Tagged: Georg Koszulinski

Chapter Three

A few nights ago – how many, who knows? – I was awakened at gunpoint by an angry mob of lunar workers from one of the lower wards. My first thought was Boško was dead. Damn. I liked him a lot. A great sense of humor and loyal to the death. No way he’d let these fucks in here. He’d have to be dead. This was a very bad situation I was coming into but I had the thought this could be worked out. I’ve had my share of crises to deal with and this was just going to be another one for the books. These fuckers were going to have to die. No question about it.

 These unmen probably figured out their comrades weren’t dying in surface accidents. I mean, they were, but these accidents were planned by yours truly so I could keep the remaining colony functioning at its optimal best. Increase caloric surplus, decrease mouths to feed, and do all this as systems became more automated, reducing the need for human work hours. It was simple math, people. Nothing personal. There was an elegance to my plan and it produced maximum joy. 

My math aligned with an accident rate that shouldn’t have raised any eyebrows, so what happened? I was taking on the burden required of me as leader of this lunar colony, as its founder and visionary. I know how that must sound. Visionary. It’s politically incorrect to call oneself visionary, isn’t it? But what else do you call it? As the person trying to protect these people from the realities of what had presumably happened on Earth, as the only person with the moral courage to do the things that needed doing, I stayed true to the vision. 

So I told them a lie. Not just any lie. The lie they needed to hear. It was a lie that kept them happy and secure, and living the best possible life on the Moon. The whole human civilization project was founded on a wonderfully creative tapestry of lies. The sooner one understood that, the sooner one could go about the business of keeping it afloat. 

Leaders work with what they have. Lies are a tool like any other. Slave away in this life, paradise in the next. For God and country. Make California great again. You know the deal. Very simple stories. Very effective. They were clearly beginning to wear off down here in the crater. But goddammit, progress is one grand narrative, and the lies are what keep us charging forward. 

Forge On.

Fiction is for losers, people who lack the vision and the balls to let their stories run free. Fiction is a failure of imagination. I was making history here. The simple story I gave them, worked wonders: 

Something had happened on Earth, communication was down, some kind of global meltdown, but we were working on it and when things went back online, everyone would be allowed to return to Earth. Forge On.

You’re welcome. I told them we were better off up here while this crisis, whatever it was, passed. Forge On. They asked about their families, why they couldn’t make connections with anyone, and I actually told them the truth. Forge On. Your families are most likely dead. We had to just remain calm, count our lucky stars, and wait for the systems to come back online and everyone would be able to return to Earth in an orderly way, once it was safe. You got it: Forge On. It had the monosyllabic symphonics of fuck you or fuck off, which wasn’t by accident. Forge On. It helped when I listened to their incessant complaining and I could just calmly say, ‘forge on,’ and be thinking, ‘fuck off,’ all in the same breathe. 

So your family was dead. Forge On. 

That was a pill they could swallow and none of these people really cared about family anyway. A lot of these surface colonists were men, socially incapable, had multiple families, young women that birthed them healthy children. They pretended to care about them because it was part of the story, and I rode along right there with them. We write it together and everything works out just fine. Multi-authored future. Forge on, you fucks. What more do you want from me? 

And now these animals are asking me to write a message here claiming I’m being held prisoner. No doubt they think this will serve as some kind of ransom letter. I’m typing it out with one hand here, and they almost certainly think this can be used as leverage to get what they want from Earth, trading me for the rockets and supplies that they need to get back home. The idiots have no idea what’s going on. It’s not their fault. I had them working the ice processors deep inside the South Pole, about as far away from Earth as you could get, literally kept them in the dark year-round.

My second thought, after realizing my head of security was kaput, as I was waking up from deep sleep with all these unmen in my room, was what these brown-skinned lower-ward workers were doing in my face and how had they gotten a hold of my prized collection of Smith & Wesson revolvers? Second and third thoughts, I guess. Those babies were tucked away in my private reserves, locked tight and only brought out on special celebrations, or on the rare occasions when I thought I might need to blow someone’s head off. It was part of my lunar cowboy persona. Never had to use them, but that was the point of having them. The animals had drugged me heavy. How long had they been here? Had they drunk all my whiskey? Fuckers.

Before I could ask what was going on or how they got my prized revolvers out of the reserves, I felt a sharp pain shoot up my right arm and saw my hand had been cut off at the wrist, neatly cauterized and completely exposed, the flesh around my nub inflamed red and charred black at the edges. Reflexively, I tried to scream but could barely breathe, let alone utter a sound. Fucking animals. They could have taken the tip of my index finger and gotten in just as well. 

Sick mother fucks.

The tranquilizers they’d given me were still in heavy effect, and I just stared at the nub and back at the angry mob stomping around my master’s quarters and the .44 magnum Smith & Wesson that killed Jesse James dancing right up in my face. My favorite fucking firearm pointed at my head by some skinny brown-skinned puke that I would have gladly murdered right then and there if I had faculties over my body. He was yelling something in Arabic. They were all yelling but I couldn’t hear anything. My legs and the good arm were chained to the bed. I could feel the resistance and the cold steel around my wrist and ankles because I was lunging for the guy’s throat with my swollen nub, the one with my Jesse James murder weapon. These idiots were so fucked. 

Now they were laughing hysterically. I think I must have said, because I remember thinking it, Boško, please kill these lower-ward slaves now. Get these fucks out of my fucking face. This is completely unacceptable, do you hear me? They were laughing and I think it was somewhere in that moment that I pissed myself, really let go, thinking these animals were going to kill me right then and there. Over the course of the last decade they had learned to speak English. Why not? Part of the genius of this colony was using language as a kind of keycode, English at the top, Spanish for the servant class, Arabic and really any other leftover immigrant population language at the bottom. 

But then a rational thought entered my brain. 

They were keeping me alive for something. Taking my hand had showed their hand, so to speak. They wanted me alive. I still had some cards to play.

As I scratch out this message locked away somewhere in the storage lockers deep within one of the lower wards – which one, I have no clue – I feel pity for these animals because the order and life I’ve provided these people is about to come crashing down hard. There is no ransom letter that’s going to get them off this rock. They could have had a life here under my supervision. That’s a fact. The last decade proved that to be the case. I had enough dehydrated protein and food rations to last me and the seventh colony a lifetime. Probably more, actually. So what if I supplemented those reserves with the occasional laborer, for fresh meat. There was no way they were all going to live anyway, and our resources were limited. We’re on the fucking Moon lockdown budget here, you know? 

Two hundred thousand calories extracted from a body up here is worth more than all the platinum and gold on Earth, you feel me? And did I hoard all those calories for myself? Of course not. I didn’t even take any for myself, just a taste to make sure the chefs were hitting their culinary marks. I took pleasure in the performance. The meals were the way to keep the English-speakers in order and that was enough for me. This was in the name of science. We never lost a day on the lunar arrays. Knowledge of the universe was expanding at a rate never before known in human history. It’s basic Dusky Seaside Sparrow logic I was applying here. 

I spread those precious calories and minerals evenly amongst the fine folks in Lunar Colony Seven. They paid me fortunes to keep them safe, sound, and most importantly happy, and that’s what I did. I was doing my job, fulfilling my contractual obligations to the shareholders who elected me. This was a democracy. I owned the companies, but they elected me to run them! It was practically in the contracts that you could be turned into food, and the unmen doing the work down here knew what they were getting into when they signed on the line.

They could have remained on Earth and starved away. No one twisted their arms. Nice slow deaths back on Earth, and I’m not even talking about whatever happened there at the end. At least up here they got to experience the Moon, walk its surface once a month, maybe, and know they were advancing the human race. They were a part of history in the grandest sense, like sailors on Columbus’s voyages, or the first people to walk across the Bering Strait. Did they think I would hand-hold them the entire time? 

I remember Carol saying once, all in a ‘theoretical proposition’ kind of way – her words, not mine – as a theoretical proposition, cannibalism is a deeply unethical and illegal act, and discussing it in any practical sense is both distressing and inappropriate. Well, fuck you, Carol. Did you really think there were that many ducks up here in the Seventh Colony? Really? Duck à L’Orange. Pan-Seared Duck Breast with Blackberry Sauce – blackberry sauce! Crispy-skinned duck breast served with a rich blackberry reduction, accompanied by sautéed greens and mashed potatoes. You’re welcome, Carol! Duck Confit. Slow-cooked duck leg preserved in its own fat, served with crispy potatoes and a side of frisée salad. Are you getting the picture yet, Carol? Duck Breast with Cherry Port Sauce. Great choice. Peking Duck. Duck Ravioli with Sage Brown Butter. The list goes on, Carol. 

You had a good life while I was in charge. With the animals out of their cages, I expect the lies to become naked again. Soon enough you’ll be eating each other right out of the rib cages, you know what I mean? I gave you all a gift. Shackleton Crater and all the colonies will shit the bed when you kill me. So sure, send this letter back to Earth. Stick it up your asses for all I care. No one is coming to save you because nobody is home. The real joke is, even if the world were spinning as it always had, who did they think was going to pay to keep me alive? Who did they think I was? So, Carol, when they eat you, I just have one question: I wonder if you’ll taste like the Duck Ragu Tagliatelle you were bitching about, or something else?

Chapter Two

A FRAGMENTARY HISTORY OF TERRAN CULTURE

BY NOEL RODGERS

What follows in this volume are the lecture notes I gave to the residents of Lunar Colony Seven in the first season after our connection with Earth was severed. My intentions at the time were to create a space for us to come together to celebrate Earth culture, to calm our frittered nerves, in the hopes that we would be connected again to our mother planet soon. That day has not yet come. It may never come. The fate of Earthbound humans may not be known for some time, perhaps ever. It may be up to future generations to find a way to return to Earth. The Moon is our home now, and that has to be good enough.

Many of you know I remain a committed student to Earth’s history, and the contributions my corporations made to advancing human knowledge on Earth, beneath its oceans and on other planets, is something I have dedicated my life to. Our lunar arrays, and the work many of you have advanced, has deepened our understanding of the universe, provided a clear view of the vastness of space, unencumbered by the atmospheric disturbances of Earth. Our vision from the lunar array could not be clearer, and we persist still to look deeper into the unknown, to answer the questions that persist. It is our evolutionary mandate to continue to explore and learn about our universe. In the case of space exploration, I was not content merely to be the CEO of my companies, but the captain of a colony. That decision has proven to be the wisest one I ever made.

I share the original notes in this volume, as much a lecture on scientific inquiry and the history of discovery, as a reflection of my thoughts and desires during that early period of great tumult. Please be sure to include the lecture slides when you play back this volume, for a more complete immersion into the original talk.

Yours faithfully,

Noel Rodgers, Captain, Lunar Colony Seven

Shackleton Crater, Lunar South Pole

EY 2095/LY 59

***

Hosts, Phantasms, and Phantasia. 

Good evening, lunar colonists, and welcome to tonight’s talk. I begin this lecture with the word: host. As in the host that holds the virus, the holy host, or one who hosts his guests for an exploration of Earth histories. As in hostage, someone held against their will as currency in an exchange with one’s enemies. Hosts held hostage, but to whom? In Latin, hostis. Means both friend and enemy. Hostile even. Tricky business, you see? 

As the host tonight, I welcome you into my home. As the host of a would-be virus, I would certainly not welcome such an uninvited guest. Have our people on Earth hosted an uninvited guest into their corporeal bodies? Hostile takeover? Next slide please.

Phantasms. Ghost hosts. 

Friend or enemy depends on the context. I see some pregnant mothers in the front row. Surely they could share some wisdom on this host business. The antithesis of a virus hosted inside our bodies would be a woman’s right to bear children, to host the species across time, into the future. But let us expand beyond the body, the social network of bodies, and go big, to the expanse of the universe. Next slide please.

Ptolemy created a geocentric theory of the universe perhaps the greatest anthropocentric idea in the history of humankind.  Every man is the center of his own universe, and this image was projected outward. Ptolemy’s theory lacks elegance and must be continually revised to account for the planets’ strange trajectories around the Earth. Unholy hosts. Looking back to our ancestral species, this evolutionary flaw comes to be known as Ptolemy’s curse—man’s inability to see his own folly. Next slide please.

Copernican Mind Spasms.

In 1543 Copernicus’s heliocentric theory places the sun at the center of the universe, with the planets revolving around it. Some say this is the beginning of modern astronomy, and of the scientific revolution. Next slide please.

Invisible Adversaries.

Ninety-nine per cent of light and the electromagnetic spectrum is invisible to the human eye. For our species to progress, we needed instruments that could render the invisible visible. Next slide please.

Mapping Time.

The Soviet filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, calls the cinema the microscope and telescope of time. He was among the first philosophers to explore the archeopsychic realm, to truly understand the power of the cinema to cross grand time scales into the past and future. To enter our minds through the conscious hallucinations that the cinema brought to bear. Proto-feed was born. Next slide please.

Sensorial Overload.

Aristotle places phantasia between sensory perception and reason: “thinking is carried out by means of images, and the images have to be provided by the imagination”. Imagination becomes the engine of thought, a means of lubricating the harsh contact points between external sensorium and inner vision. “Imagination alone contains poetry,” and, “Imagination is the most scientific of the faculties”. For Baudelaire, imagination is what makes both synthesis and analysis possible. Next slide please.

Universe Man.

Ah, a man after my own heart: Giordano Bruno, philosopher, poet, magician, mathematician, astronomer. Believing magic was the result of phantasmic images, he dreamed the feed before it was born. Extended the conceptual theories of the Copernican model of cosmology. Giordano was among the first to claim the universe was infinite. He was burned alive at the stake for his heretical views, for which he was unapologetic to the end, even as the flames consumed his mortal core. Next slide please.

“It is not surprising that man, burdened with obsolete ‘knowledge’—his spontaneous reflexing conditioned only by past experience, and as of yet unable to realize himself as being already a world man—fails to comprehend and cope logically with the birth of Universe Man.”  R Buckminster Fuller, Utopia of Oblivion, 1969. Big year for mankind! Next slide please.

Time Travels through the Light Machine.

Edwin Hubble works in total darkness to adjust his eyes to the starlight. He fixes his gaze on the Andromeda Galaxy and three candidate novae, one being a Cepheid—a star that pulsates. The length of the pulse betrays its actual luminance, and its visible luminance when measured against its actual luminance betrays the star’s distance from Earth. Tonight the most significant photograph in the history of humankind will be taken.

It is October 4, 1923. Next slide please.

Documenting Terran Bio Destruction.

Many of Earth’s thinkers recognized the destructive nature of their species, and a form of salvage biology was conducted by its most radical thinkers. In 1843, botanist Anna Atkins published a collection of images, documenting Terran plants and algae. In less than two hundred Earth years, all of these species were functionally extinct. Some exist on Mars and here on the Moon but no longer live freely on Earth. It should be noted that Atkins’s work was funded by her husband’s business in the English slave trade. These tradeoffs of human suffering versus human knowledge form the bedrock of our great gains, I might add. Sometimes referred to as the Dusky Seaside Sparrow Paradox. Landing on the Moon must have been a hard pill to swallow if you were among the last of the coastal Florida sparrows. Something has to suffer for something else to gain, or the engines of progress stall. Next slide please.

Next slide please.

One solves mysteries of the universe through the trinity of observation, theoretical development, laboratory experiment.

Next slide please.

Moth Light Flame Terrain.

If splitting the atom invoked darkness, evolutionary biology would have prevented the threat of mutual destruction, nuclear holocaust, gamma radiation, unstable elements invading our bodies, the destruction of Earth systems’ ability to sustain human life. The paradox of light: mothlight. The movies, the internet, and the feed prepared industrialized society for nuclear holocaust, like the scientists who desired detonations at night. The feed prepared us for the spectacle of light against the dark, for anything is possible. Sunrise promises warmth, ruptures night, offers another chance at survival. Mastering the sun satisfies the primal evolutionary need for light, warmth, clear lines of sight, like crosshairs in a mirror! Are you with me, people? Next slide please.

Failure to Adequately Map Time.

Old-timey corporate thought patterns structured time on quarterly profits. Wrong! Profits should be structured on the hour! Time is our most valuable asset, why wait? As the Peruvian folklorists say, there is more time than life! The Soviets invented the five-year plan. Wrong! The concept of thinking seven generations ahead is said to have originated from the Great Law of the Iroquois. Okay, I concede the wisdom of this, but that is as anti-profit as it gets. 

Most Terrans tended to think on the human timescale, a lifespan, no more. The failure to think on grander timescales while also extracting profits by the second, geologic-time-real-time paradox indicates the poverty of thought that led to the destruction of the Terran noosphere, the planetary doom that was to overtake Mother Planet. Let’s not forget there’s a reason we’re living on the Moon people, and it’s not just the amazing views! Okay, let’s wrap here. I’m getting hungry. Duck Confit Crostinis with parsnips and figs, anyone? 

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.