Hieroglyph (32 page)

“Who'd notice?”

I started to pack up the lunch, stacking the tiffin sections and slipping the self-tensioning bands over them. Blight gently took them out of my hands and set them to one side.

“Greg,” she said. “Greg, seriously. This isn't good. You need to change something. It's like living with a ghost. Or a robot.”

A bolt of anger skewered me from the top of my head to my asshole, so sharp and irrational that I actually gasped aloud. I must be getting mature in my old age, because the sheer force of the reaction pulled me up short and made me pause before replying.

“I've tried to find work,” I said. “There's nothing out there for me.”

“No,” she said, still holding my arm, refusing to surrender the physical contact. “No, there's no
jobs
. We both know that there's plenty of
work
.”

“I'll think about it,” I said, meaning,
I won't think about it at all
.

Still, she held on to my arm. She made me look into her eyes. “Greg, I'm not kidding. This isn't good for you. It's not good for
us
. This isn't what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

I nearly deliberately misunderstood her, asked her why she wasn't looking for work somewhere else. But I knew that the “this” she meant was living with me, in my decayed state.

“I'll think about it,” I repeated, and shrugged off her hand. I packed up the lunch, put it on the back of my bike, and rode home. I managed to stop myself from crying until I had the door closed behind me.

THAT NIGHT WE HAD
sex. It was the first time in months, so long that I'd lost track of how long it had been. It started with a wordless reaching out in the night, our habitual spooned-together cuddle going a little further, bit by bit, our breath quickening, our hands and then our mouths exploring each other's bodies. We both came in near silence and held each other tighter and longer than normal. I realized that there'd been a longer gap since our last clinging, full-body hug than the gap since our last sex. I found that I'd missed the cuddling even more than the sex.

I CIRCLED THE FREEBRUNCH—AS
the Freelunch's successor had been inevitably named—nervously. For days, I poked at the forums, downloaded the prototypes, and watched the videos, spending a few minutes at a time before clicking away. One faction had a pretty credible account of how the landing had been blown so badly, and pretty much everyone accepted that something about the bad landing was responsible for the systems failure. They pointed to a glitch in the vision system, a collision between two inference engines that made it misinterpret certain common lunar shadows as bad terrain. It literally jumped at shadows. And the Tilt-a-whirl faction was totally vindicated and managed to force a complete redesign of the stabilization software and the entry plan.

The more I looked over Freebrunch, the more exciting it got. Freelunch had transmitted telemetry right up to the final moments of its landing, definitively settling another argument: “How much should we worry about landing telemetry if it only has to land
once
?” The live-fire exercise taught us stuff that no amount of vomit-comet trial runs could have surfaced. It turned out, for example, that the outer skin of the Freelunch had been totally overengineered and suffered only a fraction of the heating that the models had predicted. That meant we could reduce the weight by a good 18 percent. The cost of lifting mass was something like 98 percent of the overall launch cost, so an 18 percent reduction in mass was something like a 17.99 percent reduction in the cost of building Freebrunch and sending it to the surface of the moon.

Blight knew I was hooked before I did. The third time I gave her a cold sandwich and some carrot sticks for lunch, she started making jokes about being a moon widow and let me know that she'd be packing her own lunch four days a week, but that I was still expected to come up with something decent for a Friday blowout.

And just like that, I was back in.

FREELUNCH HAD COST ME
pretty much all my savings, and I wasn't the only one. The decision not to take commercial sponsorship on the project was well intentioned, but it had meant that the whole thing had to be funded by jerks like me. Worse: Freelunch wasn't a registered 501(c)(3) charity, so it couldn't even attract any deep-pocketed jillionaires looking for a tax deduction.

Freebrunch had been rebooted by people without any such Burning Manian anticommodification scruples. Everything down to the circuit boards had someone's logo or name on it, and they'd added a EULA to the project that said that by contributing to Freebrunch, you signed over all your “intellectual property” rights to the foundation that ran it—a foundation without a fully appointed board and no transparency beyond what the law mandated.

That had sparked a predictable shitstorm that reached the global newspapers when someone spotted a patent application from the foundation's chairman, claiming to have invented some of the interlock techniques that had been invented by Pug himself, there on the playa. I'd seen it with my own eyes, and more important, I'd helped document it, with timestamped postings that invalidated every one of the patent's core claims.

Bad enough, but the foundation dug itself even deeper when it used the donations it had taken in to pay for lawyers to fight for the patent. The schism that ensued proved terminal, and a year later, the Freebrunch was dead.

OUT OF ITS ASHES
rose the Freebeer, which tried to strike a happy medium between the Freelunch's idealism and the Freebrunch's venality. The people involved raised foundation money, agreed to print the names of project benefactors on the bricks they dropped onto the moon's surface, and benefited from the Indian Space Research Organisation's lunar-mapping initiative, which produced remarkably high-resolution survey maps of the entire bright side of the moon. On that basis, they found a spot in Mare Imbrium that was as smooth as a baby's ass and was only a few hundred K from the Freelunch's final resting place.

Of course, they failed. Everything went fine until LEO separation, whereupon something happened—there are nine documentaries (all crowdfunded) offering competing theories—and it ended up in a decaying orbit that broke up over Siberia and rained down shooting stars into the greedy lenses of thousands of dashcams.

FREEBIRD.

(Supported, of course, by a series of stadium shows and concert tours.)

Freepress.

(This one printed out leaked WikiLeaks cables from early in the century and won a prize at the Venice Biennale, held in Padua now that the city was entirely underwater. It helped that they chose cables that dealt with the American government's climate change shenanigans. The exiled Venetians living in their stacked Paduan tenements thought that was a laugh-riot.)

That took seven years.

THE LOST COSMONAUT CONSPIRACY
theory holds that a certain number—two? three?—of Russian cosmonauts were killed before Gagarin's successful flight. They say when Gagarin got into the Vostok in 1961, he fully expected to die, but he got in anyway, and not because of the crack of a commissar's pistol. He boarded his death trap because it was his ticket into space. He had gone to what could almost certainly have been his death because of his belief in a better future. A place for humanity in the stars.

When you think of a hero, think of Gagarin, strapped into that capsule, the rumble of the jets below him, the mutter of the control tower in his headset, the heavy hand of acceleration hard upon his chest, pushing with increasing, bone-crushing force, the roar of the engines blotting out all sound. Think of him going straight to his death with a smile on his face, and think of him breaking through the atmosphere, the sudden weightlessness, the realization that he had survived. That he was the first human being to go to space.

We kept on launching printers.

Blight and I threw a joint seventieth birthday party to coincide with the launch of the Freerunner. There were old friends. There was cake. There was ice cream, with chunks of honeycomb from our own hive. There were—I shit you not—seventy candles. We blew them out, all of them, though it took two tries, seventy-year-old lungs being what they were.

We toasted each other with long speeches that dripped with unself-conscious sentiment, and Maya brought her kids and they presented us with a little play they'd written, involving little printed 3D printers on the moon.

And then, as we tuned every screen in the house to the launch, I raised a glass and toasted Pug:

“Let us live as though it were the first days of a better nation.”

The cheer was loud enough to drown out the launch.

FREERUNNER LANDED AT 0413
Zulu on August 10, 2057. Eight minutes later, it completed its power-on self-test routine and snapped out its solar collectors. It established communications with nine different HAM-based ground stations and transmitted extensive telemetry. Its bearings moved smoothly, and it canted its lens into the sun's rays. The footage of its first sintering was low-res and jittery, but it was all saved for later transmission, and that's the clip you've seen, the white-hot tip of the focused energy of old Sol, melting regolith into a long, flat, thin line that was quickly joined by another, right alongside it. Back and forth the head moved, laying out the base, the honeycombing above it, the final surface. The print bed tilted with slow grace and the freshly printed brick slid free and fell to the dust below, rocking from side to side, featherlike as it fell.

© 2013, Nina Miller / ASU, adapting content from: 2010, Gregory H. Revera, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license; 2011, Alisha Vargas, used under a CC BY 2.0 license; 2006, Floor, used under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license; and NASA

One week later, Freerunner established contact with the Freelunch, using its phased-array antennas to get a narrow, high-powered signal to its slumbering firmware. Laboriously, it rebuilt the Freelunch's BIOS, directed it to use what little energy it had to release the springs that locked the solar array away in its body. It took thirty-seven hours and change. We were on the Playa when we got word that the solar array had deployed, the news spreading like wildfire from burner to burner, fireworks rocketing into the sky.

I smiled and rolled over in our yurt. Igloo. Yurtgloo. I was very happy, of course. But I was also seventy. I needed my rest. The next morning, a naked twenty-year-old with scales covering his body from the waist up cycled excitedly to our camp and pounded on the yurt's interlocking bricks until I thought he might punch right through them.

“What,” I said. “The fuck.”

“It's printed one!” he said. “The Freelunch shit a brick!” He looked at me, took in my tired eyes, my snowy hair. “Sorry to wake you, but I thought you'd want to know.”

“Of course he wants to know!” Blight shouted from inside. “Christ, Greg, get the man a drink. We're celebrating!”

The playa dust whipped up my nose and made me reach for the kerchief around my neck, pull it up over my face. I turned to the kid, standing there awkwardly astride his bike. “Well?” I said. “Come on, we're celebrating!” I gave him a hug that was as hard as I could make it, and he squeezed me back with gentle care.

We cracked open some bourbon that a friend had dropped off the day before and pulled out the folding chairs. The crowd grew, and plenty of them brought bottles. There were old friends, even old enemies, people I should have recognized and didn't, and people I recognized but who didn't recognize me at first. I'd been away from the Playa for a good few years. The next thing I knew, the sun was setting, and there were thousands of us, and the music was playing, and my legs were sore from dancing, and Blight was holding me so tight I thought she'd crack a rib.

I thought of saying,
We did it,
or
You did it,
or
They did it
. None of those was right, though. “It's done” is what I said, and Blight knew exactly what I meant. Which is why I loved her so much, of course.

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