John Karr - Detonation Event

“Scanning… DNA match. Office admittance to NIH Lunar One Lab approved, log entry three seven zero five. Note: a government-approved hazard suit must be worn to gain entrance into the operations lab. Prepare for body scan.”

He snapped a pair of ultrathin gloves from the wall dispenser, put them on, and clenched and unclenched his fists. They were nothing like the gloves used on the heavy bag or various opponents who mistook him for easy prey in the gym. These were virtually an external layer of skin, though not quite to the point where fingerprints could be discerned for identification purposes, though that technology was antiquated now. He did not require hand protection for the office area, but he wore them each time he entered the facility.

If he were the only worker here, he wouldn’t bother with the additional precautions. He trusted himself to perform adequate sterility measures. He did not trust others to do so.

He did not trust others at all, for that matter.

“Step forward for body scan, or withdraw,” the computer instructed him, as he lingered outside the doorway.

He had inadvertently stepped away from the scanner after he donned the gloves.

He never did that.

Voices carried down the sparse hallway. The strip of lights imbedded in the wall was soon interrupted by a group of men and women in SCONA jumpsuits. Blue jumps, for engineering and maintenance. Their conversation quieted, and he could feel them question his tuxedo and shiny shoes. They gazed straight ahead when he turned to give them a full view, and their conversation thinned to a few words here and there.

Too controlled. Perhaps they were being polite or figured he was someone not to be trifled with.

The latter was true enough. Everyone could be tracked at all times on the lunar bases and on the space stations. The jumps were standard issue while working, and names were sewn on the front pocket and upper backs. More, all personnel had traceable identification chips imbedded at the base of their skulls, so even if your workday was over and you wore shorts and a t-shirt, security could identify and locate you, if necessary.

The ID chips were invasive, but required as a condition of working in space.

Don’t like it, don’t work for the world leader in space development, or as part of the United States government in oversight and regulation of the world’s leader in space development. Such was the case for Schiflet and his small lab team. His jumpsuit was light brown, which Schiflet considered a less than subtle dig at “government brown shirts.” It was a way for some liberty-minded fool inside SCONA to get a little payback at what they considered intrusion by long-nosed government busybodies.

They were right, of course. But people need controlling. Otherwise they do things that aren’t in a civilization’s best interest.

Karen Wagner did not subscribe to that, he knew. She preferred to immerse herself in science, though she got in a dig here and there about oversight and overreach. He often wondered why she didn’t just join SCONA like her young adult offspring, Trent and Gwen Wagner, employed on MOS-1 and MOS-2 respectively. Perhaps she was waiting for the completion of MOS-3 here on the moon for her turn.

The voices came louder now as the group turned off at the intersection and disappeared. A dose of laughter carried back to him.

“Obviously they’ve never seen a well-dressed man on the moon,” Schiflet told the scanner.

“Response invalid. Step forward for body scan, or withdraw.”

Was that seven?

No. That one did not count. It was more an observation to himself than to an external recipient.

Sort of.

Computers were incapable of the give-and-take of true conversation, though so many were programmed to fake it. Not even the most advanced artificial intelligence bot truly conversed; it merely evaluated input, scanned for keywords, and responded according to output derived from dynamic Structured Query Language (SQL). They could state observations and spout statistics, which was useful at times, but there were no remarks made based on true intuition. They were merely parrots with processor chips and expanded memory databases.

Too much randomness in his thoughts. Time to up the dosage of attention deficit disorder medicine, already at the upper limit.

Oh, yes, and time to return to Earth.

He’d been here two years already, and while living among the stars had been novel and at times fascinating, after a while it grew standard, then wearying, always having to be contained in something, whether it be space suit or protective shell or building. Vacations back on Earth were no longer enough to offset the creep of space madness.

“Final instruction. Step forward for body scan, or withdraw.”

The computer did not ask.

One of the first things Schiflet had done upon his ascension to OD of the NIH Space Labs was jettison the polite phrasing of the past and use the computer-generated voice instead of the human one. It was more intimidating that way, more sterile. To the first point, people needed to be reminded of who was in charge and what the rules were. To the second, any first-year lab technician could attest that without sterility there is no validity, and without validity there is futility.

Both points represented potential threats to upward mobility. Paton Schiflet would suffer no one who interfered with his upward trajectory.

Schiflet stepped forward. “Scan away.”

A mesh of crisscrossing laser beams, emitted from the door frame, enveloped him.

“Item detected. Do you wish to disclose?”

Instead Schiflet mused. “Wagner is well aware that I have reservations at Andromeda with superiors from Earth in less than hour… Despite this she has ignored my reply for more detail.”

“Item detected. Do you wish to disclose?”

He snapped his fingers three times. “On with it!”

“Transported samples must be logged into the system and transferred via containment channels. Do you have samples?”

“What I have is a hurry.”

“Place your hurry on the scanner.”

“No, I don’t have any damn samples.”

“Inanimate object detected. Proximity to lab requires disclosure and sterility procedures. Lab entrance prohibited without hazard suit.”

“I created your directive!”

“Failure to disclose. Please remove the object and place it on the sensor platform for scanning. You may choose to exit by selecting the exit button.”

“It’s only a private computer, damn you.”

He pulled it from his pants pocket, unfolded it, and placed it on the small shelf. He frowned as the laser crossbeams engulfed the small machine. A very fine vapor cloud encompassed it and penetrated inside.

Schiflet said, “It is non-biological and clean. I sanitize it daily.”

“Response has been noted for later record. The object has been identified as a computer and sterilized. Entrance granted.”

The first door withdrew into the wall.

He stepped forward. The door closed as soon as his body cleared the frame. Before him, a hall led directly to the preparation bay of the lab. All walls were transparent. To the right was a corridor that branched into a suite of seven offices. His was the largest, and part of the outermost wall of the last building in this sector before the protective dome. The corridor led to a sealed door that opened to a courtyard that met the track and ran just inside the protective dome. He’d already run his laps around the vast base. Manufactured gravity kept it a challenge, but even after two years he believed he could still tell the difference between enhanced lunar gravity and Earth gravity.

Each of the two large SCONA lunar bases was encased in a clear acrylic derivative meshed with micro strands of titanium. The lunar surface, withered by radiation and generally porous, did not provide an airtight seal. The domes were bolted to a vast platform of coated graphene steel supported by massive struts of titanium that extended deep below the surface.