Hieroglyph (30 page)

This wasn't one Pug had a solution for. Neither did I, or Blight, or Maya. But it wasn't just us. There was a sprawling wiki and mailing list for the project, and at one point, we had three separate factions vying to go to the moon first. One was our project, one was nearly identical in goals except that its organizers were totally committed to a certain methodology for sealing the bearings that our side had voted down.

The third faction—they were
weird
. /b/ was a clutch of totally bizarro trolls, a community that had cut its teeth drawing up detailed plans for invading Sealand—the offshore drilling platform that had been converted to an ill-starred sovereign data haven—moved on to gaming
Time
magazine polls, splintered into the Anonymous movement with all its many facets and runs and ops, fighting everyone from the Church of Scientology to the Egyptian government to the NSA and that had proven its ability to continuously alter itself to challenge all that was sane and complacent with the world, no matter what it took.

These people organized themselves under the banner of the Committee to Protect Luna (SRSLY), and they set out to build a machine that would hunt down
our
machine, and all the tiles it dropped, and smash it into the smallest pieces imaginable. They had some pretty talented engineers working with them, and the designs they came up with solved some of the issues we'd been wrestling with, like a flywheel design that would also act as a propulsive motor, its energy channeled in one direction so that the Gadget would gently inch its way along the lunar surface. They produced innumerable videos and technical diagrams showing how their machine would work, hunting ours down by means of EMF sensors and an onboard vision system. For armament, it had its own sinterer, a clever array of lenses that it could focus with software-controlled servos to create a bug-under-a-magnifying-glass effect, allowing it to slowly but surely burn microscopic holes through our robot.

The thing was, the technical designs were absolutely sound. And though 90 percent of the rhetoric on their message boards had the deranged tinge of stoned giggles, the remaining 10 percent was deadly serious, able to parrot and even refine the Green Moon party line with stony earnestness. There were a lot of people in our camp who were convinced that they were serious—especially after they kickstarted the full load for a killer bot in thirty-six hours.

I thought it was trolling, just plain trolling.
DON'T FEED THE TROLLS!
I shouted online. No one listened to me (not enough people, anyway), and there was an exhausting ramble about countermeasures and armor and even, God help us all, a lawsuit, because yeah, totally, that would work. The wrangle lasted so long that we missed our launch window. The leaders of the paranoiac faction said that they'd done us all a favor by making us forfeit the deposit we'd put down, because now we'd have time to get things
really
right before launch time.

Another group said that the important thing wasn't countermeasures, it was
delay
—if we waited until the /b/tards landed their killer bot on the moon, we could just land ours far enough away that it would take five hundred years for the two to meet, assuming top speed and flat terrain all the way. That spun out into a brutal discussion of game theory and strategy, and I made the awful mistake of getting involved directly, saying, “Look, knuckleheads, if your strategy is to outwait them, and their goal is to stop us from doing anything, then their optimal strategy is to
do nothing
. So long as they haven't launched, we can't launch.”

The ensuing discussion ate my life for a month and spilled over into the real world, when, at an L.A. burners' event, a group of people who staunchly disagreed with me made a point of finding me wherever I was to make sure I understood what a dunderhead I was.

I should have known better. Because, inevitably, the /b/tard who was in charge of the money fucked off with it. I never found out what he or she did with it. As far as I know, no one ever did.

After that, I kept my mouth shut. Or rather, I only opened it to do things that would help the project go forward. I stopped knocking heads together. I let Maya do that. I don't believe in generalizations about demographics, but man, could that girl
argue
. Forget all that horseshit about “digital natives,” which never meant anything anyway. Using a computer isn't hard. But growing up in a world where how you argue about something changes what happens to it, that was a
skill,
and Maya had it in ways I never got.

“WHAT'S WRONG WITH CALLING
it the Gadget?”

Blight looked up from her weeding and armed sweat off her forehead, leaving behind a faint streak of brown soil. She and I traded off the weeding and this was her day, which meant that I got to spend my time indoors with all the imaginary network people and their arguments.

“Leave it, Greg,” she said, in that tone that I'd come to recognize as perfectly nonnegotiable. We'd been living together for two years at that point, ever since I sank a critical mass of my nest egg into buying another launch window and had had to remortgage my house. The vegetable garden wasn't just a hobby—it was a way of life and it helped make ends meet.

“Come on,” I said. “Come
on
. We've always called it ‘the Gadget.' That's what
Pug
called it—”

She rocked back on her heels and rose to her feet with a kind of yogic grace. Her eyes were at half-mast, with that cool fury that I'd come to know and dread.

“Pug? Come on, Greg, I thought we agreed: no playing the cult of personality card. He's dead. For years now. He wasn't Chairman Mao. He wasn't even Hari Seldon. He was just a dude who liked to party and was a pretty good engineer and was an altogether sweet guy. ‘That's what Pug called it' is pure bullshit. ‘The Gadget' is a dumb name. It's a way of announcing to the world that this thing hasn't been thought through. That it's a lark. That it's not serious—”

“Maybe that's good,” I said. “A good thing, you know? Because that way, no one takes us seriously and we get to sneak around and act with impunity until it's too late and—”

I fell silent under her stony glare. I tried to keep going, but I couldn't. Blight had the opposite of a reality distortion field. A reality
assertion
field.

“Fine,” I said. “We won't call it the Gadget. But I wish you'd told me before you went public with it.”

She pulled off her gardening gloves and stuffed them into her pockets, then held out her hands to me. I took them.

“Greg,” she said, looking into my eyes. “I have opinions. Lots of them. And I'm not going to run them past you before I ‘go public' with them. Are we clear on that score?”

Again, I was stymied by her reality assertion field. All my stupid rationalizations about not meaning it that way refused to make their way out of my mouth, as some latent sense of self-preservation came to the fore.

“Yes, Blight,” I said. She squeezed my fingers and dropped her stern demeanor like the mask it was.

“Very good. Now, what shall we call it?”

Everyone who had come to know it through Burning Man called it the Gadget. Everyone else called it the moonprinter. “Not moonprinter.”

“Why not? It seems to have currency. You going to tell everyone the name they chose is wrong?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay, go,” she said.

“Well, first of all, it's not a printer. Calling it a 3D printer is like calling a car a horseless carriage. Like calling videoconferencing ‘the picturephone.' So long as we call it an
anything
printer, we'll be constrained by printerish thinking.”

“All right,” she said. “Pretty good point. What else?”

“It's not printing the moon! It's using moondust to print structural materials for prefab habitats. The way you ‘print' a moon is by smashing a comet into a planet so that a moon-sized hunk of rock breaks off and goes into orbit around it.”

“So what do you think we should call it?”

I shrugged. “I like ‘the Gadget.' ”

I ducked as she yanked out one of her dirty, balled-up gloves and threw it at my head. She caught me with the other glove and then followed it up with a muscular, rib-constricting hug. “I love you, you know.”

“I love you, too.” And I did. Despite the fact that I had raided my nest egg, entered the precariat, and might end up someday eating dog food, I was as happy as a pig in shit. Speaking of which.

“Dammit, I forgot to feed Messy.”

She gave my butt a playful squeeze. “Go on then.”

Messy was our pig, a kunekune, small enough to be happy on half an acre of pasture grass, next to the chicken run with its own half acre. The chickens ate bugs and weeds, and we planted more pasture grass in their poop, which Messy ate, leaving behind enough poop to grow berries and salad greens, which we could eat. We got eggs and, eventually, bacon and pork chops, as well as chickens. No external fertilizer, no phosphates, and we got more calories out for less energy and water inputs than even the most efficient factory farm.

It was incredibly labor-intensive, which was why I liked it. It was nice to think that the key to feeding nine billion people was to measure return on investment by maximizing calories and minimizing misery, instead of minimizing capital investment and maximizing retained earnings to shareholders.

Messy's dinner was only an hour late, and she had plenty of forage on her half acre, but she was still pissed at me and refused to come and eat from my hand until I'd cooed at her and made apologetic noises, and then she came over and nuzzled me and nipped at my fingers. I'd had a couple dogs, growing up, but the most smartest and most affectionate among them wasn't a patch on a pig for smarts and warmth. I wasn't sure how we'd bring ourselves to eat her. Though, hell, we managed it with the chickens, which were smarter and had more personality than I'd ever imagined. That was the other thing about permaculture: it made you think hard about where your food came from. It had been months since I'd been able to look at a jar of gas-station pepperoni sticks without imagining the animals they had once been.

Messy grunted amiably at me and snuffled at my heels, which was her way of asking to be let out of her pasture. I opened the gate and walked around to the small part of the house's yard that we kept for human leisure. I unfolded a chair and sat in it and picked up her ball and threw it and watched her trot off excitedly to fetch it. She could do this for hours, but only if I varied where I threw it and gave her some tricky challenges.

Maya called them the “brickshitters,” which was hilarious except that it was a gift for the Green Moon crowd, who already accused us of shitting all over the moon. Blight wanted “homesteaders,” which, again, had all kinds of awful baggage about expropriation of supposedly empty lands from the people who were already there. She kept arguing that there were no indigenous people on the moon, but that didn't matter. The Green Moon people were determined to paint us as rapacious land grabbers, and this was playing right into their hands. It always amazed me how two people as smart as Blight and Maya could be so dumb about this.

Not that I had better ideas. “The Gadget” really was a terrible name.

I threw the ball and thought some more.

WE ENDED UP CALLING
it “Freelunch.” It wasn't my coinage, but as soon as I saw it, I knew it was right. Just what Pug would have wanted. A beacon overhead, promising us a better life if only we'd stop stepping on one another to get at it.

The name stuck. Some people argued about it, but it was clear to anyone who did lexicographic analysis of the message boards, chats, tweets, and forums that it was gaining with that Internet-characteristic, winner-take-all, hockey-stick-shaped growth line. Oh, sure, the localization projects argued about whether
free
meant “libre” or “gratis” and split down the middle. In Brazil, they used “livre” (Portugal's thirty-years-and-counting technocratic “interim” managers translated it as “grátis”).

More than eight thousand of us went to Macapá for launch day, landing in Guyana and taking the new high-speed rail from Georgetown. There had been dozens of Freelunch prototypes built and tested around the world, with teams competing for funding, engineer time, lab space. A co-op in Asheville, blessed by NASA, had taken over the production of ersatz regolith, a blend whose composition was (naturally) hotly debated.

The Brazilian contingent went all out for us. I stayed up every night dancing and gorging, then slept in a different family's living room until someone came to take me to the beach or a makerspace or a school. One time, Maya and Blight and I were all quartered in a favela that hung off the side of an abandoned office tower on impossibly thin, impossibly strong cables. The rooms were made of waxed cardboard and they swayed with the wind and terrified me. I was convinced I'd end up stepping right through the floor and ended up on tiptoes every time I moved. I tried not to move.

Celesc Lifter SA had a little VIP box from which customers could watch launches. It held eight people. The seats were awarded by lottery and I didn't get one. So I watched the lift with everyone else (minus eight), from another favela, one of the old, established ones with official recognition. Every roof was packed with viewers, and hawkers meandered the steep alleys with bulbs of beer and skewers of meat and paper cones of seafood. It was Celesc's ninety-third lift, and it had a 78 percent success rate, with only two serious failures in that time. No fatalities, but the cargo had been jettisoned over the Pacific and broke up on impact.

Those were good odds, but we were still all holding our breath through the countdown, through the first flames and the rumble conveyed by a thousand speakers, an out-of-phase chorus of Net-lagged audio. We held it through the human-piloted takeoff of the jumbo jet that acted as a first stage for the lifter and gasped when the jet's video stream showed the lifter emerging from its back and rising smoothly into the sky. The jet dropped precipitously as the lifter's rockets fired and caught it and goosed it up, through the thin atmosphere at the edge of space in three hundred seconds.