Lunar Oblivion

The beginning is the most important part of the work - Plato

I really didn't want this job when I first got it.

I spent my whole life doing whatever the fuck my family asked me to do.  Go to a classical school and spend hours a night learning Latin and Ancient Greek all in a bid to impress college admissions offices?  Of course I did that because I had no choice other than to excel.  Go to MIT and study aeronautical engineering?  You bet I did that.  Go balls deep into debt traveling across the breadth of the Americas and the Nato Alliance to get my Masters Degree from Berkely?  Of course, you fucking bet I did that.  My life had a checklist I had to follow, accomplishments I needed to obtain or else my life, and by extension that of my parents, would be a total waste.  Did anyone ask me if I wanted any of this?  Nope.  But I couldn't ever go to my parents, who I loved, and tell them that I didn't want this so I kept at it, grinded it out, and worked as hard as I could to excel in all that I did.  For them mostly.  I graduated Berkeley with the highest honors and the last 24 years of my life finally led to something instead of nothing like a decent portion of people, most in some places.  I fought the system and won.  My family were poor immigrants from Mexico and I had accomplished the dream!  Me!  Alberto Gonzales had done it.

It was worth it when I saw the look on my dear mother's face when I crossed the stage and had my name announced, and got my degree.  She cried a bit.  I cried a bit as well, out of exhaustion mostly, but I'm man enough to say that I did.

Like the vast majority of people on Earth I had no rich parents to let me pursue what I wanted to actually do, which was to work for some major space agency and design rockets or something like that.  Instead, I had to look at the situation with some introspection.  I was 24, in so much debt that I couldn't really breathe half the time, and I needed to make as much money as humanly possible in order to start clawing my way out of this godforsaken mess.  So like a lot of people with my degree in this position, I decided to take to the stars, well, in this case to the Moon.  I went online, found a company willing to pay off my debt in exchange for half a decade of free work, said bye to my family, and boarded a Starship bound for our nearest neighbor.

I remember the excitement of boarding the ship, getting strapped in, smelling the mixture of air and chemicals meant to keep me alive.  Before the door closed I took a deep breath, knowing that this would be the last natural air I would breath until I was basically thirty, and I held it in for as long as I could after the door slammed shut until I could no longer do so.  Here I was, breathing in fake air.  So fresh it stung.  And so we were off, into the heavens.  Ten hours later we transferred over to a larger ship in orbit that was designed just to ferry cargo and people over to the Moon and we were off.

You see, I'm not sure what things are like for you but all the dreams of space flight and colonization, at least in this time, were indeed rather moribund.  Not that it didn't happen of course–it happened all the time–but the dreams of colonization and sending billions of people into space didn't shake out the way some thought.  You see, humans are very fragile.  I'm sitting here dying and fuck it, I am indeed fragile.  It costs millions of dollars a year to keep a human being like myself alive and the advent of extensive automation in many fields rendered it cheaper and indeed far easier to send robots into space to handle most anything.  Mining asteroids was potentially a profitable endeavor first, but the costs of shipping things down to Earth couldn't compete yet with, well, just digging shit out of the ground and loading it onto trucks towards somewhere else.  Even recycling copper proved to be cheaper.  So in the end, the people in space were highly educated and well-trained people overseeing a bunch of robots.  Anyone who went up into space had to justify their existence to some corporation or nation state, and were all super well-trained people who, after paying off their initial indenture, became wealthy over a long period of time.  Yes, there were a few hundred thousand people on Mars by this year, 2123, mostly kooks who sold their houses to live on the desolate world following a dream, but the South Pole is fucking Eden compared to Mars and again, the cost of keeping people alive on Mars was prohibitive for all but a few.  And none of this got over the fact that humans were literally made to live on Earth with 1G of gravity, with anything substantially less resulting in serious issues.   I still remember the story of that foolish woman who tried to give birth to a baby in zero gravity and how the thing came out of her still mishapen and wrong...just wrong.  She was sentenced to jail for murder and I don't blame them for throwing the book at her.  That really did hit all the headlines when I was a child and I shudder to think of the situation that went wrong.