Luna: Episode 11

Let's go for a ride

Sep 01, 2024

In a matter of months, three to be precise, the Truth and Reconciliation Tribunal concluded its work and issued its report, which was read by very few. The thousand plus remains of the dead from Campo Libertad were exhumed bone by bone and identified tooth by tooth and left unclaimed by anyone. So much carnage in the last century from famines, floods, fires, water wars, plagues and unrest left little hope for any related survivors anywhere. Only the forsaken desert welcomed the return of the forsaken. Dust to dust. The aged survivors of the most tumultuous time in human history had seen too many reports of yet another cache of cadavers uncovered to care anymore. One more global cataclysm and one more frenzy of killing best forgotten. The bones were ceremoniously returned to the site of the mass grave on a windy December day and another burial ground was consecrated and a xeriscape garden dedicated.

Carlos, consumed with remorse, attended and fell to his knees and remained on his knees throughout the brief ceremony. Luna and Cass helped the broken old man up to his feet.

As the seasons passed, and sandstorms came and went Luna remained a hermit like her grandfather.

“Dad, I’m not a hermit. I’m an introvert. That’s how we artists are. You wouldn’t understand.” Artists would understand. Luna was a hermit. The lies, the shunning and the name calling after the space center attack stung and drove her into her art and her reading.

Sol and Maya wed in the Spring and Montaño Hydroponic Farms became a Tang-Montaño Enterprise and by the following Spring had grown to become an industrial scaled farm. Sol told their friends, “I went from fusion to blissful delusion. I couldn’t be happier.”

Cassius continued to tinker with upgrading Rin-Tin-Tin. “Luna, your pup needs a bit of AI independence.”

That was a mistake.

Rin was pelted with rocks and lassoed by unknowns when he wandered off exploring one night. Mars found him the next day in the Rillito riverbed. Hooligans must have spotted him. As Cassius put it, “In spite of full employment some private citizens reserve the right to be jerks.” Luna washed the graffiti off him.

KILLER K9.

CUJO666.

Traitor!!

Cassius reattached his head. “Small town. Long memory.”

“You should hear what they call grandpa, Cass.”

“What about you little sister?”

“Rolls off my back like water off a Martian Rover. But grandpa? It’s killing him.”

Luna graduated high school and was looking forward to attending the University. She was desperate for a fresh start. Maybe even a friend. Or two. Her companions since the bombing trial had been the books that Maya had given her. And scraps of blank paper that Maya had found when she scavenged the ruins of the past in her youth. Paper was an exotic artifact from past rivaled only by the odd sticks she treasured and called “pencils”.

Despite not having a clue what direction her life would take she’ agreed to sample a few classes to please her father and if nothing fired her booster rockets, she could always take that year of public service and see the world, maybe even an actual forest. Or snow.

Her grandfather was her most persistent inquisitor about her path choices. She was studying the University’s course offerings in her room when the old man poked his head in her room. “If you’re too mature for one of your grandfather’s stories at least you could tell me what you want to do with your life. By the time I was your age – “

Luna held up her hand in a gentle “please stop” gesture. “I am so tired of that question, grandpa.”

“Let me tell you about Sacajawea. She was a pathfinder. She was indigenous.”

Luna brushed her long hair, black as the night sky, off her shoulder and in her most sarcastic voice muttered, “Let me guess. Another made up indigenous fairy tale?”

“She was no fairy tale. Brat.”

Made to feel foolish again and again by his children and their children Carlos grew accustomed to retreating into his room to talk to his dead wife’s hologram or to grumble at the face in the mirror.” By the time I was your age, young lady, I was carrying a gun and killing women and children. Innocent children.” It was the first time he noticed the shadows cast on his bedroom wall by his collection of Katsinas resembled dancing children.

The old man was not sleeping well these days and often paced the hotter days away while the cool house slept. At night when Mac, Calypso, Cass, and Luna were off to work the old man would often sit out under the stars. He’d count the airships waiting to land. He missed watching the birds. They stopped coming around when he was a boy.

Luna lied to everyone in her family to satisfy their curiosity. “I want to be a geo-engineer. In Antarctica. Because of Cassius’ time there.” That answer placated her father. Professor Kino Mackenzie was busy writing and talking about sustaining urban life in a desert in the Age of fire. Rainwater harvesting. Why Tucson persists. The Nocturnal Choice. The Ethics of sustaining sustainable populations with population controls. That was the sore point where Luna thought her father was a colossal Eco-Fascist. “Playing Darwin.” Maya taught Mac the basics of her farming enterprise. The Professor added a “Hydroponic Farming of Native Seeds on a Sustainable Industrial Scale” segment to his teaching syllabus. Paris had made him famous. The desert city sustainability expert in the age of climate decimation. He turned down Kuwait City. Too far. By airship, train and electric plane combined it would take days to get there. He already spent too much time away from his kids.

A few weeks later Luna would give her anxious parents a different response. “I want to be a fusion engineer. Or maybe something to do with the space program.” That series of possibilities delighted her mother.

Her brother, Cassius, got the truth from his sister. “All I really want to do is to explore the world. To see what’s beyond those mountains. And make neon art.”

“When your year of service comes around you can travel then, little sister.”

“Doing what?”

“Forestry. Firefighter. Up north.”

Luna winced. “I’m going for a joyride. Come with me.”

After school Luna worked at a nearby assisted living center as a food server and she used her income in carbon coins to buy herself the charging tokens to power her used “Jetson”, the scarlet EVF-11 flying car she adored. Luna never dreamed her parents would permit her to fly one let alone give her one.

Yet there it was on the morning of her birthday, parked in front of their earth ship home beneath the new solar panel ramada her grandfather had convinced her to help him build over a period of weeks. “I fooled you and we all kept it a secret.”

Cassius was in on it. “It was a carport!”

Her dad, Mac, handed her the cyber key. “Flies up to 30-feet off the ground. Up to 83 kilometers an hour.” Luna calculated. “Forty-five miles an hour!” She hugged everyone, jumping in place and singing, “Freedom!”

Her mother, Calypso, responded, “Responsibility.”

Luna repeated the invitation. “Come on Cass. Let’s go for a ride. Rin! Let’s go.” She unsealed the hatch, and the warm night air bled in and around them. She shut the hatch, turned her headlamp on and happily dragged Cassius by the hand to her car.

She hopped into the pilot’s seat of her “Jetsons” flying car, opened the back door, said “Get in and buckle up” to Cass and Rin, and fired up the four drone propellers, one pair in front and one pair in back and peeled smoothly up and off into the night air.

On weekends when Luna didn’t have to work and her schoolwork was done and the weather wasn’t hostile, churning, burning, flooding or sandblasting another night away Luna put on her finest white caftan robe with its matching keffiyeh, got in her small flying car and buzzed the dunes and the desert surrounding Tucson. Some nights she’d race along the rainwater canals and aqueducts or cruise the main thoroughfares in Tucson lit by neon. Nearly always alone. “Tonight, let’s do something different, Cass.”

“What do you want to do, Lu?”

“Let’s go out to the Space Base and watch some launches. Or farther out to Nostromo to watch the Ore Haulers land and lift-off. And you can tell me more about Antarctica.”

As they flew across the city Cassius offered backseat tips. “Watch that windmill, little sister. And don’t fly so close to the airships that are on the flightpath to Tucson International!”

She set her beloved “Jetson” down due west of the security fence of Diaz-Borman and together they wait for the inevitable launch.

“I’m worried about grandpa, Cass.”

“Me, too. He talks a lot about wanting to see the woolly mammoths up north. Is he senile or is he serious?"

“Oh, he’s serious. He has a fantasy about going north with me now. Digging up the past hit him like an asteroid to the gut. Blew our family to the four winds.”

Cassius pointed to a gantry in the distance that had just lit up. “He was in the wrong place. At the wrong time. He had no choice but to fire.”

“Try telling him that.”

“Hey, look!” Soon they felt the ground rumble and in the darkness in the distance they saw a booster emerge straight up from roiling clouds to light up the southern sky. Cassius whooped. “I missed seeing these launches. Wow.”

“Let’s go.” Luna pushed the throttle and the three headed south passing close to the no-fly perimeter of the new reactor that Solomon Tang had built. “Under budget,” said Cassius, who followed such details. “It’s a beauty.”

“Needs neon,” said Luna.

Cassius pointed to the south. “Look. Off in the distance. Where the lights are.”

Luna zoomed up to the mass grave site and circled to the left around the burial mound and over the desert garden. The flags bordering the garden flapped in the wind kicked up by Luna’s drone propellers.

Cassius said, “Let’s not disturb the dead.”

Luna nodded. “No one’s out here. Let’s head back. I don’t need to see this.”

On their way home they could see the glittering industrial zone where the massive Nostromo mining corporation was thriving, prospering, clanking, hissing and shuttling haulers, despite the strike last year.

Cass followed that news story. “It resulted in the neutralization of thousands of sentient androids who were turned to scrap and replaced by more reliable, simple robots.”

Luna followed the remains of Interstate Ten below back to town. “Think they were sentient? Like us?”

“They wanted a better existence. You tell me, little sister.”

“I want a better existence. Do you, Rin?”

Rin tilted his robotic head like a perplexed dog as if to ask, “What is a better existence?”

“Mars sure found a dream existence working on Maya’s hydroponic farm.” They laughed at his good fortune. Luna casually turned on the Mind-pad news as she drove them home. The news of another virus on the other side of this hot world was as distant as the asteroid ore haulers orbiting in fixed positions above Tucson.