Mike Moscoe: A Day's Work on the Moon

I just knew I’d work on the Moon, but, like, I never figured on getting a job there before I finished high school. So totally prime! I wasn’t even bummed when it was only delivering pizza–it was on the Moon!

Really, Dad started it. I was playing a game, ignoring my room, all pink and frills, a ten-year-old girl’s dream of a woman’s world. I was almost thirteen and beyond that stuff. The game was a cool new one. I was slipping and sliding my way across a marsh, full of lizards, frogs, snails, and other threatened and endangered species. The idea was to avoid running over them while hunting the rogue robots that did. I got points for incapacitating the bad bots long enough for a repair crew to reach them and correct their programming. You lost points if you damaged the bots too badly. Totally ace.

“Good game, Nikki?” Dad asked.

I almost jumped out of my chair. “Great, Dad. Way cool sim. You can almost smell the flowers. Course, bummer, I don’t have a VR helmet,” I wheedled.

“Would you like to do it for real? Drive a real robot on the Moon?”

“Way prime,” I shrieked. Everybody knew you could rent time on the lunar robot explorers puttering around the Moon. Anybody with the money could drive the bots when they weren’t being used for science. Problem was, they weren’t cheap. “How long could I drive it?”

“Would fifteen minutes be enough?”

I did the math. “Yes!” I was really getting a birthday present this year!

“First, you have to do the research.” Dad slipped into lecture mode. “What moon rovers are available? Which one do you think would be the most interesting to drive and why? Pick a preferred option and a few fall back ones and put a report together for Mom.”

Neat! Mom and Dad were treating this like a full-fledged project. I slammed out of the game and rolled into the net for research. My birthday was in two days; which rovers would be in daylight? Of the nine on the Moon, three were hibernating for the night. Two more were new arrivals and still tied up with science where they’d landed. One was nudging its way around Tycho Crater; that looked like the most fun. Two were in the lunar uplands around the seas of Nectar and Serenity. They might be good. Then there was the one shuttling across the south pole, measuring water. That would be my last choice. Then I checked the length of the waiting list. Duh. All were booked solid for the next six months–except the polar rover. I outlined the situation to Mom.

“What do you want to do, Nikki?”

“I’d kind of like to drive a rover before I get my driver’s license.”

“I’ll sign you up for the water survey, dear.”

My birthday party was at the local pizza parlor. I had a bunch of the girls over from school, as well as Jer and a couple of his friends. Dad seemed happy that the guys were so few. I think this whole moon rover thing was just his way to get me interested in something before guys started following me home. He was too late; Jer had been carrying my books since third grade, but there are some things you don’t tell your folks.

Anyway, after I’d survived “Happy Birthday to You,” in a dozen wrong keys, Dad took me over to the lame Vehicle Remote Controller, just a box with fakie wheels, a tiny 30-inch monitor, a joystick for direction and a pedal for the brake. Who needs a brake? Dad buckled me in–I needed a seat belt less than a brake–said “don’t forget to point the camera up,” and lowered the lid on the VRC. It still smelled like pizza.

Then the monitor lit up; I was looking at a gray, boulder-strewn field on the Moon. I slapped the joystick for speed, and a crater moved closer, faster. I flipped the joystick to the right. The entire scene changed. I made that little moon buggy do a complete turn and got a view of this entire huge crater with rocks and little craters all over inside it. I did a second turn before I realized I was just doing wheelies on the Moon like some dumb kid. But I wanted to see it all, over and over again!

I remembered to point the camera up. The stars were unblinking pinpricks against a vast, black sky. I felt so tiny. Then I turned the camera down. Water crystals sparkled in my tracks. I’d uncovered a rock in my wheelie–a rock that had been there since the Moon was made, just waiting for me to come along.

I put the rover in gear, going forward, like its mission plan said on the map in front of me. At the bottom of my screen some instrument reported water content of the dust beneath my rover. I was recording scientific data!

The rover was headed for an ancient crater where a real scientist would take over and do something really scientific. But for the moment, it was mine. I drove forever–and in only a second, the screen went blank. I just sat there staring at the gray monitor–and remembered how to breathe.

I wanted more.

After that, every spare ten bucks I could get my hands on went for another minute on the Moon. Luckily, grunge was making a comeback. Mom never caught on that I outfitted myself for school at the Salvation Army. Clothes money went for rover time. Lunch money too. Anything to spend another five minutes alone on the Moon.

Of course, I usually wasn’t all that alone. Jer got hooked, too. He started designing us our own buggy controller so we could do our time right from my room. You could buy a Kopy Kat? VRC with full emulation for $10,000, but my fourteenth birthday passed without even a party; money was tight. So Jer and I started putting one together up in my room from odd parts.

And found out that Dad had done some really interesting programming with the motion detector on the burglar alarm. When I was just a little kid, it felt real good to know that Mom and Dad could see anywhere in the house, especially the monster that hid under my bed. Later, when I was eight, and Mom explained to me how young women need their “privacy” and she was removing the camera from my room so I could have my privacy “just like her and Dad had,” I felt very grown up.

“But I’ll keep the motion detector on alert,” Dad said, “so if any strangers come into your room, the alarm will go off.”

At fourteen, I didn’t consider Jer a stranger.

“Dad, Jer’s lived next door since forever. We’re just building a rover emulator. Why won’t you give him full access to my room?”

“I thought Jer lived in our refrigerator,” Dad said, giving Mom one of his sideways grins. So this was going to be a two on one talk. It was times like this I wish my folks had had two kids; that way at least it would be a fair fight.

“Honey, a young woman’s room should be a private place for her.”

“But where else can we put our kopy kitten-ulator? Dad’s shop just swallowed the rec room for a spare parts locker. You’ve got the last bedroom laid out as a project management center. Maybe if we moved the dining room table out to the screened porch, I could set the VRC up in here.”

“No!” They got that word out together. I expected they would. Dinner was a “sacred” time for the family to be together. Usually.

I won and I lost that night. The VRC stayed in my room, but Jer only got unlimited access to the ground floor. We had to keep our distance, and keep moving–but not too fast. Dad really did some programming on that alarm. I know; Jer told me. He tried and tried to get a work-around on Dad, but everything he tried, Dad had something there before Jer did. Bummer parents don’t trust their kids more!

So there I was, fifteen going on sixteen, lounging on my bed alternately staring at the want ads and at the pink wallpaper, wondering if Mom was right and if I should redo my room different from when I was ten. I’d really rather use the money for rover time; Jer didn’t mind how my room looked. He was sitting over in the corner by the skeleton of our kopy kitten, in the cast-off chair from the living room, his nose in a reader doing homework. I couldn’t make up my mind. Do I want a job to pay for my own car insurance or more Moon time? Mom would make me save some of the money for college. Jer’s grades would get him a scholarship; mine might get me in. Then I spotted the ad from Artemis, Inc. and sat up.