nothing's gonna change my world

September 2084. The International Lunar Station. Keri Riley was 23. 

soundtrack: Across the Universe, by The Beatles


Keri had fooled herself to think that she could ever be a warrior. She was a spoiled trust fund baby and pampered princess. She never got good grades in school, she was mediocre at sports, and she wasn’t exceptionally talented at anything except spending her daddy’s money. And later, her husband’s money, too.

Justin told her that he would support her, but he didn’t believe in her, either. She could tell. Nobody really believed in her. She’d never been any farther outside the reach of planet Earth than the moon’s orbit. She’d flown in one launch, and now she was here in these long gray rooms with fabricated air and gravity that was 83% wrong and dizzying at first. She wasn't allowed to zoom around the solar system in a little jet. It wasn’t her job to build systems or repair rockets. They would never let her mine ore or quarry rock. Keri’s job was to sit a small gray cubicle, look at a smaller gray monitor, and relay what information she was told to relay into a tiny gray headset wrapped around her ears.

Why couldn’t the headset be colored, at least? Emerald green, like the forests.

“It’s standard issue,” they said. “It just has to get the job done.”

Keri missed emerald green.

Keri wasn’t a warrior. She was a communications specialist. A space secretary, as Justin had called her once. He thought it was funny, but her job was never very funny. There were coordinates, unit numbers, conflict hot spots, fatalities. Already there were so many fatalities. That was how we discovered that we shouldn't shoot at them—the little shits shot back, swift and precise. One fine beam and our rudimentary space jets disintegrated into a million tiny stars of metal and organic matter, the elements of life dispersed into black space. Humans were not supposed to be up here. We weren't built for it. Keri reported each casualty back home. Name, age, country of origin. Her job was not funny or exciting.

On the plus side, Keri was able to call home more often than most. She called Justin's cell phone because the new house she and Justin bought together was left vacant and unused. Whenever she called home, Justin was never there. She wanted him and Lily to have the very best while she was away, so they chose a beautiful, modern, spacious home on the lake shore. But then he said it was too big for just him and a baby. Way too big. "It makes me remember that you're not here," he said. "We bought it together, but you never lived there with us. It's just somebody else's house, and I can't stand it. Don't ask me to stay there, because I hate it. I hate it to death." So he spent all of his time visiting his parents and her parents and Stephanie, and the home they bought together was empty.

Keri’s bunk on base was six foot wide and eight foot tall, and for an indeterminate time, this would be her home. She hung up pictures of rich green forests. She hung up pictures of Justin and Lily. In bed before she slept, she had taken to praying. Keri never believed in God before, but out here, she couldn’t sleep if she didn’t pray. She didn’t want to think about where she was. A round orbiting rock, one tiny ball circling a larger ball in an infinity of black space. So she prayed. To God, maybe. Whatever god might be out there, even if it wasn’t the one she was raised to know. She folded her hands over her chest and she prayed, thinking of Justin, thinking of Lily, and she wondered whether this would be the greatest adventure or the biggest mistake of her life.

—

Since the war started, lunar tourism was suspended indefinitely. Troops went up, supplies went up, but civilians did not. But Keri’s mother, in her official capacity as Governor of the state of Michigan, was able to cut a little red tape and secure an official government pass. Governors had been known to use state money for far worse things before. She brought pictures of Lily, who now had two teeth and hair long enough to pull into a ponytail. Keri hung the pictures on the blank concrete wall next to her bed.


“I didn’t know there was a terrarium,” Madison said.

“Yeah,” Keri told her. “There’s even rain sometimes. It doesn’t smell like real rain though. I can tell the difference.”

"It’s a shame that I've never been to space before now. I always wanted to take that crater tour. I just kept putting it off. The first tourist flights started when I was in college. Then I started working, family, you."

"I’m the reason you never got to visit the moon while you were young?"

"That isn’t what I meant, sweetheart. There were lots of reasons."

"You’re here now," Keri said. "It’s just a hole in the ground. Come on. I’ll show you around the base. I'll show you my favorite part.”

The long gray corridors leading to the observation deck were like the corridors anywhere else. The room was gray and empty, apart from a single row of metal chairs that were just as gray as the room itself. It was quiet here. The only sound was a slow whir of ventilation banks on the wall and soft classical music. And in the center of the room, through tall panes of protected glass, was the Earth. Home, in a flat black sky.

“It feels better to see it sometimes,” Keri told her mother. “Then you don’t feel so far away.”

There was another soldier in the room. He was quiet too. People rarely spoke when they were here. Not because they weren't allowed to speak, but just because it was just better if they didn't. The symphony featured flutes and what Keri thought might have been an oboe. “Greig,” Madison announced as she sat. Keri was forced to learn piano as a little girl, but she'd forgotten it all. Her father played the piano. He preferred jazz, but he would play classical when Madison asked for it. Keri waited for her mother to close her eyes and sigh as she would, but here, instead she gaped into the blackness of space ahead of them.

Yes. It took some getting used to that this wasn’t the moon in the sky that you were looking at. It was the other way around.

Madison finally turned, her eyes full of more wonder than Keri had ever seen in them, like she was a child. "You could forget where you are," she said.

If you thought about where you were too much, it was terrifying. Those troops that had been blasted into pieces in the vacuum of space would keep drifting forever. They would never decay. They would never stop falling. "I wonder," Keri said, "If you got lost out there, if you hurled yourself at the Earth, would you keep going? Would you keep falling toward it until you got home?"

"And then what?"

"I don't know. I guess you'd burn up in the Earth's atmosphere and plummet to your death. But I mean, if you were going to die in space anyway, that might be an okay way to go. To burn up like a shooting star."

"Please don't talk like that," Madison said.


The man in the front row collected his things, and he left. When he was gone, when they were alone, Keri looked around the room. She listened for more footsteps in the hallway. She looked at her mom and leaned in close, whispering even softer than the whir of the ventilation ducts. “I know now why you didn’t want me to do this. I know more now than what they’re telling everyone.”

Keri pulled back to look into her mother’s eyes for a moment as they softened with concern.

Keri whispered again. “It could get worse before it gets better. A lot worse, Mom. They’re saying the best we can do is just survive. The other day, one of them, the little shits, laser beamed a jet in half near the Jupiter station. I had to radio the death tolls, twenty people, four Americans. If they decide to come at us, we'll be struggling."

"They didn't tell us that people have died already."

"Don’t you see now how it makes no difference whether I’m here or down there? It’s all the same, if they get this far. I could die here, I could die down there. We could all die. Every last one of us. And then what would be the point that I even came out here?"

Madison grasped Keri's hand, and Keri could feel her mother’s pulse beating. "What you're doing is important," Madison said.

There were no questions. They turned to the window together in silence. Neither of them said so out loud, but silently, they both started to pray.

—

(continue reading)

footnotes from ages ago: Keri wants to be a warrior // Madison doesn't try to stop her, exactly