Shine

by Jetse de Vries

  Whyte shrugged. “We told you. Nobody believed.”

  “What’s Earth?” Nils asked.

  “Where we came from,” Ani said.

  “What happened?” Jun said. “They could’ve made their own moonbase. They could have built space elevators! We had the materials when I left, ten years ago.”

  “All spaceflight appears to have been consolidated in Intelligent Risk shortly after you left.”

  “We will not take. We will not increase.” Whyte said.

  Jared glanced at him. “It appears to be an ingrained thing. Propaganda.”

  “Or skeins,” Whyte said.

  “Let’s leave that for now,” Jared said. He glanced at Ani and mouthed, Don’t ask.

  And, for the first time since she’d landed on the moon, she actually felt fear. Earth had grown strange.

  “Is it safe to assume that United Sustainability is preventing the launch of our shipments?” Ani asked.

  Jared nodded. “I’d say that’s a good assumption. Remember, though, the data we have is partial. There are many protocols that won’t resolve down to our level. What we have is posted on the mediawiki for everyone to review.”

  “So we may be able to contact United Sustainability and work a deal with them?”

  “I would assume so.”

  Whyte frowned. “No. No. No.” He stood up and walked away.

  Ani shook her head. It should be simple. Tell them about the Europa Explorer, tell them about the space-based economy they could build, and show them how they could have a real postscarcity economy. Leave out the signals from the Europan seas for the moment, because that was just icing. And the shipments would start again, and everything would be fine.

  But nothing is ever that easy, is it?

  THE GEEKS CAME to Roy Parekh’s Special Projects basement, wearing serious masks. Inside, they were giddy.

  Roy Parekh knew giddy. Or at least its less-colorful cousin, happiness. It was how he felt, every day they came a little closer to making the promise of the FOLR a reality.

  The geeks worked twelve and fourteen and sixteen hour days and never complained; they left their families and lived in the Intelligent Risk Special Projects office, or picked up apartments across the street. They worked for half of what they’d been paid at their old jobs, where they’d been developing phones or planning cities or running numbers. They tracked him with their bright eyes in a scary, devoted way.

  Thank you, their expressions said. Thank you for letting us dream.

  And, at the same time, he wanted to tell them, No, thank you. Thank you for helping me do something that isn’t about passing it on to my kids, or saving the world, or getting 12% return, or avoiding carbon taxes.

  As they worked, Roy made deals.

  Roy went to SpaceX, who held Intelligent Risk insurance, and said: let’s joint venture to bring carbon-balanced, risk-mitigated spaceflight to place and service satellites. Also offer longer-range flights to NASA, which had just lost another Europa probe.

  It made sense, but it still wouldn’t work. The basic budget was insane, unimaginable.

  Except Roy’s pitch also happened to be the perfect thing to fling at the incoming Congress, who were looking for a way to fit the United States into a world with two and a half billion people who all thought they were middle class but weren’t Americans.

  Spaceflight was a dirty business, and if they could get the carbon credits and resource utilization stamps to take that over for the world, maybe America could suddenly fit, and maybe the slide would stop, maybe they could stop bulldozing the unsold homes while two or three families lived next door.

  In the insanely complex world of twenty-twice, it made sense. Suddenly Intelligent Risk was de facto owner of a rocket company and backstopped by a fund that made them the largest business venture on the planet.

  And that was when Roy came back to the Special Projects basement.

  The geeks had put up a fogtank showing a solid projection of the moonbase, cut in layers beneath the lunar surface. The name HERMES hung above it; he nodded, he got that, his iBlasters had already told him Hermes was the greek god of animal husbandry, roads, travel, hospitality, heralds, diplomacy, trade, thievery, language, writing, persuasion, cunning wiles, athletic contests, gymnasiums, astronomy, and astrology.

  “We’ve been thinking about the colony,” a thin, dark-haired girl said. Her bright blue eyes skated off of him, as if he was radiant. His iBlasters floated her name: Ani Loera.

  He nodded.

  Words poured out of her. Other geeks watched from overtop cubicles. Clearly she was the sacrifice. If it didn’t fly, they’d blame it on her.

  It’s time to do something really new, she told him. Hit the reset button. Put the colony on the back side of the moon, so it would never face Earth. It would never receive a radio transmission or television show or wireless network connection. It would be a clean slate. They could wipe away all the insanity of the world. Leave religion at home. Put constant surveillance in place, but without security, open to anyone. Let any three people try a fourth in an ad hoc court. Governance by lottery. Issue hard currency and put an unregulated market in place, and count on surveillance to ensure it isn’t gamed. Let the kids grow up unfettered by everything on Earth, everything that had come before.

  She stopped and took a deep, shaky breath, clearly expecting an explosion.

  Roy nodded. “If we do this, how do we make sure the parents leave their own prejudices at home?”

  Ani clicked her mouth shut and stammered, “Uh, uh, its easy actually, an algorithmic search...”

  “An algorithmic search of online habits can easily be correlated with tendencies towards religion, economic philosophy, gluttony, and many other undesirable influences,” said another geek, coming out from the safety of his cube. “Anyone we send up, we’ll know who they are.”

  Ani nodded vigorously.

  “Why an unregulated market?”

  “It’s the best way to reward individual initiative, provided it isn’t gamed.” A quick sidewise glance.

  Roy nodded. More geeks emerged from the cubes, not trying to hide their grins.

  “And what is this?” Roy said, pointing at a squat cylinder concealed to the side of Hermes proper.

  “That’s the Asteroid Miner,” Ani said.

  “No, it’s the Jovian Infrastructure Probe,” said someone else.

  “No, it’s both.”

  Ani waved them silent. “Every perfect society needs a goal. This is ours. We will build it. And then we’ll start developing a true space-based economy.”

  “Using local resources.” Said someone else.

  “Shipping back to Earth.” Another.

  Roy threw back his head and laughed. “Approved!” he said.

  BUT WE DIDN’T see this one, Ani thought, remembering that day, remembering Roy’s question.

  She squinted through the old-style slit in the airlock at the Last Resort. It was a tiny thing, only big enough for three people. Like the old Apollo missions. The difference was that the Last Resort could make the journey to Earth and achieve a non-destructive landing using its stubby little delta wings.

  If Roy had seen that, he may have asked one final, fatal question: So do you really believe in this, if you have to have a Last Resort?

  And now the decision was made. Sometime in the next day or two, she and Jared would head to Earth to make their case to Unified Sustainability. Or any other transnational collective that would talk to them. They’d tried contacting Earth through the tenuous radio link, but they’d been unsuccessful, or misinterpreted, or thought a prank.

  Or ignored, she thought. Because the Earth was seriously changed, with transnational states squabbling with the remains of Russia, China, and Africa, as well as an alliance calling itself the United Nations with members that included most of Japan, some of Taiwan, a decent chunk of Australia, and Greenland. Most of them loudly proclaiming “Our flavor of post-scarcity is better than yours!”


  But they had to try. The Europan Explorer had to launch, less for the squawks and echoes that might be intelligence under the Europan sea, more to build the economic net that would solve everyone’s resource problems forever—metal from the asteroids, volatiles from Jupiter, launched by dumb slides to cascade down to the moon for automated processing, and then on to Earth.

  Nils pulled on her t-shirt. “Go home!” he said.

  Ani started. How long had she stood there, just gaping at the ship?

  She looked down at Nils’ dirty, impatient, beautiful face.

  We have to make this work. We have to.

  “CONGRATULATIONS,” THOM LYMAN’S ghost said. “The board of Intelligent Risk is stunned at the profits from your spaceflight monopoly.”

  Roy Parekh blinked and sat up in bed. His old penthouse in the Eastern Standard was cold and still, the hum of the city a distant thread beyond the walls of glass. Thom looked real, but sensors told him there was no physical person in the room, painting the information discreetly on his retinal screen. Which meant that Thom had sent a slice of himself to invade Roy’s augmented reality. Roy didn’t know whether he should be more irritated by the compromise of his virtual space, or a real intrusion.

  “Your virtual space isn’t well guarded,” Thom said.

  “Are you a mind-reader now?” Roy said.

  “New inference algorithms.”

  Roy nodded and swung his legs out of bed, to sit and face Thom’s figure. He hadn’t seen Thom for a couple of years. His ghost looked younger than Thom in Scottsdale, that first deal, all those long years ago.

  “Why the visit?” Roy asked.

  “It’s a sincere thank-you, from myself and Nari and everyone else on the board. You’ve delivered above and beyond.”

  “But.”

  Thom smiled. “But it’s becoming risky.”

  “How so?

  “Come out of your hole and take a look around. Do you know about the Balance For All Act? Have you seen the riots? The world is changing.”

  “I’m aware of it.” But he didn’t want to think about it. It had been three years since their first launch. They were running a loop around the moon every two months. Perfect for research, deep space launches, service... and for dropping carefully-selected items on the moon. Roy still met every selectee personally. He still told them the absolute truth about their chances of living and dying. And seeing those supremely competent men and women, day after day, with tears glimmering in their eyes, tears of happiness, as they saw simulations of the unending labor on the moon, and heard realistic assessments of the number of disciplines they’d have to learn, to see them leave and go on to do something so grandiose and stupid... it made him feel tiny. It made him feel very, very happy.

  “And we’re moving in different directions,” Thom said.

  “Unified Sustainability.” Nari’s division.

  “It’s an amazing new opportunity,” Thom said. “Almost unlimited growth potential.”

  “I don’t want to be a government.”

  “We’re not a government. We’re a balancing entity, ensuring peak satisfaction for all of our members.”

  Roy said nothing.

  “You know there’s an 85 per cent probability that an existing government or transnational state will take over or shut down your space-ops within the next decade?” Thom said.

  “I’m optimistic.”

  Thom crossed his arms. “We’re not. Which is why I’m here to propose something that helps all of us. Let’s split the company. Intelligent Risk becomes your gig. The spaceflight company. The rest of us reorganize under the Unified Sustainability banner. Intelligent Risk is vetted by Unified Sustainability, which provides a buffer between you and the governments.”

  “And I will have majority stakeholder position in Intelligent Risk.”

  “Right.”

  “Which means I hold the bag of gunpowder when the hammer comes down.”

  “With US as a shield, the hammer may never come down.”

  Roy sighed. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

  Thom shook his head, almost sadly. “You stopped being majority shareholder long ago.”

  Roy heard Nari’s voice: We’re throwing you a bone. Hell, we’re throwing you an entire cow. Take it. He didn’t know if it was in virtuality or in his head.

  Thom tapped a foot on the floor, shifting his weight impatiently from side to side.

  Roy ignored him and let his thoughts reach out through the network, bringing him data. Facts and figures came: the world economy stagnant, people in America and Europe rioting as their standard of living fell to parity with the giants of China and India, the few shining stars of technology not enough to spread across the entire world. Drexler-level nanotech wasn’t working; there was some hope in biomimetics, but the technology was slow. It would take decades or centuries to grow the infinite fields of energy and resource, and that simply wasn’t fast enough for people who had grown accustomed to instant answers. The inference was clear: nonessential programs would eventually be shut down. The line was broad and hazy: 2033 earliest, 2050 latest. He had somewhere between nine and twenty-six years.

  And even then, he was still a salesman. He still had a hand to play.

  That was enough, he thought.

  “Deal,” Roy said.

  Thom’s ghost nodded once and disappeared.

  ANI PULLED HERSELF through the narrow hatch into the Last Resort. It was less than an hour before they launched, and she had to go through the final checks.

  The air in the cabin smelled strange and thick. The tanks had probably been filled on Earth; the scent was foreign, alien. Ani’s stomach, already twisted in knots, did another half-turn.

  I have to do this, she thought.

  Even though she’d seen enough of Earth. Too-happy people, smiling as they marched to the state-sized fields in the morning, or to the city-sized factories where the magic technology kept almost ten billion people clothed and housed and fed and connected. Or the others, standing guard over the deserts of slowly-growing biomimetic power and food. Or the few living in glory on depopulated islands. Tiny shards of rational groups still existed—the OpenMITers, the Progress in Time people—but they were tiny. And frequently working to perfect the technologies of the transnationals. And then there were the Anonymous groups hacking the skeins which kept a tenth of the population in check.

  There was a small noise in the storage compartment behind her. Ani started. “Jun?”

  Her wriststream heard the request and pulled up Jun’s feed; he was still kissing his wife goodbye.

  “Who’s there?”

  Silence. Smooth, velvet science. Then, almost at the threshold of hearing: a rapid scuff, and an intake of breath.

  “Who’s there!” Ani levered up out of the seat to open the storage compartment door.

  It was Nils. Curled into a ball, head down, as if to make himself invisible.

  “Nils!”

  “I... wanna go with you!” he wailed. He jumped out of the compartment and clung to her, hugging tightly.

  She smoothed his messy hair. “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Because I probably won’t come back. Which meant Jared might actually have to learn something about being a parent, rather than just sticking to calculations.

  But she couldn’t tell him that. And, looking at his tear-streaked face, she started crying.

  Nils pulled back. “Why are you sad?”

  “Because...” Ani began, but her voice stopped in her throat. Because she just realized how stupid she was. She couldn’t go off on a suicide mission to an insane world.

  I have a kid! On the moon!

  Ani took her handscreen and put together a party line with all the Primes, and Jun. “I’m countermanding my own order,” she told them. “I now recommend we don’t waste the Last Resort on a trip to Earth.”

  Combined shock and relief. Jared laughed; in the background were the unfinished living areas and thron
gs of people. Ani noticed a lot of young people in the crowd, older kids who’d been among the first to be born on the moon. Kids fifteen and sixteen and seventeen years old. Some even younger.

  “They were just voting on the same thing,” he said. “We would’ve had a supermajority to stop the launch in another five minutes.”

  Relief flooded through her. “You’re not upset?”

  “I know a fool’s game when I see one,” Jared said. “And these kids are pretty adamant.”

  “Can we launch a comms package to Earth instead?”

  Jared nodded. “We can mod an asteroid probe. Launch in a few days.”

  “We could even put a bottle of wine in it.”

  “What?”

  “To make it symbolic.”

  “We could.” Jared sounded doubtful.

  “And load it with photos of all the children. Show them our potential.”

  “We could do that.”

  “Then that’s what I want to do.”

  There was a murmur behind Jared. Jared looked around. “They’re not thrilled about revealing ourselves to Earth.”

  “We aren’t revealing ourselves. Even our inference software says they know about us.”

  “They’re not happy.”

  “Run the vote.”

  Jared turned around. She switched to the stream from the cavern. It was packed, standing room only. She waited while Jared explained her decision to the room. In two minutes, over 95% of the vote came back. 45% didn’t want to send the comms package. But 55% did.

  “You won,” Nils said.

  Ani hugged him, long and tight.

  “Yes,” she said, through tears.

  ROY PAREKH LIVED on a tiny island off the coast of the Phillipines. Like many of its kind, it had no name. He liked it that way. It made him feel invisible. It was the farthest he could be from the modern world and still have the connectivity he needed to run Intelligent Risk.

  But he wasn’t invisible. In the last decade, he’d had five visits from Unified Sustainability. Every time, they’d been very civil, very polite. Nari had come once. Thom had come another time. They’d had drinks and talked about the old days, and they’d admired his midcentury-style house in the distracted tones of people used to living on palatial estates.