Chapter One

A scruffy-looking man wearing a white undershirt and white shorts and thick white wool socks sat at a wooden desk with a radio receiver in his hand, held close to his mouth as he thought of his next words. Twice a day for countless years he sent a message across space, hoping to get some kind of response. None came. The man stared silently out the large window before him. In the foreground, the barren pocked moonscape disappeared into the horizon, and beyond that Planet Earth loomed large in the black expanse of the universe. 

The room was small, white-walled, and gave off a mid-century modern aesthetic with the elegant wooden desk and the three white chairs surrounding it. The walls were constructed of bricks made of lunar regolith and looked strangely similar to the walls of a 19th-century factory like one might have found on Earth in cities like Baltimore or Buffalo or Boston, or the cigarette factories in old North Carolina. The face of the desk was constructed from a single slab of multihued acacia wood, grown in the wild on the African savannahs. 

The sound of birds played through the invisible speakers embedded in the lunar bricks. A few plants with deep green ovoid leaves hung from the ceilings closest to the window, lit with artificial light that brought their lush growth into glittering focus against the cool white of the room. 

The air in the tiny room was crisp and clean. Cleaner than the air one might have breathed in Los Angeles or Mexico City or Tokyo or Beijing or Mumbai, Egypt, Vienna, Prague, Paris, Moscow, Madrid, Nairobi, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janiero, Taos, Toronto, or New York City if you were on a boat traversing the narrow waterways between the aging island skyscrapers of former Manhattan, which now belonged to the sea. You would have had to go to the far reaches of the Arctic Circle or Antarctica to find breathable air that came anywhere near as pure and clean as the air being breathed here in the white Moon room.

Deep within the lunar South Pole, on an embankment where sunlight never touched, the trapped ice was mined with large drilling machines, hundreds of them, that transported the ice to be heated in vast underground processing centers, manned by Terran refugees with engineering and aeronautical expertise who migrated from all over the world and almost never saw the surface of the moon, never saw natural light, never saw stars, never saw a smiling face, the landscape of the human soul. Only water and ice. And the pipes that led to the above-ground lunar colonies where the first- and second-class colonists lived and worked. The workers’ living quarters were deeper still, beneath the platforms where they worked in their waking hours. These were the unmen who kept the lunar colony afloat.

The heated ice transformed into vast amounts of water, pumped in through underground channels to electrolysis stations where the water split into hydrogen and oxygen, or viaducts that fed the greenhouse crops where the sun reached, or the lunar waterworks where drinking water and lakes and pools made life pleasurable for the surface colonists. Aquatic life existed in some of those waterworks above, and the colonists enjoyed watching them through the transparent walls of their tanks. 

Some of the subterranean pipes led to the rocket fuel processing centers. Others led many kilometers away to the lunar colonies above, where the breathable air extracted from ancient moon water was breathed and enjoyed by the lunar citizens of Earth. None of the colonists knew what had happened on Earth, so they continued to process the ice, produce the rocket fuel, drink the pure water, and breathe the clean lunar-manufactured air. Life on the Moon continued without disruption, despite the reality that they could not return to Earth, could not communicate with their home planet, could not answer any of the questions that had plagued them for almost a decade. 

The air pumped into the small white room overlooking Planet Earth, and the man at the desk continued staring into the vastness of space. A system many kilometers away and hundreds of meters below the lunar regolith kept this room in a state of perfect comfort and stasis, with the purest air one could ever hope to breathe. The value of this air here in Shackleton Crater on the Earth’s only moon was immeasurable. Without it, all the colonists would be dead within a matter of minutes. 

The man breathed the lunar air and enjoyed the gravity processors that kept his body tethered to the moon like a normal human being, not one of the unmen below who floated and bounced on the moon’s light gravity, their bones and muscles weakening and atrophying to the point where to return to Earth would crush their bodies, render them immobile. They were trapped processing the lunar ice until the end of their lives. There seemed to be no escape from this reality. Not even sunlight on the lunar surface to calm their nerves.

On the wall opposite the large window hung a number of priceless artworks, among them a small drawing of six symmetrical moons, framed in an ornate wooden rectangle. The drawing depicted detailed sketches of the moon in various phases of light, some checkered white on black squares, others floating orbs on the white paper. The sketches were highly detailed and could be read both as an object of study and an aesthetic rendering of Earth’s moon. The drawings, encased behind glass, were sketched by none other than Galileo Galilei himself in 1609 after having viewed the moon through his telescope. Here, those drawings were now staring back at the Earth itself from across the glass. 

Next to Galileo’s drawings, the imposing canvas of Jan Vermeer’s The Geographer hung. On the large canvas, a man stood hunched over his maps, facing the lit window of his painted world. Looked at from just the right angle, it was as if the man in the painting were staring out the glass window in the room, gazing out towards a distant Earth. 

In the far corner of the room, shrouded in shadow, an Egyptian sarcophagus laden in gold stood sentinel, and next to it, a grayed stone carving of the Egyptian goddess, Sakhmet. Her slender humanoid form was topped with the head of a lioness crowned with an orb above her head, the stilled image of the moon floating above the goddess of violence, disaster, and illness. Behind the sarcophagus and behind Sakhmet, hanging on the wall, was a blackboard. On the blackboard, this formula was hastily written out in chalk:

Beneath the chalkboard on a small white card affixed to the wall, the words ‘Einstein’s Chalkboard’ were neatly typed out in black 12-point Times New Roman font.

The man at the desk stared out the large window in absent gaze. His eyes were not focused on the moonscape, or the Earth beyond, only out into space. The man broke his trance, reached for a leaf, broke it off, and chewed on it slowly. He clicked the radio on and began to speak.

Hello? This is Noel Rodgers, is anybody home? Do you read me? I repeat, this is Noel Rodgers of Lunar Colony Seven. Do you read?

The man took a deep breath and swallowed.

He looked down on Earth and asked himself the same thing he had been asking for years, without ever getting a satisfactory answer: what have you done down there? 

Just then the intercom kicked on, muting the birds. A man spoke with a heavy Eastern European accent.

Mr. Rodgers, are you there? We’re about to start season two, Breaking Bad. Classic American television. Best stuff. Only gets better after first season. Should I tell them wait for you?

Rodgers put down the radio, grabbing another leaf from the hanging plant and shoving it in his mouth. He took a deep breath, stretched his arms, broke out of his inquisitive state.

Tell them I’ll be right there.

Very good, sir. We wait. 

The intercom clicked off and the birds resumed their song.