Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

“But then what, how,” Gompers began, “how do we get Mission Control access to our numbers?”

“I promise you,” said Maxon blankly, “that I can fix you a way to talk to Houston, if you just get me over to that cargo container. One of the machines the robot Heras are going to build on the moon is a comm center. We only need a Hera. And I need silicon, titanium, iron.”

George and Phillips looked at each other. “Moon metals,” said Phillips. “We need moon metals.”

“Yes, those are minerals found on the moon, among others,” Maxon told them. “The robots are made to extract their own materials from the moon’s environment, can’t be shipping them plastics and aluminum from Earth all the time.”

“Well, where are we going to get silicon and titanium?”

“You can break down some of the equipment in Cargo A,” said Conrad.

“Will there be enough?” asked Phillips.

“I don’t need much,” Maxon said.

While Phillips plotted a course to intercept, Gompers and Maxon sifted through the rest of the rocket, looking for pieces that could be used as raw materials for the Hera to make a phone.

“Thanks,” Maxon told Gompers. “This will cover it. Now, Phillips, can you get us in line with that container?”

“Simple math, my friend. Simple math,” Phillips reassured him. “I gotta say, Genius, you came up with a good one this time.”

It took him two hours to put on the suit they used for space walks. It was a bulky contraption with a glass helmet, gloves, boots, heart monitor, brain scan, and a bodily fluid collector. There were layers and layers to install on himself, and he didn’t quite fit it, being too tall for the legs. The jumpsuit inside felt tight, like he was squeezing into a second skin. The sturdy exoskeleton fit over him and shut. He moved like a monster inside it, like a fifty-foot lizard, motions slow and deliberate, knocking over stuff in Cargo B, sending bits of equipment spinning across the room. The jetpack was operated by controls under his fingers, and with a few short instructions, Maxon was able to understand.

By the time he was ready to go, Phillips and Conrad had worked out the orbit of the container module, had mapped it, and had pulled up alongside it. “Godspeed, Dr. Mann,” said Phillips forlornly. “You have about six hours of working time in that suit. We’ll be in communication with you via the radio.” He went into the airlock. He could see Gompers and Phillips back in the rocket, looking in at him. Then there was a hiss, and the bay opened out onto space.

Without hesitation, he pushed himself off the door to the rocket, and went spinning outward. Did he worry about the jetpack? If it would fire when he pushed the button, if it would function properly? No. Maxon believed in machines. Believed they would do what they were built to do. It was like walking around with a kidney, or a lung. We all do this all the time, Maxon thought. We think nothing of depending on a lump of muscle to keep us living, a lump of biological matter that pulses moment by moment, day by day, on and on in the dark, without respite, without refreshment, and even when we starve it, or stifle it, or overdo it, that lump of pink continues to contract, contract, contract, without a will of its own, without a rest. Without the knowledge of its own sacrifice.

“You are already a robot,” he had once told a roomful of graduate students at a conference in Maine. “The most advanced robot ever created.” The heart pumps without awareness, and that’s why it pumps. Unless there is a mechanical failure, it continues to pump, and who can plan for that? You build your organs out of the best material available. You build them while you are still in the womb. While you are still on Earth, you build your jetpack that will take you out into space, and when you get out there to use it, you just have to trust that you built it right.

Out into space he went, amazingly free of connection. Without a cord to tether him, without a thought to pull him back into regret, he went sailing away. The boys in the rocket saw him silhouetted against the backdrop of the moon, with all of space behind him. He looked no longer human; they had to remind themselves of his flesh and his human soul inside that bright white mechanical suit.

He was human, but uncrushable; human, but breathing; he was human, but free. He could see the Earth, the moon, the rocket behind, and the cargo container in front of him. He had truly departed, and yet he was sort of unaware. Detached. There was no profound experience waiting for him in the depth of space. Other humans, in this situation, were moved to think inwardly. Not so Maxon. He only thought of his direction, of the corrections needed to keep himself on course, the distance between himself and his target. It’s literally all he thought about.

WHEN HE WAS A child, there were very bad times. There were times when his father hit him with a strip of leather. There were times when his father hit him with a brick. These experiences were not lodged in Maxon’s memory. They were not allowed to stay there. He had often been bent, naked to the waist, over his father’s foot locker, instructed to hang on to the bars of the bed. One of the man’s boots would clamp down over his rear, pinning him down while the belt fell again and again on the small of his back, his arms, his ribs. Nowhere for his head to go, nowhere safe. For failing to respond to a question. For failing to deliver an appropriate answer. For upsetting his mother. For being late. Then there was no flesh that would respond with a smack. There were only bones that would thud, and skin that would tear. He would deliver the punishments in the most secret places, to hide them. They would be hidden from view. So, did Maxon have a familiarity with divorcing his mind from a troubling physical situation? Yes. It was one of the first skills he mastered.

THE WALK ACROSS FROM the rocket to the cargo container took him ninety minutes. It was a long ninety minutes, one of total concentration. While he did not feel worry, or pain, or excitement, he did feel the cold urgency that he must succeed. He was his own man, out there, uncontrolled by anyone’s idea, unfettered by anyone’s inadequacy. He was as a body floating, as a speck of dust floating past a warm window in the afternoon, he was rudderless, detached, at the mercy of no wind, no gravity, only operated by the fuel and intention contained in his own white titanium skin. It didn’t take him long to get used to the feeling. He liked it.

There were few times in his experience when he had stepped out without a road map. Without programming. Winging it. It was antithetical to his vision of the human race. Once when he was in Europe, during a summer in college, he had been following the Tour de France, running with the riders up the mountains, dressed as Darth Vader, shouting “Allez, allez, allez!” He knew their every movement, their route to the last kilometer, his lodgings booked months in advance. But then, “Hey, Darth Vader,” a cameraman called to him at the finish one day, “come out with us!” And he had gone. Without a schedule, without a map, without knowing who would be there or when it would be over. They went to a bar where a spotted jersey was hanging in the doorway, proof that one of the top riders was drinking there that evening. He had drunk alcohol for the first and only time in his life. He had kissed a woman that wasn’t Sunny. She spoke only French and he pretended he could not. He had regretted it all in the morning.

He remembered another time when this had happened. It was the quiet moment, on the bank of the Crowder River, where he asked Sunny to marry him. For times like this, scripts had often been crafted for him by the mother. If he had to say thank you to a scholarship committee, he was taught exactly what to say, how to hold his face, how to raise his voice. At his father’s funeral, she showed him how to shake hands with the minister, what part of his mouth to show when smiling. Even the first time he told Sunny he loved her, Sunny herself had all but written the words in the air in front of him, and led him to the spot, and pointed to each syllable. And yet, that day, he made up his own words.