The High Five

In the Moon's Shadow

The Moonlighter slipped silently into the moon's shadow. Where the sun should be there was only a large void like a black hole. Still visible, the Earth was a blue crescent rimmed in red. The night side was covered in lacy lights separated by swathes of emptiness—the oceans. At the poles were wispy rings of green and purple auroras.

The shakes had stopped, but Bobby was covered in clammy sweat.

He listened in on the civilian comm bands. Just people talking, speculating, commiserating, sometimes disagreeing—but never too strongly so as not to trigger the moderator AIs. One at a time they dropped out, leaving only the emergency channels. The updates were clinical and emotionless as if dictated by a bot. Running through the background was a low hiss of static with the occasional pop.

On Earth, the auroras gradually brightened and turned angry. Crimson now, they spread out from the poles like gauzy devil hands trying to squeeze the Earth between them. There was a pinpoint flash followed by several more. Satellites shorting out. It was easy to imagine a space battle taking place at a distance. Meanwhile, the static had gotten so bad it distorted the voices into harsh, alien tongues.

Bobby shook his head to snap himself out of it. He cut comms and headed toward the mess. He didn't want to be alone.

* * *

The marching beat and rattle-tattle of snares kept Tayen grounded as she went through her lab routine. She was optimistic the raspberries in the crew garden would bounce back. Milo had caught the problem early. A clogged water line was to blame, an easy fix. The more resilient peppers, which were on the same line, were barely affected. She double-checked the experiments, including the auto-labs, which were ordinarily Milo's responsibility. Only then did she allow herself to focus on her favorite project.

It went by the unpronounceable name of SRCPLIV: Self-Replicating Chain Polymers with Light Induced Vectors. But Tayen thought of them simply as artificial plants that could grow in space. Space weeds, Milo called them. Out of the dozens of experiments, this one had instantly captivated her. It combined the seemingly unrelated domains of engineering and plant husbandry.

There were serious—some would say insurmountable—challenges to growing something in the vacuum of space. There was obviously no air, soil, water, or nutrients, and without gravity, plants literally didn't know which was way up. What space did have was abundant sunlight, but it was too much of a good thing. Unfiltered, the more energetic wavelengths shredded chemical bonds.

Yet there were good reasons to pursue research into space plants. They could be used to create massive light harvesters beyond even the largest solar arrays. They could colonize asteroids and convert dust and rock into usable materials, possibly even edible food. It could be the dawn of space agriculture.

Every attempt to adapt a natural plant or fungi to space had so far failed. But what if you started with an empty slate and designed a new, synthetic organism from the ground up? Technically speaking, it didn't have to be alive. It just had to function as if it were.

The result was a self-propagating wire fed from a stock of nutrient gel. Growth was stimulated by applying an electric current. At full power, a wire could grow by as much as four inches an hour, outrageously fast for a plant but still too slow for the human eye to detect except for the occasional twitch. But growth was only the first step. How to get the wire-stems to go in the desired direction? Left to themselves, they created a squiggly, tangled mess like clown hair. The tips were supposed to provide steering through an affinity to light, but Tayen hadn't managed to get one to travel straight for more than an inch or two before curling. She tried different light wavelengths and modulations along with guide sticks, meshes, and magnets. Nothing worked.