26: Chloe – Fly Me to the Moon

Reece read his file from beginning to end. When he was done, he pushed the monitor away in disgust and rocked himself on my desk with his fingers hooked under the edge to counter the missing gravity. He then shook his head and mumbled under his breath on repeat while yours truly sifted through decades of logs, tracing my own roots to a line of orphans brought to populate an island the Foundation had acquired back in the nineteen-twenties. It was an island encircled by two peakes of a rocky bay, the perfect shelter for a naval assembly yard. A shipyard island.

“Orphans catalogued for genetic viability were rehoused in the isolated city for something called Project Bloodline.” I read, clicking links. “Screw me sideways. The Foundation was into eugenics.”

“Sounds sciencey.” Reece said without turning around.

I scrolled through the additional data. “We were bred for specific purposes. Your caste picks tasks up easily and you’re always professional in your duties.”

“Something I pride myself on. I only need to see something once to copy it.”

“Yeah? Well that’s ‘cos you were bred to be a soldier. A drone. You’re tough and you adapt quickly, and you’ll execute any given order without delay.”

Reece stopped rocking. “Hey, I ain’t some braindead zombie, you know. I got my own thoughts and my own plans to—”

“Hey, shut up, dummy and listen for a moment.”

To his annoyance, he did.

“You’re not a slave, Reece. You’re still free to do what you want. It just means when we need certain attributes in a person, you have the advantage.”

He pushed away with a harrumph and stared out the viewport “Don’t sugarcoat it. What about you? Any family?”

I brought up my name. “Heralds, yeah. Seems Kinsley meant exactly what he said when I asked why he chose me. I’m a herald. Seems my whole lineage were heralds. Presenters, Radio jockeys, talkshow hosts, newscasters. Even got a couple of singers in here.”

I hit one of the links and showed him the screen.

“Is that who I think it is?” he said, looking at the reflection.

I stared at my ancestor. “Guess we know why he disappeared. The Foundation used him in a revived breeding program in the seventies. One of your ancestors was in it, too. Some famous martial artist who faked his death four years earlier.”

“Explains why I don’t put fat on easy, and your fashion sense.” Reece said. Then his head twisted round.“ Wait a minute, if we’re all supposed to be latent supermen, how’d we end up behind bars with no education?”

I tapped at the keyboard. “Well, let’s see. The second world war forced training centers to be repurposed. The children’s understanding of chemistry, physics, etcetera, etcetera, proved too good to let up, so the military muscled in to reshuffle the island into a research and development outpost. After the war, the mob bought the island. The tourist trap stuff disguised their trafficking.”

“So we were doomed before we were even born.” Reece said “Hell, our great grandparents had their lives written before they were born.”

“I guess so. Unless…” I typed JRC into the search bar. “Son of a bitch, Kinsley was smart. Look.”

Reece floated behind me and peered over my shoulder. “Knowing the subjects of Project Bloodline would likely have been absorbed into the criminal syndicates, the Kinsley Foundation set up the Junior Rehabilitation Committee in twenty-eleven to sift for lost numbers. Verified descendants were offered training in roles their ancestors had been bred for.”

“Now you know why they offered you pilot lessons despite being in the joint.”

“And I thought it was for good behavior.”

An electronic whistle signalled a video call on my monitor. I tapped it before reading the caller ID and a window popped up. Kinsley’s face pixelated into focus

“I see you’ve been busy uncovering your pasts.” He said. “Now the question remains, how will it affect your future?”

Reece swiveled the screen to face him. “Kinsley, you god-playing asshole, when I get my hands on you—”

“I’ll meet you in the playground after school. Then you can listen to a rather boring yet hopefully illuminant lecture on how the sins of the father ought never be visited on the son while security holds you down. Or did you think I somehow ordered those abominable experiments before I was born?”

“You started the JRC, didn’t you?”

“And you’re very welcome. Now, Chloe, dear. If you don’t mind, there’s a once in a history event happening in a few minutes, and I’ll need you to chronicle it. I’d prefer you didn’t bring an entourage.”

He gave Reece a stern appraisal over his half moon rims as his call box faded away. A floor address replaced it and dropped off the bottom of the screen to slide onto my tablet’s.

“Duty calls.” I said, and unstrapped from the desk rig. “You want me to call you after?”

Reece gave a half assed shrug and drifted to the exit.

I grabbed his arm on the way. “Look, I get it. We’ve been lied to all our lives and the Foundation’s to blame. But Kinsley’s right. He never made those decisions. You can’t hold him accountable.”

He tugged away from my grip. “Oh, so now you trust him? You just gave me a crash course in how our genes define who we are. That means if he’s descended from the asshole Kinsleys who did that to our ancestors, he’s no different.”

“Don’t you go putting words in my mouth. If that’s what you took away from everything I showed you, then you’re an idiot. And that already proves you’re nothing like your parents.”

Reece scowled and dropped into the corridor. I kicked off my shoes and slipped into comfies before leaving. There wasn’t much point floating around in formal wear. I strapped the tablet to my arm and waited until I couldn’t hear him repeatedly kick the walls before leaving for the elevator. My destination was the lobby again, and the TurboLift, as someone had registered it on the maps, took just a half minute to reach it. James Kinsley himself greeted me as soon as the doors slid open.

“Ah, Chloe!” he said. “I have such sights to show you.”

He looped his arm under mine and pulled me over to the window, this time around the back, away from the Earth.

“Come with me, and you’ll be,” James sang as we sailed through the air. “In a world of pure imagination.”

“Take a look,” I chimed in. “And you’ll see, into your damn, creepy ass eyeball? What the hell is that?”

Staring back from the abyss was indeed a giant eyeball. A white sphere around a green iris around a black pupil, hanging in space and staring us down.

“People often wonder why we never colonized space. The truth is, we’ve been doing just that since the late sixties.” James said. “That green circle is a forest in a dome. An oxygen factory half the width of Canada. Note the green turns blue around that black circle? Water condenses on the dome and runs down to the center to evaporate again, just like in a terrarium. The black circle in the middle is a solar array. If you look closely, you’ll see lines leading from it to the edge. Solar rooftops. The buildings support the dome. Well, I call it a dome. It’s more a series of streets with glass ceilings to keep the air in.”

I eyeballed the giant not-eyeball. “So you built a giant space station? Why? How’d you make it so big without anyone seeing? And what’s the white circle around the rest of it?”

He stood as straight as he could and dramatically lowered his voice. “That’s no space station. It’s the moon.”

A smile tugged the corner of my lips. “It’s too small to be the moon.”

He flashed me a smile and a pair of victory fingers. “You’re absolutely right. The moon usually orbits the Earth, but without gravity to tether it, she’s flown off.”

“So we won’t have a moon anymore? Wait, was anyone in the dome? Did they evacuate?”

“Watch. Any moment… aha!”

In the space before our eyes, the eye in space flared. Its edges glowed and the ethereal teal of its forests and streams dimmed under the glass as a quarter of its edge blazed brighter, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the moon rotated.

“It’s still inhabited. They’re diverting power to the exhaust ports.” James said. “A controlled, or rather channelled, nuclear explosion. I don’t know if you can make out any details once the forest has returned to the dark side, but the rotation will stop with their back to us. That’s the side you’re used to seeing. I do hope they succeed.”

I gave him a stare of my own. One of confusion peppered with horror. “Succeed in what? You turned the moon into the world’s creepiest watchtower. Or is that a weapon? Was this how you turned gravity off? Is that why you keep making those references? Did you make a real life Death Star?”

James scoffed at my questions.

“No, she’s not a weapon. And I had nothing to do with the reversal of gravity. Without our intervention, the moon would have flown off into space or become a small planet orbiting the sun. Either way, we couldn’t afford to lose her. The exhaust ports and our Ring will keep her close until it’s time to roll back into orbit.”

“Look, Jimbo, I love the moon as much as anyone else, but don’t you think you should’ve focused all that mullah into saving more lives?”

“What, and then let them burn to death? We need the moon to stir the tides and the molten iron in the Earth’s core. If you want an ozone layer to protect you against repeats of that inferno, thank the moon’s gravitational pull.”

I nodded slowly. “Right, because without it we’d have a repeat of Armageddon.”

James put his hand on my shoulder. “That world was razed for just over two and a half hours and look at the damage it caused. Without the moon, that’s what every day would be like. Forever.”

I looked back over his pointing hand at the Earth. “But without gravity, won’t Earth drift away from the sun?”

“We would,” James said. “If not for that moonbase and our orbital ring. That’s the advantage of having a century to study a gravitational anomaly. You learn how it works. We aren’t just a space station, you know. This is a gravity engine anchoring us to the moon, which itself is in an orbital similar orbit to Earth’s. We’ll be a little further out, but still in the Goldilocks Zone.”

“Goldilocks Zone?”

“Sorry, that’s a colloquialism. The habitable zone around the sun where it’s not too hot or cold.”

“Ah, Goldilocks. Needs to be just right. Got it.”

“If our calculations are correct, days will last around twenty-six hours after that, winters and summers will probably be harsher while the Earth and Moon’s gravitational dance stabilizes, and a year will be a whole day shorter.”

I rounded off the potential new clock in my mind and came up with my next article’s title. “Well I hope you’re not superstitious, ‘cos from now on, Midnight’s gonna be at thirteen o’clock.”

He drifted back to the TurboLift, once again leaving me stranded at the window. “Speaking of time, Chloe, I want you to publish a confirmation for everyone. Misinformation is a terrible burden on administration. From beginning to end, this current event will last exactly one million seconds. That’s approximately eleven days.”

“Yeah, I saw someone posted it as a billion.”

“A headache I don’t think any of us need. A billion seconds is over three decades.”

I jotted in down on the tablet. “And then what, everything returns to normal?”

He stopped before calling the elevator. “Far from it. You see, the world is actually exploding. Slowly, given the other universal forces are back to full power, but it is physically tearing itself apart. When gravity resumes, the lands you know will be destroyed.”

“Is that why you took everything up here? You could have stored them in bunkers and dug them up later.”

“The oceans are a solid shell a mile thick around the planet, and weigh incalculable tons. It also holds everything that fell into the sky. Vehicles, boulders, buildings, all the loose debris and matter, you name it.”

“And what goes up must come down.”

James shot me a finger gun. “And it’ll crash with enough force to shatter the continents into islands. No bunker or underground shelter, no matter how deep, can withstand the weight of a country falling on it. Why do you think we gave suicide sweets to everyone we had to leave behind? When the sky falls down, all they can do is take Repose and hope it kills them before the earth does.”