Tala of the Stacks

The Last Experiment

My name is Tala. And I am the last of my kind.

Forty-two years ago, the planet of my ancestors began to die in earnest. It had been dying for quite some time before that. But it declined in such a way that my forebears—short-lived as they were—never quite grasped the big picture. They all thought they had time.

At least, that's what Mother told me.

I was born here. On the moon. So, I never really knew anything else. Never knew another way of existing.

All that I knew about Earth and the life people once lived there, I learned from Mother and her wild, fanciful stories.

Every night, before she tucked me into bed, she would lay next to me. Running her fingers through my hair as she began to recount details of the life she knew on the storm-wracked ball that our home revolved around.

"Not so long ago," she once told me, "Earth was beautiful. There were jungles and clean air and turquoise waters—"

"What's turq...turquoise?", I asked her.

Mother took out the worn photograph that she kept close to her heart. I had seen her unfold that piece of paper so many times. But I still felt the same confusion of fondness, longing, and vague familiarity I got whenever I saw my father's face. I never knew him. Yet somehow, I missed him.

"His eyes, see?", Mother said. "The colour of his eyes. That's turquoise."

Father gave up his place on the colony for me.

Often, when I think of Father, guilt runs through me. If I had waited. If I had only waited to come out of the womb, maybe he could have lived here with us.

But for all Mother's sorrows and my regrets, I feel he was better off living out his remaining years on Earth. The colony was not the dream everyone imagined.

The early days were magical, or so I heard. People from all walks of life marvelled at the wonders of the technology that allowed them to live off-planet. They rejoiced in the ethereal silence that surrounded them; the barren yet enchanting landscape of their lunar homestead. But the peace, the wonder, the glory faded quickly when they realised that living on the moon was not as the pamphlets promised. Resources were scarce. Space was a luxury.

The moon is a harsh, unwelcoming place. Days are fiery and nights are over a hundred centigrade below freezing. Safety was only guaranteed in the domes. Stepping out of them for too long meant death. In the first few months, people who possessed more daring than common sense perished in their quest to break free from the colony. But who could really blame them? Crime was on the rise. And the domes quickly became a breeding ground for lethal resentment among our numbers.

We were told terraforming was a reality within arm's reach. But all our efforts failed. And supply pods from Earth stopped coming.

We were sold lies.

It wasn't long until we all realised, we weren't the saviours of the human race. We were its last experiment.

That was when order fell.

Space defined our hierarchy. And the handful of billionaires with their looming towers became the overlords. Factions sprung from five wealthy households. Their lackeys patrolled the streets and seized our pods. Every inch of space they could confiscate—so that they could farm our own food that they sold back to us.

We paid in water. Our parents braved the outside to plant their vaporators on the bone-dry dune fields. And when they returned, us children would run to the nearest potato farm to barter for dinner. One potato was a litre of water.

The factions raided dwellings constantly. Anyone found to be in possession of plants or seeds were either banished or taxed heavily. The tax was so severe that those taxed eventually ended up being enslaved, forever destined to surrender all earnings to the faction they owed.

The banished were the lucky ones. We were sent to the outskirts of the domes. Sentenced to live on the streets and to build our own dwellings from scraps. Eventually, the dwellings were built one on top of the other. And the stacks were born.

I knew the guy who discovered the sink hole. He lived two houses below us. He was a kind man. Strange, but kind. Lucas was on his daily run to the dunes when his vaporator struck more than sand. The ground below him let out a sickening crack that was heard throughout the colony and in the blink of an eye, he was gone. We lost eighty-three parents that day. They all fell into the hole on the moon's surface that Lucas had inadvertently made.

If he had survived, he would have been the richest of us all.

For the hole was lined with a previously unknown mineral.

And that mineral fuelled inter-stellar travel. The five factions mined day and night. So much so that the constant hum of their machinery became my most potent lullaby. The billionaires built their rockets. And then, they left.

They set their sights on the nearest earth-like planet and never looked back. Last we heard, they had discovered that the water on Kepler-452b was undrinkable and the rain, mostly lethal. Communication with the Exodus rockets ceased soon after.

Population in the stacks began to dwindle. People lost hope. There were hardy people here and there who tried to revive the farms after the factions left. But soon, they too fell to the harsh conditions.

It has been three lunar years since Mother passed.

And I am alone, watching the last rays of the sun disappear behind one of the dunes outside my dome.

The spectral, flared light is dancing on the edges of my visor and it's almost peaceful. Beautiful, even. This is my final log. And I only hope someone finds it.