0.3

🌘

With any luck this will be my final log entry from the Moon for a long time. I’m sitting in the spaceport terminal. A minute ago I heard the shuttle touch down on top of us, they just have to refuel.

Its passengers are leaving now. Some of them look disoriented in our gravity--colonials, high-G worlders--you can tell who’s who by the unique ways they stumble around when they arrive here. Suits from the chamber of commerce. Transient workers in more respectable clothes. Then there’s the tourists, for some unfathomable reason coming here on purpose, for fun. Jumping out an airlock sounds infinitely more fun than a trip to Qianshi.

Status update--one hour until boarding. Wish I had something to eat. Must be going on 24 hours now... Wait--I have money, money can be exchanged for food, yes, there is food here at the spaceport, yes--the stars are in your favor today Saffron!

Head for the food court. It’s so different wearing a skirt, I can’t believe how nice it is, such a simple thing, somehow so liberating. Between that and the estrogen really starting to hit my brain, I think I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. Is this happiness? In the back of my mind it feels wrong to be dressed this way, something deeply ingrained to unlearn. That just makes it more exciting--the cold air touching my skin--the soft fabric brushing against my legs with every step--shiver shockwave--horripilation--heart racing. This joy is all mine to feel. I’m a technopath candidate, master of my own mind. Look around--bright lights on me--nobody even notices, I’m just any other girl here. They have no idea! Incredible. So happy have to stim--flappy hands--spin around. Now people are looking though...keep moving.

The ads are so loud here in the food court, how’s a girl supposed to decide what to eat when they’re all constantly yelling about how great they are? Turning some music on, maybe I can drown it out. Something loud, like Mooncore.

No headphones. No problem, I have the neural interface. Very different experience--overrides my actual hearing and gives me the impression of hearing it without producing any actual sound. Technically is it a hallucination? My brain doesn’t know the difference, though--so easy to fool.

Okay I can think now. Wow, there’s so many machines. More variety than all the kinds of stir-fried noodles you can get at the autokitchens on the street. Crepes, ooh--oh wait, cold rice noodles would be good, maybe complicated to eat here--oh, perfect, skewered meat, the ultimate balance of good and convenient. It smells so good. And no line. I’m so hungry, yes, this is happening. Nobody can stop me from eating this food. Nobody. I’m in control now. I’m in control!

Just a girl with her meat stick--fresh from the lab--walking back to the waiting area where it’s quieter. Maybe the thing I’m most thankful for of all is the ad-blocker in this student technopath terminal. Normally this music player would be interrupting me every few songs. Civilians can’t easily get something like this, but unbroken concentration is indispensable for a technopath, and technopaths are necessary for the development of hardware and applications like this, so they’re willing to make a special exception for us. Besides, they couldn’t stop a technopath if they wanted to.

Food, right. Have it right here in my hands but, all these people... Suffocating. I’m gonna find somewhere else. Somewhere alone...

Here, a nice little corner, out of the way, my kind of space. Now food.

Wow, the perfect texture of meat--that autokitchen really knows how to grow it. Flavor. Texture. Warm. Salt. I can’t really remember the last time I had something so good. Does estrogen even makes things taste better? Hard to eat--overwhelming--but so good.

Ugh this was a bad idea. Don’t feel well about this. Gonna be sick. Shouldn’t have done that. That’s what I get for overindulging. Have to control myself better. I’m a technopath--I’m in control. Need to keep this down, it’ll be a long flight... Just sit down, stay still.

Calm. Let go of body and dissolve into the music.

Pulled out of out of my trance. The boarding call, right at 00:15. Stand up, feeling better now, ready to finally leave this place. Look around at the few others in line to board--a few other kids from Qianshi, nobody I’ve ever seen before. Perfect, nobody’s going to know me, the me I was, they’ll all only ever know Saffron.

Connect to the gate terminal--I’m getting fast with that--submit my boarding pass remotely. It opens. To the elevator, with the other kids. We slowly rise out of the building and into the glass tube overlooking the launchpad, right next to our magnificent shuttle.

The little craft is a cylinder about 25 meters tall, wrapped in multi-layer insulation shining gold in the noon sunlight, sitting on four sturdy legs here at the very top of Qianshi’s spaceport. I see the whole city on the horizon, across the train tunnel that took me here. I’ve so rarely even seen it from the outside, I forget how dull and run down it really looks from any distance. Not like this rocket--a shining beacon, my ride to freedom.

“Is this your first spaceflight?” one of the other kids asks me. They must have seen how stimmy my hands are with excitement approaching our craft.

“Yeah, it is. What about you?” I say.

“I’ve flown lots of times! My dad owns this starline,” they say. Should have known from their clothes that they were one of those students. Nice dress--probably hand made and not printed, it could last a lifetime. Not like this cheap skirt that won’t be wearable in a year.

“So what do you know about this shuttle?” another kid says.

They look out at the craft as our lift comes to a stop. “The DreamFlight LTS6900, a light shuttle craft that can carry sixteen passengers in comfortable quarters. Powered by two X50 thrusters at liftoff and two N91 nuclear thermal engines on orbit. It has a range to anywhere on the Lunar surface or to the colonies at L₁ and L₂. That’s as far as we need to go so it’s perfect for the job. Its life support systems can sustain its passengers for three months in the event of an emergency, but its routes rarely last more than three days.”

This kid, just fishing for a chance to infodump. Fair enough, I wanted to know about it too, but they could’ve just told us without flaunting their parents at us. Some of us had parents too busy abusing us to be rich. Whatever. We’re boarding!

Elevator stops at our level. We cross the tunnel and climb down a ladder into the shuttle, where we find our compartments--each one a separate little pod that seats two. Good thing I’m so small--I’d heard spacecraft were like this. It has all we’ll need for the journey though--food, water, sleeping compartments, and a great view.

“TLA students sure get a luxury transport, don’t we? DreamFlight has a good contract with TLA.” Oh no, it’s them, I’m gonna have to listen to this rich kid for twelve hours. “These passenger compartments are self contained pressure vessels that can be sealed off in the very unlikely event of a hull breach, so don’t worry about a thing. DreamFlight is the safest ride in the system.”

Yeah, I wasn’t worried. “What, do they pay you to say that?”

“They don’t have to, friend, it’s a fact. Shen Skye, they/them,” they say. Ah yeah, the Shen family’s got more MoonCoin than the Mare Cognitum has dust, figures.

“Liáo Saffron, she/her.” I climb into my seat and fasten my belts.

“I don’t know the Liáo family. Perhaps you’re a military student then!”

“Yeah that’s right. Blackstar Security’s own Saffron, here. I’m not gonna recite an ad.”

“Fascinating.”

What, have they never met a poor kid before? This is gonna be insufferable. Maybe I can just get them to infodump about spacecrafts the whole time and not press too much about the fascinating life of the dispossessed.

They strap themself in across the aisle from me. We’re laying on our backs with the window above our heads. All I can see is the black sky from here.

“DreamFlight also has a contract with Blackstar, you know. Maybe someday you’ll work for me!”

Please let the pressure vessel fail before that day ever comes.

“So you’ll be indentured to them after graduating,” they say.

“For ten years, yes.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve heard over ninety percent of TLA students are military.”

Welcome news, I couldn’t survive three years surrounded by this. “What about you, going on to a job with DreamFlight then?”

“That’s what they expect of me, yes. Neither of us has much choice in the matter do we? Everyone’s going to be bound by whoever paid our way.”

Except one of us will have a luxury job and one will be in mortal danger, that’s all.

“What do you think you’ll specialize in?” Skye says.

“I don’t know, I have all year to decide, I thought I’d see what draws me, you know?”

“Ah, I’m supposed to go into Administration. I wonder what it would be like to have the freedom to go whatever way I wish.”

This is going to be a long flight.

A red light comes on above our heads and my belts tighten down on me automatically. It’s a nice pressure stim.

“Time to go!” Skye says.

I wait--shaking with anticipation--this is the moment I really leave. A countdown ticks down on the monitor on the ceiling above us. I feel the ship shake as the engines ignite. Zero. Streaks of gas blowing across the platform out the window. We’re rising into the sky!

It’s as smooth as an elevator, and the G force is mild. But it’s no less exhilarating than I could imagine. We pitch over in my direction--lucky me. The Lunar surface racing by beneath us. Flying over Qianshi. There it is, a sprawling unplanned disaster of modules and corridors retrofitted together for over a hundred years. Glistening sunlight on the watery surfaces of the large domes. It looks so small from here, an insignificant scar on a vast grey field. Beyond it the Riphæan mountains vanish below the horizon, and in no time the city vanishes with them, gone from my sight for the first time ever.

Takes ten minutes to reach orbit. We’re across the dark mare. Must be Fra Mauro below us now. We’re so far above it I can’t tell the elevation difference.

Engine cutoff--I really feel the loss of gravity, even fastened in with these belts. The ship enters a slow rotation--passive thermal control maneuver, Shen Skye could not possibly resist telling me--and I watch the surface drift by in the window. Once the spin-up is over, the light above us turns green again and our straps loosen.

Skye unfastens their belts and pushes themself out of their seat. “We’ll be in this low orbit until our next maneuver, then we’ll have to strap back in for Lunar departure burn.”

I set myself free of my restraints. This is different. Moving just a little pushes me out of my seat and sets me slowly adrift. Keep feeling like I’m falling--the deep instinct of my primitive animal brain of course--I know I’m in orbit and I’m perfectly okay.

I navigate my way back to the window and hold onto the bars around it as the desolate surface comes back into view.

“Going to miss home?” Skye says.

“Not a chance.”

The Moon looks exactly the same from orbit as it does on the ground--grey. “A stark and unappetizing place,” said one of the first people to ever go here. So of course everyone wanted to go and live here. The bleak expanse of dead regolith is still a better sight than Qianshi, though. And if I never return to Earthside and have to look at it again I’ll die happy.