The Moonborn: or, Moby-Dick on the Moon

by D. F. Lovett

  I told you, earlier in this narrative, that my debts were insurmountable and it was for that reason I left school. I did not lie. But there was more, too.

  I’ve never seen anything more horrifying: the protests, the brutality of the poverty in the tent cities that sprang up around it. But all of it came down to the anger and the rage. The violence, both seen and unseen, boiling over.

  For World Bowl One, you may recall, was supposed to be the healing step. The first football game between the two new nations, the time to bring people together again. I know this has been recorded for posterity, all of this, by Jennifer Curtis and hordes of others.

  But people only know half-truths of all of it. They only know pieces. Not that I can offer the whole truth, but I can offer a truth, a truth I saw.

  The school paid for us to cover it. I had never stayed in a hotel before.

  The World Bowl, as you must know, was held in New Washington. Of course it was. Washington was the last president of the United States who everyone in the world could agree had done good. New Washington, despite being in the Euro-American Union, represented something that the leaders of the Sovereign States of America could respect. Because Washington, like them, was a rebel. Or that’s how the stories went, the public arguments, the narrative.

  I had imagined staying in a hotel my entire life, imagined what it might be like to have a bathroom that only I used, a macro-screen on the wall that I could control. The option to watch whatever I wanted. Windows whose shades I could draw or leave open.

  Of course, it didn’t go that way. They crammed us in there. I shared the hotel room with three other men from the school. No control of the screen, no bathroom to myself. Snoring, a room filled with unknown strangers, in a strange hotel, in a strange town. My sleeplessness multiplied.

  I went for a walk, through streets neon and endless, alleys dark and empty, sidewalks loud and crowded. All worlds had poured into New Washington for this event.

  And as I walked I came across a man speaking, shouting, yelling into the night. You see men like this at all these events, but this one had a crowd. He was a larger man by even the most relaxed standards, a blustering walrus of a man. The crowd around him affirmed everything he said, shouts of Speak, Father and Preach, Father regularly rising from the crowd.

  He shouted a story that I remember, a story that I recorded. It was the story that I was to tell. I would break it into micro-narratives and take it back to my classmates and share it.

  And again, of course, it didn’t go that way.

  Three

  After the Flood, shouted the Father, the world didn’t learn. The nations were meant to divide but they refused and they came together and they showed ambitions that were never intended!

  And they said, looking at one another, Let us build a city and a tower on a hill, a tower to heaven!

  And I am quoting scripture now, if you do not know it!

  But the Lord, our God, he came down to see the City and the Tower, built by these children of men.

  And he feared what they saw, and what they said, and what they spoke. For they all spoke in one tongue and they all knew one nation.

  Nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.

  This is what the Lord said, and he did not mean it in a good way.

  And so what did he do? He stopped them, broke them, toppling their tower. He confounded them!

  And he scattered them across the Earth, telling them not to build a tower again.

  But did we learn? Of course not. We learned nothing, we never learn, even when the Lord walks among us and tells us the exact thing we are meant to learn. There is one truth, and it is the Lord’s truth, and that has been his only lesson to us, again and again and again, and we do not learn. Now we build towers and we fly into the stars, and do you think the Lord likes this? Do you think the Lord will allow this to continue? Do you think that the Lord won’t step in and scatter us again, confound us again?

  He floods us already, but we do not learn.

  He smites us, but we do not learn.

  And there is only one thing he wants us to do: learn his truth and share it!

  Instead we worship men born in the sky! We give power to dragons! We wonder after beasts! We open seals and there is no repentance of these murders, nor these thefts, nor these fornications, nor these sorceries.

  Woe to him who seeks these pleasures, and woe to him who seeks to please!

  Woe to him who fails to realize that he is the castaway!

  Woe to us! Woe to all of us!

  Four

  I left knowing that was the tale I had to tell. The Father who preached to a massive crowd, most of them in rags, hearing what he had to offer. I knew not whether he was a citizen or a civilian, whether he came from the Sovereign States or from the Union.

  But I did not write it, at least not in a way that could be shared. Not until now.

  As you know, World Bowl One never occurred. The terror that was unleashed, the worst the world had ever known, broke out as I walked away, fire in the sky and over the buildings, screams and shouts and blood and deaths.

  There is no need for me to go into greater detail. We all know what happened there.

  I found myself a basement somewhere and I hid.

  I hid and I hid.

  I stayed down there until I knew it was over.

  I meant to find my way home but learned, soon after, that I had no home anymore. I did find employment, eventually, somewhere in the north. The job that led to the job that led to the trip to space. Asking questions no one answered, somewhere no one visited.

  The class continued, like I said, that journalism class, but I wasn’t in it. I never returned.

  I heard the stories of the storytellers, telling the stories people wanted to hear. Everyone finds the narrative that matches the narrative they already know and want.

  It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to share the truth. It wasn’t that I feared the response.

  It was that I no longer believed in a truth. I didn’t believe what that man had shouted from his pedestal. He said that there was only one truth and that it was our job to tell it, but what do you do when the world has a thousand truths? How do you know which one to tell?

  And so, unable to ever know which truth was the truest, I chose to never choose.

  Until now.

  Five

  Before I spotted it, I stood in the Bow Quadrant Observation Room, staring through binoculars. Jennifer Curtis stood beside me. It had become all hands on deck, all eyes out the windows. Of course, all hands on deck is not all too significant when there are only five of you left.

  I sat in one chair. Jennifer Curtis sat in the other.

  “Some of them think he’s an angel,” she said. “Others that he could have been, if he’d never left the Moon. But now he’s a devil. The devil. They call him Lucifer, some of them do.”

  “Everyone worth knowing eventually gets called Lucifer,” I said.

  “I’m not disputing that. But he’s a great manipulator, Adam Moonborn. I didn’t know it until I started paying attention to you, the piece of this puzzle that you are. I wanted to frame this narrative, frame this quest of his and I kept thinking Don Quixote or Eliot Rosewater or Bruce Wayne or some combination of all three. Those are the names who precede him, those are the men. But he thinks he’s someone else, doesn’t he? There’s a different man he has chosen to be, and he has chosen all of us with him. He thinks the Ozymandias is the Pequod, doesn’t he? And he, Captain Adam Moonborn, he is Captain Ahab?”

  “I haven’t read it,” I said. “I haven’t read Moby-Dick.”

  “But you’re Ishmael,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “And that’s what I don’t understand. Who are you? Why is there an Ishmael? Why isn’t it me?”

  “Why should it be you?” I asked.

  “Why should Ishmael be me?” she said. “Because I’m the one he hired to write the book. That’s what I don’
t understand. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to me. Ishmael is the narrator. Am I not the narrator? Are you more than you seem?”

  She stared at me after finishing these questions.

  I said nothing. I had made my deal. They had pitted me against her, but I could not tell her and keep this job.

  And then something stepped in.

  Fate, perhaps.

  The White, undoubtedly.

  Jennifer Curtis stared at me, waiting for an answer. But then she just stared. Past me. And then she fell to the ground.

  Her body shuddered.

  Her mouth foamed.

  Her eyes, wild and unseeing.

  That is when I saw it. That is when I saw it out there, the orb on the horizon. The great and terrible White.

  I screamed and I shouted, at both her seizing attack and the thing that I saw out there through the window.

  I shouted for help but could not be heard over the sirens that suddenly broke out, screaming throughout the ship.

  The sirens. Howling into our ears, howling something wild and terrible.

  The White had been seen by more than just me.

  Our journey, our destination, our reckoning.

  Six

  I rushed to the two-way radio on the wall, but Moonborn’s voice came through on the ship speakers:

  All hands to the Ship Center, he bellowed. There she blows! The White is on the horizon!

  “It’s Jennifer Curtis,” I said into the intercom on the wall. “She’s having some kind of attack.”

  I looked back at her body. She had stopped her seizing, if that’s what it was. Had gone still. What this meant, my mind danced around. She’s still because she’s dead, the words whispered in the back of my head, the whispering worry once again.

  But then I watched as she sat up, her back to me. I could not see her face.

  “Jennifer,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Ishmael!” Starboy’s voice over the speakers. “Did she have a seizure? If she did, get out of there. She’s not safe.”

  “What?” I said, tried to say, into the intercom, but I’d become transfixed by Jennifer Curtis standing and turning around and staring at me, blood running from her eyes and her nostrils. Her face, both blank and pained, no recognition other than some twisted contortion of pain and fugue.

  “If she was seizing,” Starboy’s voice quick through the speakers, “it’s the White taking her chip.”

  Moonborn, in the background: “She has a chip! I said no chips! Everything is fucked if she has a chip and she had one this entire time!”

  Starboy: “Run, Ishmael! The White is puppeting her! Get out of there. Run!”

  You can run. You can fight. You can hide. You can surrender.

  Are there any other options when up against the enemy?

  I did none of these. I stood, helpless, unmoving, unprepared to fight whatever Jennifer Curtis had become.

  The possessed Curtis, coming straight for me.

  The idea that this could have been my last moment, the flash-before-my-eyes moment: that idea still haunts me. Jennifer Curtis, haunted by some puppetmaster cloud, crushing my windpipe or gouging out my eyes, stabbing my neck with her pencil.

  I raised my hands, covering my face, when the sound of the blast rang out.

  In the doorway stood Q.

  “Go to the Captain’s Roost,” she said.

  “Did you kill her?”

  “I don’t know,” Q said. “I’ll check. You go.”

  Seven

  When I reached the Captain’s Roost, I found the two of them there. Starboy and Moonborn.

  They stared out at it: the White. There, out in the darkness.

  I saw it now, again. Saw what it was. The Moon had been my first thought. Perhaps that’s what it was.

  What I saw now, an orb. A sphere. A globe. But not floating, as it had appeared at first. No, not floating, but on legs. Eight legs, thin and crooked, descending from the orb down to the surface.

  It gleamed. Smooth and blank, an untouched canvas, but it laughed at me, that unlikely demon out there.

  This was not what it was meant to be.

  I should have asked them what it would look like.

  I should have asked them what it would smell like. Because it did smell.

  “Do you smell that?” I asked. Because I smelled it: something in the air, something acrid, something thick, something vague but particular.

  “I smelled it last time,” Moonborn said. “Q’s mother, she smelled it too. They don’t understand it. No one does.”

  “Is that how it possessed her?” I asked. That vision, the haunted woman coming at me. Burned into my eyes: Jennifer Curtis, a writing rival once upon a time. Now bleeding and struggling, here on this ship.

  “She lied to us,” Moonborn said. “I demanded no chips. You cannot fight this thing if you are chipped.”

  “You should’ve told them that,” Starboy said, looking back at us. Rage across his face. “We should’ve told them it could jump into chips like that. How powerful its cloud is.”

  I’d interrupted an argument, I realized. These two men, not just arguing over how to win this thing now but what they should have done, and when. Who had done what wrong. How this battle should have been won. They argued like men who realize they’ve lost and look to one another for blame.

  “We need all directions,” Moonborn said. “We have two fliers left and this ship. All three directions, coming at it.”

  “He deserves to know,” Starboy said. “Tell him what you brought. Tell him what we brought. All of us. If you don’t tell him then he’s the only one left who doesn’t know.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I’ll tell you in the flier,” Moonborn said to me. “Q in one flier. Starboy, you’re up here. Protect the Ozymandias. You know the cost. Ishmael, you’re with me.”

  Q found us in the cargo, dressing in the proofsuits. Her face said it all, but I asked anyway.

  “No,” she answered. “Her last words to you were her last breath. We lost her.”

  “She doomed herself,” Moonborn said.

  Eight

  In our flier, we attacked.

  All the lasers.

  I want to tell you how it worked, the battle, the brilliance, the fire, but it all happened so fast and I never held the controls. I was the artillery, the bombardier, the gunner. Moonborn held the controls.

  It occurred to me now how little they had included me in these preparations. I had not realized that the White was some kind of metallic orb-headed arachnid.

  But there we were: the White, a few hundred yards ahead of us. Unwavering but ready. We raced toward it, the Ozymandias in the middle, Moonborn and me to the right, Q to the left.

  The Ozymandias, piloted by Starboy, floating upward as it went.

  I had not known what it would look like.

  And I had not known that the plan was to knock it to the ground in a chain.

  The Ozymandias went up. We went right, Q went left.

  The White’s intelligence, I still don’t know. It had the ability to possess Jennifer Curtis and turn her into some kind of zombie. It had the ability to crash the camp in the tunnels, the tale Gardener had told us. It had the ability to disable any artificial intelligence that came after it.

  But did this mean intelligence? Did it mean evil? Or did it just mean that the White had become more human than any machine before: that it would persevere until it ensured its own ultimate survival? Driven by its lust for immortality?

  It lowered as we came for it. Crouching, I realized. The other thing I realized: the others had practiced this, studied it.

  Chains descended from the back of the fliers, both ours and Q’s, as we came in hot and close to the beast.

  How massive it was!

  How terrifying!

  The chains clicked, attached to the legs, and we began our spiral.

  We pirouetted around it, our dance of death, the chains delivering the White to the fate i
t had earned long ago.

  But then.

  Nine

  Q’s voice:

  Adam, something’s wrong. The flier isn’t working.

  Starboy’s voice:

  This isn’t right. None of our ships have any bot intelligence, right? There’s nothing for it to jump to, right? Right, Adam?

  Moonborn, quietly:

  The controls aren’t responding

  Ishmael:

  What do we do?

  Starboy:

  It won. Abort, abort. All of us. It won. We can still live. We can turn back.

  Q:

  No, it didn’t. No, no, no, it didn’t. We have an option. We have the option. The nuclear option.

  Ten

  “What’s the nuclear option?” I asked.

  “What it sounds like,” Moonborn said.

  Eleven

  I saw the two things happen so quickly, so interchangeably, impossible to know what happened when. When who knew what, when what did what.

  The claws of the White, its great legs, suddenly reaching out and breaking the chains that Moonborn had declared unbreakable only moments ago.

  It leapt, the White. It leapt like the spider it was, landing on top of the Ozymandias.

  But as it did so, Q had ejected from her flying saucer. Q landed atop the White as the White landed atop the Ozymandias. I watched it fling her off, a horse bucking a human, a human swatting a fly.

  And Moonborn and me, in our own flying saucer, knocked by the White in its great leap.

  We went spiraling away, losing the horizon, losing touch with all senses, losing the battle.