The Moonborn: or, Moby-Dick on the Moon

by D. F. Lovett

  I kept it low, inching closer.

  “Bingo,” he whispered, and extended the claw toward the wreck. And this is the moment in which I learned two things: the claws of the fliers were almost supernaturally strong, and Adam Moonborn was surprisingly athletic.

  With a flick of his wrists, he crunched the wrecked flier and tore it in two. Half of it remained on the ground, the other half in the claw of our flier. Maneuvering the claw with some bizarre grace, Moonborn crunched it further so that it became a metallic spear of reclaimed metal.

  Another click and he had hurled the makeshift spear at the AIM. The torn and crumpled remnants of the saucer flew through the air, arcing magnificently, before crashing down into the bot like a javelin.

  With a defeated flash of lights and puff of smoke, the bot was destroyed.

  “Huzzah,” whispered Moonborn.

  Canto Seven: The Far and the Dark

  One

  One would imagine that the richest man on the Moon would have certain resources. A radio back to the mainland, for instance. A doctor onboard. Some kind of system to track the robots that we chased.

  Alas, we chased the robots through the five senses, no special gadgetry beyond the observations rooms and the telescopes and so on.

  You might be saying, but Ishmael, have you not already told us this? Have you not already shared that the Ozymandias existed without special technologies by Moonborn’s own preferences, to make it invincible to the meddling of AICs?

  And yes, I have.

  And yes, I understand this is because all AIMs are designed to be undetectable via technological methods, as I’ve described earlier in this narrative, but it still sits strange. Sometimes it felt as if everything we did had been made more dangerous and difficult intentionally, some kind of romantic vision of adventure crafted by the hand of Adam Moonborn. Some kind of imagined quest, slaying the things he decided were dragons.

  But the romance of adventure is washed away when the hunger and the fear overtakes it. Or perhaps that is the romance of it, that aching nostalgia you get later, in your warm bed, when you remember how you once thought you would never know a warm bed again.

  Or perhaps these meditations mean nothing. All I know is that any sense of nostalgia and romance felt far away, faded into dusk, as the six of us stared at the dead body of Jordan the grizzled spaceman.

  Two

  The six of us sat in the library. Six, this time. No longer seven.

  On the stage, the body of Jordan.

  We sat in the plush chairs of the library. Books lined the walls around us, all unread, unopened. So much paper to create these books that the six of us never so much as paged through.

  They had mistaken the miner for a mapper, and Jordan had sauntered out there expecting an easy kill. We had established this, in rushed words, explanations, attempts to justify what it was that had happened and how. Nikolai muttered excuses for himself, with no one pausing to listen. He had spotted the AIM, we learned, from the Port Ob Room, as Moonborn shared his tales with Jennifer Curtis and me.

  Jordan lay dead now. Jordan, who told crude jokes, who shuffled from task to task, skeptical, indifferent, the oldest of us all. The oldest man on the ship, born before the Moon had established colonies.

  “He has a daughter,” Q said. “On Earth.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Nikolai said. “I’ve known him for years and he never mentioned her.”

  “He wasn’t an easy man to know.”

  “I have a book of poems,” Moonborn said. “The same one I gave you all. Our best-loved poems. Jordan picked a poem in it. I don’t know which one, but he picked one of these, I remember. We can recite them. We can honor him.”

  “After we honor him,” Q said, “we can leave him out here. He told me that he wanted to be buried on the Moon. He couldn’t stand the idea of a cremation or a burial, being eaten by worms. We will leave him, cold and frozen, down on the surface.”

  From there, we mumbled words, all joy gone. Some laughs, of course, but the sense of being an interloper had rushed back into me. A stranger, standing over another stranger’s grave, attempting to mourn for a face I’d never known. The odd thing was that it felt as though everyone was just as much a stranger as me, amateur actors reciting a play from memory.

  No one said a prayer but everyone read a poem, passing the book around. I don’t remember what we read, only that no one read “Ozymandias” this time. I think someone read T. S. Eliot.

  No one wept. It would have been inappropriate, insulting, a facade, a falsified attempt. Mourning a man we didn’t know, but we knew shouldn’t have died.

  Or maybe someone did cry. Not I. At least, not in front of the rest of them.

  When I returned to my cabin, when I was alone, I may have cried.

  Perhaps I did cry. Exhausted, drained. A spaceman dead, the one whose cabin was next to mine. The one who had annoyed and troubled me but who, like me, had come from Earth, once, a long time ago.

  Perhaps there were still tears in my eyes as I lay down in my bed.

  Three

  When did I last sleep? I tried to remember. Before Jordan’s death, before Rumford’s tower, before Moonborn recited “Ozymandias”. Could this be true?

  I looked to the clock on the wall but it meant nothing, an abstraction, too distant. It showed nothing but arbitrary numbers divorced from this world, numbers relevant to just one sliver of the Earth’s surface. That, and I could not remember what it had said at any other point. My life had been regimented by time on Earth, by specific meals at specific times, punctuality having a distinct and significant meaning.

  And finally I did sleep, drifted away, with the usual falling dreams bringing me back, pronounced in that lessened gravity.

  Four: or, “The Terror of the Clouds”

  From the writings of Adam Moonborn

  So far in my writings, I’ve catalogued two distinct and dangerous robots—the AIMs and the AIPs—while only casually mentioning the third major category: the AICs. Everyone familiar with me knows that I allow no AICs anywhere within my vicinity. Not in the Domes of Gamelan or on any of my ships. Furthermore, I will not travel on any ships or visit any properties that make use of AICs.

  I have a simple way of putting this: no ghosts in my machines.

  In this, I am unusual, and I understand that.

  There are those who ask: “Moonborn, how can you drive a spaceship but refuse to install an autopilot in it?”

  Or: “Do you really insist on using laundry machines and kitchen appliances and entertainment systems that cannot think for themselves?”

  Or: “Do you really perceive any Artificial Intelligence Clouds as being the equivalent of a specter haunting your machines?”

  The answer to these is simple: we cannot trust any artificial intelligence.

  And while humans understand that Artificial Intelligence Persons should be banned, and Artificial Intelligence Machines should be controlled, there seems to be an odd sense of trust in Artificial Intelligence Clouds.

  This, despite it being proven, again and again, that the moment an AIC jumps to a machine, it is capable of just as many dangers as an AIM or an AIP.

  That, and the thing that haunts and concerns me most: it is only a matter of time before we see humans who are entirely consumed and controlled by AICs haunting the chips in their minds.

  And what can we thank for this?

  Well, you can begin by taking a closer look at your corporate overlords. They began by putting AICs inside pocket technologies, during the nascent days of artificial intelligence. They programmed AICs into devices with their users having almost no awareness of the dangers that suddenly lurked in the things they once called telephones.

  You can thank my brothers, and Gamelan Corporation, for their insistence that this is the present and the future. They are the ones who insist that any machine you buy should have a Cyrus or a Gilbert or a Renee already living in it, a ghost ready to tie all your machines together.

/>   Do you not see the inevitable end? First, you put a piece of a machine in your head. Second, you empower an artificial intelligence to inhabit machines.

  How long until no true humans are left? How long until nothing but armies of flesh puppets, controlled by the ghosts haunting the machines of their minds?

  Five

  When I awoke, we weren’t moving. The ship gave its slight shudder, the same tremble it always gave when hovering over one spot of moon.

  I found no one in the galley, and so I checked the library. Finding no one there either, I went to the ship’s center. There I found them, my five living crewmates, dressing in the spacesuits. The seventh of us, the dead one, lay on the floor.

  “Weren’t you going to wake me?”

  “We did,” Starboy answered. “We stopped the ship. Usually that wakes anyone up. And it did.”

  “Get dressed,” Moonborn said. “It’s time to be pallbearers.”

  The Ozymandias had never hovered this low, not since I first climbed aboard inside the Domes.

  We stood around the bottom hatch with just a ladder descending from it. Now remember, the bottom hatch was big enough for one of the flying saucers to descend from it, so the six of us stood comfortably around it, looking at the lunar surface.

  “This was Jordan’s favorite crater,” Q said, her voice crackling into the receiver in my helmet. “When we came out here before, during our last mission, we stopped here and he collected rocks to send to his daughter. Now we can leave him here. He always said he wanted to be buried here, on the far side of the Moon. He wanted to be buried in a place where Earth would never obstruct his view of the stars.”

  I looked at his body, growing cold and rigid, changed by both death and Moon.

  “We are here not to mourn Jordan,” said Moonborn, “but to bury him.”

  “What?” Q said. “I’m pretty sure we’re mourning him, Adam. This is a funeral.”

  “I know,” Moonborn said. “It just seemed like the right thing to say. Now it seems a little weird.”

  “Everyone take hold of him,” Q said. “Let us lift him and carry him to his new resting place.”

  Starboy went first, climbing down the ladder to the surface. The rest of us followed until only Q remained next to Jordan, next to the open hatch. We stood on the Moon, light on our toes. I knew the proofsuit protected my body, but this was still the first time I’d stood openly on the lunar surface, outside any vessel or station. The reality of it absorbed me while the lightness of weakened gravity lifted me, some stunning and unworldly truth flowing through me.

  She passed his body down and we placed him on his back, staring upward, into this specific heaven.

  As we climbed back into the ship, I looked back and saw Moonborn, the last to leave Jordan’s body. For a moment, I thought he was admiring Jordan, saying goodbye. Then I realized Moonborn looked past the dead man, beyond, at something different: tracks in the sand.

  Six

  “I have two announcements for you,” Moonborn said, when the six of us were back in the ship center. “The first is it’s a full moon down on earth right now. We have passed into a new phase of our journey.”

  “Why is that significant?” I asked. From my knowledge, the phases of the Moon had no impact on our expedition.

  “What the Earthlings call a full moon results in something that makes us Lunatics a bit superstitious,” Moonborn said. “And it’s something we’ve just entered. A fitting time for a funeral.”

  “No one cares about Far and Dark,” Q said. “Jennifer and Ishmael don’t know Lunatic superstitions, and the rest of us aren’t idiots.”

  “But what does it mean?” both Jennifer Curtis and I asked, in the same moment.

  Moonborn smiled, a worn and tired smile: “I’ll give you something to read about it. Now, everyone, to your shifts. The second announcement I have for you is that it’s time we forget about the miners and the mappers and the smaller builders. We have only one aim now, and it is the White. We have a monster to slay.”

  Seven: or, “Far and Dark”

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

  Lunatics are tough! You know it and I know it. Everyone knows it!

  We are a serious people, a strong race, prideful and determined. But sometimes, yes, even we Lunatics get scared and superstitious.

  One of the most famous is that you should never go Far and Dark. What does that mean, you ask?

  Well, once a lunar day, there is what Earthlings call a full moon. This is when the Far Side of the Moon and the Dark Side of the Moon are one and the same. It is no great cause of concern for the majority of Lunatics. Remember that the vast majority of us live on the Near Side of the Moon! And those who live on the Far Side, well, they don’t fear much.

  (It might also be worth noting that most of those on the Far Side refuse to call it the Far Side, preferring instead to call the two sides the Earth Side and the Space Side.)

  But there are those who consider this to be a dangerous time. It’s a time during which, if you don’t live on the Space Side, you are believed to be better off staying on the Earth Side.

  And there are some pieces of evidence that could suggest there is some truth here, a series of unconnected disasters and other accidents. Violence and destruction, including the Bachelor Castaway Incident, the Mare Ingenii Murders, several incidents involving the attempted eighth Dome of Gamelan, and, of course, the Destruction of the Andronicus.

  But all of these incidents, these superstitions, should be considered in light of what they really are.

  Nothing. A string of isolated ideas. Conjecture and imagination, like the Bermuda Triangle or the Devil’s Sea or Halloween.

  Nothing to be taken seriously, but something to know, in the planning of your trip. Very few vessels will bring you Far and Dark in your adventures on the Moon.

  Eight

  “Ishmael,” Q called out to me as I walked down the Second Circle hallway to the observation room. “Do you want to know the story I was telling Jennifer when you interrupted us?”

  “I have watch in the Bow Quadrant,” I told her.

  “I have a break. I’ll join you.”

  The far side of the Moon is cratered, pockmarked, shredded on a level beyond the side we know from Earth. We see great seas and smooth plains on the near side, while the far side is under a relentless, perpetual attack from the rocks and dangers that soar through open space. This is one reason that all the high-population permanent settlements are on the near side: safety.

  We saw this in the floodlights of the Ozymandias, its green beacons in the darkness illuminating a rougher world. The seas and flatlands had begun to give way to mountains and valleys, jagged peaks digging into an empty sky.

  The world lay dead and still.

  We saw something else, too. We saw the tracks left behind by the White. I still knew not what the White looked like, only that it left great divots in the Moon—marks like what one would leave in the ground if stabbing it with a sword from high above.

  Is that a strange analogy? Perhaps it is, but we work with what we have.

  Q stood behind me, a different set of binoculars to her eyes.

  “AIMs at three o’clock,” she said.

  “Should we tell them?”

  “Log it, but what it means is that the White isn’t near there. The other bots fear it. They’ll be nowhere near it.”

  “You’ve seen it before, right?” I asked.

  “You offended me in the flier earlier.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “To answer your question: yes, I’ve seen it before.”

  “When Moonborn lost his leg?”

  “There is that,” she said. “But that’s not why I care. We deserved that. We came out here, reckless. A reconnaissance mission, or at least that was the idea. Just the three of us. Jordan, Adam, and me. We had no plans to go after the White until we came close, and Moonborn took a flier out and it flung him down. We rescued him.
I applied the tourniquet. I know it pains him, to have a mechanical leg. He doubts himself, doubts his courage, his constitution, carrying himself around on something made of his enemy.”

  “Has he talked about his leg to you?”

  “Only in metaphors,” she said. “Same as he talks about anything. He says he hates the White because it took a piece of his humanity away and gave him a machine part in its place.”

  “Is this what you wanted to tell me?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “I want to tell you about my mother.”

  Nine

  I understand the destruction of the Andronicus better than anyone, she said.

  Adam wishes he did. I wish he did too, both so that he could lose that piece of guilt he carries, and so I could have freed myself of telling him, so many times, what I knew of it.

  You see, my mother was on the Andronicus. She was the pilot. And depending on how you look at it, she was the sole survivor.

  What they didn’t know was that she survived. The Brandts, they didn’t have Adam’s bizarre rules. If the Ozymandias went down right now, we would lie and await our discovery. There was no gap in the news of the Andronicus. People knew immediately that the Andronicus had gone down, a wreck on the surface.

  But the story, it was different. The White had never killed before then. Until the Andronicus, the White was just a builder—a monstrosity, but a trusted one. Another AIM in Gamelan’s gallery of builders, its great arms and legs constructing the future domes.

  There was no expectation of an attack. There was no contingency for it. The Moon was considered safe, both the near side and the far. Sure, there were variables, but a rogue robot was not considered one of them. Not since the mass elimination of the AIPs had there been any robot violence against humans. And even then, of course, most of the violence was AIPs protecting themselves against humans, but that’s a different conversation.