from this tower.
“As you know,” Moonborn continued, “as all of you know, he has at least one AIM at his disposal. But there are surely more there. Until now, this mission could be considered simple and straightforward, no ambiguity. But now? Now we encounter a fellow man who lies to our faces, who threatens us, who harbors enemies of man!”
“Are we accepting defeat, Captain? Because that’s certainly what it seems like.” It was Jordan who spoke, the rough-necked spaceman, grizzled and troubled. “Nikolai and me shot that thing, chased it, but he protected it. We got in there and he acted like some kind of gen’lman but he’s a devil, that Rumford. I know the stories about him. He’s a devil and he stockpiles ‘em, I bet.”
“The agreement that I’ve made,” Moonborn said, “is that we are killing all loose AIMs. It’s not like the man had AIPs walking around in there. What are we to do, if he keeps his AIMs hidden? If he claims that they’re scouts?”
“How is an AIM not loose if it attacks us?” Q said. “Isn’t its very presence on the surface an indication that it’s loose?”
“It outpaced us,” Jordan said. “We couldn’t catch it. Wish we would’ve shot the damn thing down, destroyed it. There’d be no need for this conversation.”
“But you didn’t,” Moonborn said. “And I think it bears telling the story of who that man is, of who he is and why I fear him. I know all of you know different stories, but I think it’s worth reflecting on the fact that I’ve lived for forty-seven years and spent the bulk of that, the great bulk of it, right here on the Moon, and I’ve never met that man before. But I’ve always known of him. Everyone knows of Rumford. He’s a danger, a madman, and if he has AIMs living in his underground bunker below his tower, then he has us outmatched for the moment. This mission might be approved by the Lunar Families, but they never approved of me taking human prisoners, or killing humans, and those were the two options back there. We will need to return with a militia, and with the powers of all the Lunar Families behind us.”
“All the Lunar Families?” Jordan snorted at this one, shaking his head.
“It will take all the Lunar Families to take Rumford in,” Moonborn said. “Including the Rumfords.”
“That’s a crock of shit,” Jordan said.
A moment of silence. Adam sat down on the stage where we’d so recently performed for one another, demonstrating our talents, our passions, our joys. The laughter had evaporated, this man Rumford having snuck onto this scene and stolen the humor and the adventure away, leaving these dark clouds.
“Out,” Moonborn said, a whisper at first. “All of you out!”
“But Adam,” Q began.
“Out!” Moonborn shouted now, before dropping back to a whisper. “Enough, Q. Enough. You leave.”
But as we turned to go, he said, “Not all of you. Ishmael. Curtis. You two stay.”
Thirteen
I don’t often speak of where I was when they died, he told us. And there’s a good reason for it. I’m embarrassed. I wish I had been on the Moon for it. I wish I had saved them.
For a time, I wished I’d died with them.
I was supposed to go to college on Earth, you know. Middleton University, in Illium City. Lots of snobs there, elitists. No surprise there. The name Moonborn—they thought I was a joke. I was a literal joke to a lot of them. Some of them called me nouveau lune. You get it. They laughed a lot.
I impressed a few of them, I suppose, because once they got past the whole spaceman thing, they liked that I could keep up with them. Drugs and drinking. They said I walked funny, too, because of not being used to Earth’s gravity. That always got some laughs.
He sighed.
This part of the story doesn’t matter that much. Just a setting for you. Trying to establish setting. I’ll get to it.
Three weeks after school started, I skipped classes and went to the ocean. I’d seen it before, a few times, but I never get used to it. You two grew up down there, so at least you could go to the ocean. Yeah, maybe it was a long drive, or a flight, but you could go there.
Me? I’d grown up seeing the oceans my whole life, when I looked at the sky. But aside from my handful of visits, it’s not like they were ever within reach.
When you grow up so far away from the ocean that it’s nothing more than an abstraction, and then you finally obtain it—touch it, see it, swim in it, know it—everything about it is perfect. The sand, the salt, the sun. It makes no sense, but it is beauty.
We rented some kind of house on the ocean, a group of us. I paid for it, I should clarify, and invited only that handful of my newfound friends who I wanted around. Mostly beautiful women. Girls, I suppose. We were all so young.
But they all kept slipping away from me, slipping away to follow other things. Other stories. I had told everyone we’d leave our devices elsewhere. I told everyone to lock their devices and in the trunk and turn off their devices. Some of them pretended to.
I thought I was creating a happy memory. I thought I knew the path in front of me. My parents and sisters were on the Moon, my brothers both somewhere on the West Coast, establishing themselves.
And then, in the haze of it, there was one of them. I can’t remember her name, or at least I don’t want to share it now. The two of us, next to the water. I wanted to be alone with her.
“Did you turn your chip off?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said, smiling. “I heard your house rules.”
But they turn themselves back on, those things, when there’s a significant enough news story. Or at least they did at the time. I haven’t been around one in years, as you both know. Jennifer, you did the first interview with me about it.
Anyway, that’s how it happened. Somewhere, deep in this bender, next to the ocean, she snaps. She sees the story, but she doesn’t tell me. She retreats, going away, walking back to the house. She doesn’t tell me what happened. She just leaves me there, next to the ocean.
And I walk inside, into the house. The place is trashed. Bottles, both empty and full, vape sticks, foil, powder. All of it. The place is a wreck. And everyone, they’re all staring at me but they’re staring somewhere else too. That glazed look when someone is watching something through their mind but they’re staring at me, too, because what they’re learning about—it’s my family. My parents, my sister, dead, the explosion. The news story.
I’d locked myself away in this prison with these zombies and all of them knew before me, they all knew, disappeared into themselves, learning about the attack, the explosion, the death toll.
I got my GamelGlass out of the trunk of the car, where I’d made all of us lock everything away.
I read the news, I saw, I listened, but it all just washed over me. What do you do? Where
do you go?
I’m sure you both know this next part. I didn’t notice I was naked until the crowds were following me, people pointing, the photographs, capturing it all. But it’s not like I was in trouble. There was no one left whose opinion I valued.
They told me later that they found me weeping next to the ocean, looking into the sky, asking everyone where the Moon had gone.
Fourteen
He finished speaking and we sat in silence. A different man, a friend or brother, and you would reassure him, build him back up, tell him that everything was okay. Not here. Not this man. To reassure Captain Moonborn would be to take the control away from him, to remove his alpha status. If he had a moment of reflection or meditation in front of another person, he had already determined when and how that moment would resolve itself, on his terms. All his broadcasted vulnerabilities, or so it seemed to me, were carefully calculated in advance.
That, and I could not help but remember the famous image from the death of the Brandts: Adam Moonborn, naked and crying next to the ocean, became a famous meme. “Sad and Naked Moonborn,” in fact, won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Meme in 2088.
I resisted the temptation to tell him I’d seen the photos of his breakdown, including the abridged version of The Godfather in which every Marlon Brando line was replaced with Adam Moonborn crying. I resisted the temptation to tell him that I had never been to the ocean. I had never seen one in person before seeing it from the Moon. Just like him.
Fifteen
Lawyers and politicians and diplomats and bureaucrats and fat cats, they all still disagree about what constitutes “outer space”. Not surprisingly, anyone on the Moon considers the idea that the Moon is “space” to be completely outrageous. Legally, still, space qualifies as anything outside the atmosphere of Earth.
For those of you interested in the history of law on the Moon and in outer space, I refer you to either Other Worlds Than These: The Three Lunar Colonies by Edward Finnerty, A Brief History of Man and Moon by Roger Chan, or The History of Law on the Moon by Eleanor Klosterman.
It is not on me to recount the legalities of death on the Moon or murder on the Moon, but I’ll point out, or remind you, that the realm of lunar death is muddled and murky.
That said, death on the Moon becomes relevant in two ways at this point in the narrative: first, Adam Moonborn was not finished recounting his personal account of his family’s deaths on the Moon.
Second, we were about to encounter, ourselves, a death on the Moon.
Sixteen
“What troubled me,” Moonborn continued, “are the things I learned when I returned to the Moon. There was no Starboy in those days, assisting me. I was a child, adrift, unmoored, untethered from anything I’d known. Initially, I returned for the funeral, but as everyone knows, I never returned for education. I made one or two passing efforts at continued education, but nothing stuck. Not that anyone needs a college degree these days to be worth a damn, but still. A weakness, perhaps. An insecurity.
“It wasn’t for years that I learned about Cornelius Rumford. Not that he killed them, or anything close to it. If that were the case, if it were even possible, we wouldn’t have waltzed out of his tower just now. He’d be dead or in prison. So I guess he’d be back on Earth. You both know we have no prisons up here. Jails, sure, but no prisons. Things would have ended for him a long time ago, I know that much.
“What did he do?” I asked. I knew I was interrupting, but I’d never any implication of Rumford’s involvement in their deaths, or wherever it was that Moonborn was going with this.
“He witnessed it,” Moonborn said. “He witnessed their deaths. He had no tower in those days, nothing of that sort, but he saw it from his ship, just a dinghy really, and he did nothing. No one knew for a long time, but he told his sister. Katherine Rumford, you know of her, of course. She’s the good one.”
“Was there an investigation?” I asked.
“Into what? Nothing to investigate. The public, sure, they got the story that it had been a malfunction. Only those of us close to it learned the truth, that it had been the C-Tex. One of our own machines. The White. They were destroyed by a robot my father had helped design. Maybe it’s hubris. I don’t know. Something like that. Like the Titanic, or the Hindenburg, or the Statue of Liberty. One of those things where there could only be one fate.
“But he saw it all. He saw it, he saw the White destroy them. C-Tex. And he told no one, not for years.”
“You just saw him,” Jennifer Curtis said. “You met him for the first time. How do you feel? How did that make you feel?”
“I know him for what he is now,” he said. “He’s just another castaway, lost in the sea.”
His words hung there for a moment. I stared down, taking it in. Reminding myself that I would have to write all of this down, that I was his ghostwriter, that he was telling me these things because it was on me to tell his story.
I looked up and saw her staring at me. Staring at me with suspicion, like she knew me for the first time and like she distrusted and feared me.
She mouthed something at me. The name they’d given me: Ishmael.
But before any revelation, Starboy’s voice over the intercom:
“All hands to the Ship Center! All hands on deck! Man overboard!”
Seventeen
We raced to the center, as commanded.
I reached it first, finding only Nikolai there.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Q is getting into a flier,” he answered. “Starboy is up in the roost. Jordan is overboard.”
“Why?”
Moonborn and Jennifer Curtis arrived during this line of questioning.
“Why what?” Nikolai snapped at me.
“Why did he go overboard? What’s that even mean, overboard? You can’t fall out of a spaceship!” I realized I was shouting now.
“Fuck you,” Nikolai answered.
“Answer,” Moonborn said. “Ishmael is right. You can’t fall out of a spaceship.”
“There’s a mapper down there and he went after it, but it’s probably not a mapper. Shot him down, sir, Captain. Q took a flier out after him so there’s just the one left.”
“Goddamn it,” Moonborn shouted. “I spend a few minutes delivering a monologue and all hell breaks loose!”
He looked around between the three of us; Nikolai, Jennifer Curtis, and me. It was no secret that he was quickly calculating which of us would be the least worthless as his co-pilot and laser-fighter.
“Ishmael. With me.”
Eighteen
The drop always scared me. That moment, once we had our spacesuits on and had entered the flying saucer, when we positioned it over the hatch, the airlock activated, and we dropped down from the Ozymandias into the open non-air of the Moon.
It came as no surprise that it scared me. The journey to the Moon had been horrifying, as had the two airplane rides I’d been on, as did really all forms of public and private transportation. That feeling in your stomach, the one you get when the vehicle you are in suddenly drops and you have no control over it.
“Where the hell are they?” Moonborn said beside me as he spun us around, looking for them to come into view.
And just as he said it, we saw ahead of us, the three beings in contention with one another.
First, Q’s flier, circling in the air, firing its lasers.
The AIM on the ground, a blue bot that looked like an overgrown turtle on treads, taking no apparent damage.
But no, it was more than just a turtle. The thing had a laser cannon protruding from its back. Not a mapper, but a miner. Far more dangerous than whatever Jordan had thought he was going up against.
Then, a crashed flier on the ground, smoke rising from it.
“Do you see him?” Moonborn asked.
“There,” I said, as I saw the figure of Jordan, stumbling.
“You guys got a place for this?” Q’s voice came in through our speakers.
�
��Get out of there,” Moonborn said. “You pick up Jordan. I get to kill the robot.”
Nineteen
We zoomed in at it, low to the ground, taking the flier at its max speed. I had no idea the things could go this fast. We hadn’t even hinted at these kinds of speeds previously.
“Cannons!” he shouted as we swooped over it. I blasted it but to no avail.
We swept again and again, each time blasting at it, dodging the laser fire the turtle-looking bot returned at us.
“This isn’t working,” Moonborn said. “It’s too tough. You know how to work the claw on this thing?”
“This thing has a claw?”
“Yeah, a hand that comes off the top.” He pressed a few buttons as he spoke, and a clawed arm suddenly extended from the roof of the flier.
“Steer it with your hand-saucer,” he said. “Like you’re shooting. Actually, hold on.”
Moonborn pressed a few buttons again, and we suddenly dropped.
“Steer, damn it!”
“What?”
“You’re steering now,” he said. “Take me down to the crash.”
I had never flown anything, aside from my one brief lesson with Moonborn in the roost of the Ozymandias. I barely knew how to drive a car, a child of self-driving vehicles and other machines that Moonborn viewed as the enemy.
But I did it. Somehow. I took us down to the wreckage of the other flier. I saw, somewhere in my periphery, Q’s flier next to Jordan. I didn’t look too closely, couldn’t handle the tragedy or defeat of knowing their fates too soon.
We hovered, the wreck of the flier between us and the bot.
“Right next to it!”