The Miserable Moon; or, A Polemic Against Solitary Love

A year ago, I was working as an astrotechnician for the Eurasian Coalition Aeronautics Administration, ECAA, and God had still yet to show itself. At the time, secularism and theological belief were still separated by a clearly defined line; defined differently from one culture, nation, or ethnic group to another, it was, nonetheless, defined. Wars and revolutions, disasters and humanitarian efforts, hither and thither, the Earth rotated, and the Moon followed. But then God appeared, and with a stroke of its spiral arms, it displayed to us, all of humanity, the true contour of oblivion; its omnipotent nature erased the fundamental constants of time, subjectivity, belief, dimensions, nature, and death; it also stripped me of him, the martyred saint, the Lord of Intelligence and Innocence, the love of my life.

This document will chronicle everything leading up to and after the catastrophe, either through existing historical materials at hand or my recollection of events. Though some details may be muddy, the description’s accuracy is more or less guaranteed, and until the Moon finally decides to finish its eschatological course into Earth, this chronicle will stand, for an eternity.

The fourth skyhook was completed in 2085. Its first operation occurred on June 2nd, 2087, which marked the then-final astronautical mission co-directed by both NASA and the ECAA. The first skyhook, named Lutheran by the Americans, had experienced at least a dozen operational failures throughout the 50s due to the aging tether. With the UN’s verdict that Lutheran would no longer be suited for class-four heavy cargo missions, prohibiting it from shipping most if not all of Lunar Base’s freightages, the Americans threatened to cease all future cooperation with the ECAA. According to an insider’s recount, NASA’s then administrator, Bradley Connington, went on a two hours tirade with the president on the phone, demanding the White House to take a more aggressive stance at the international court; Lutheran’s shipping missions, especially those associated with the Lunar base’s construction, made up nearly 40% of NASA’s annual income.

Skyhook was a tether-based astrodevice running from the upper atmosphere to the low earth orbit. The first skyhook Lutheran and the second skyhook, Ealim, were both non-rotating skyhooks consisting of three parts: the weight at the bottom which spacecraft would hook themselves onto; the counterweight at the top which acted as a launch pad; and the tether threaded with carbon nanotube, connecting the two weights into one singular unit. Astro-traveling using the Skyhooks saved a massive amount of fuel compared to the traditional rocket launching method, making space travel affordable to countries all across the world, paving the way for the eventual construction of both the Space Elevator and the Lunar Base. Conceptualized in the 1970s, the first operational Skyhook, Lutheran, was built in 2044 by a private American aerospace manufacturer, KONY. The company held onto its monopoly on space travel until 2053 when JAXA, ROS, SSF, and ESA merged into the ECAA to counteract America’s dominating presence in the astronautic business.

The second skyhook, Ealim, had a 3500-kilometers-long tether, with its weight set at about 120 kilometers above-ground, making a full circle around Earth every 3.2 hours. The third and fourth skyhooks, The Iris and Yuzhe, were rotating momentum exchange skyhooks. The tether connected two orbiting stations capable of hooking and launching spacecraft, and the entire system rotated around its center of mass. Spacecraft would hook themself onto one end and be flung into space, saving even more fuel by borrowing the momentum of the skyhook’s rotation.

During the 2084 nationwide high school entrance exam, I failed to acquire an enrollment from any academic high school. The allocation system assigned me to the Jiangbin technician school just near my hometown, a vocational high school specializing in the training of low-skilled, labor-intensive astrotechnicians.

I soon applied for my first internship at the ECAA. Every Friday night I would spend approximately twelve hours in the Chomo Lonzo launch site on the Himalayas, a location chosen for its proximity to the lower atmosphere. My job was to carry waste products down the hill to the supply center on the East Rongbuk Glacier and return to the site with fresh supplies; a twelve-mile trek. Once in a while, some upper managers, or better, senior members of the Politburo, would visit the launch site, and I would be ordered to swap the floor until one could see their reflection on it. The whole thing paid in pennies, but I did have a lot of colleagues; many of whom were, surprisingly, Indians.

After decades upon decades of space travel, the low earth orbit was clogged with defunct satellites, used rocket boosters, empty fuel tanks, and shrapnels from various missile tests. In the 50s, a report conducted by NASA estimated about 4000 unusable satellites, 50000 artificial objects large enough to completely devastate a space station and roughly 2000000 pieces of fragmented materials that, at an orbital speed fast enough to go around Earth several times a day, could cause serious collision damage to any aerostructure; pieces smaller than a screw nut were innumerable beyond human comprehension.

The completion of Skyhooks made safe collections of debris a reality. Pieces that were big enough would be brought back to Earth where they would be recycled for raw materials; the smaller debris would be pushed back into the atmosphere to burn up, or vaporized on the spot with electromagnetic laser beams. The unglamorous nature of what was essentially a garbage disposal job often drove the Americans and the Europeans away, making it the perfect space industry for developing countries. The Indian private company MUNDI held a near chokehold on the industry. They employed only Indian citizens and most Class B launch sites, like those in the global South -- Mid-African, Southeast Asian, and South American regions -- were in all but name MUNDI’s property, hosting nothing but their debris removal missions unless the ECAA or NASA specifically requisitioned their site; Chomo Lonzo was at the low-end of Class A, a perfect breeding pool for the future garbage men.

I knew not a lick of Hindi, so for the sake of being able to understand the incoherent phrases my colleagues constantly subjected me to while swabbing the floor -- which later I learned was because I had stepped on their just-swept floor with my dirty boots -- I attended an intensive English entrance course near the mountains. The student demographic was mainly composed of low-skilled, uneducated laborers like me. I put in great effort to make myself friendly and presentable, even grooming diligently because I knew that friends made in these places could always be serendipitous in nature, and I was proven right. Pramod Singh was a handsome young man of my age set to be a low-end storage supervisor for MUNDI. We got along well, mainly over our similar, acquired tastes in music.

Rock music as a genre had been littered with American conservatism for decades; most were overproduced junk promoting ideas such as traditional family values, the rejection of modernity, or plain old capitalistic individualism, etc. In light of it, a submodern genre of ambient music rose from the internet underground to be the antithesis of mainstream rock; Preter-ambient, with some critics calling it Anti-rock. Following the footstep of the visionary electronic composer Eliane Radigue -- her track Islas resonates was often considered to be the Godfather of the genre -- Preter-ambient music aimed to express complex literary themes and often progressive ideology through wordless ambient noises with minimum overt textual references; my favorite track of the genre was Gabe Newsome, Lichen, Sunlight by Gabe Newsome, and ∿∿ƒ ƒ ƒ∿∿ by Omar Louie. Pramod once brought me to some concerts downtown where he had me sober watching him get drunk on substances.

“So, what’s the plan? Big man?”

I expressed that I was tired and wished to head back to my rented apartment.

“No, you buffoon! The plan for your future! What are you gonna do after you graduate?”

I said to him that most likely I would be an assistant for one of the garbage men, picking up loose ends, eating the crumbs of their bread.

“Yeah, no, my guy. I would not allow that. Anyone who is a fan of Preter-ambient is incapable of tolerating mediocrity. You know, fuck your high school. What’s its name again?”

I told him its name, Jiangbin.

“Yeah, Changpin, Tongming, chickpeas, whatever the fuck its name is, fuck it. You are better than a vocational school. You won’t drop acid, I forgive you that, but if you are content with that lousy school and this lousy job of yours, I won’t allow it! Believe me, alright? I know just the way for you to break through.”

And indeed he brought me the way: the ECAA’s Youth and Tomorrow Program, established to cultivate a new generation of high-end technicians, programmers, and scientists from some of the poorest regions of the world. The application process was as tedious as it was taxing, with maddeningly many documents to submit and revise and resubmit again; they would never tell you why they needed a death certificate from you that was yet to exist, they just needed it. It was then followed by a three-stage standardized test of qualification. For months, Pramod and I were entranced, doing nothing but burying our heads in books; weeks would go by with us sustaining on nothing but bottled milk and crackers.

It paid off. We were both accepted into the program and enrolled in the same class. Granted, the courses and the materials the program provided were similar if not identical to that of a vocational college, but graduating from this program could have me overseas contributing to the completion of the Space Elevator, humanity’s most technologically advanced megaproject; while graduating from a vocational school would land me a scrap metal job working for the garbage men; they would earn piles, and I would earn dirt.

Pramod was outwardly urbane enough of a guy for him to make a good amount of friends in the class, and as his acquaintance, I naturally benefited from his social network. Cull Blaker was a great friend of mine whom I first met on that program. He was this Caucasian guy with an ethnically ambiguous face and a fervent interest in the entertainment industry, making him a poor fit with the rest of the herd; we barely knew any English. Lehmann was another friend I made through Pramod, and though I had grown an unexpected liking for him, I still haven’t had the pleasure of knowing his last name.

One day, Lehmann introduced me to an exchange student from America. Names are but lies, and it is only for our delusions of selfhood that we somehow perceive names as a singular, coherent representation of our personhood and agency; once the Moon wipes us all clean, the necessity for a name -- or appellation of any kind for that matter -- would surely cease. I hardly wish to taint his sainthood with a filthy lie, so I will simply refer to him as Cinder. A young man slightly short of my age coming from a lower-middle-class family on the West Coast, Cinder was an exceptionally accomplished student. At the time, I only saw him as the guy who ranked first in our class every semester. I paid him no mind and, though it wrenches my heart now to admit this sin, I even held some contempt for him; I mistook his competence and emotional honesty with arrogance.

In the end, half of our class graduated and were all offered a job at the Seymour Astronautic Base located in Dallas, Texas. The air base had a strange entanglement of institutions: the site was logistically owned by NASA, yet most of its infrastructures, from the dormitory to the dining hall, were properties of KONY, while most of its employees and laborers worked directly for the ECAA. Many turned down their offers, not wanting to part with their loved ones and motherland. I had no such problem, nor did Pramod who was eager to see the grand wide world for himself; Cull and Cinder were both American so they obviously would come with us; only Lehmann decided to stay in Chomo Lonzo.

“Peace of the mind I cannot reject, and the mountains are offering me plenty of it.” He said to me when we parted ways; never heard him mention anything or anyone of his before, guess he was also a rootless man like me.

In the summer of ’87, I arrived in America. The Seymour Airbase was a subsidiary operation base to the Hawaiian Port which itself was a subsidiary body to the Space elevator.

The Space elevator was no doubt the most technologically advanced, architecturally complex, and financially expensive structure in human history. It consisted of four parts: the anchor below the seafloor, rooting the whole system and its operational center, the Hawaiian Port, in place; the counterweight at the top, a space station 250000 km above sea level, which tightened and held up the tether; the tether, made from the strongest, most resilient materials on earth, nano thread; and at last, the climber, an elevator carriage capable of carrying hundred tons of materials each ascension.

If the Space elevator was put into regular usage, it could reduce the cost of spaceflight by one hundredfold; in terms of space travel, its completion could be equated to human’s first mastery of fire. Hence everyone wanted a share of the cake: the ECAA, NASA, and most if not all of the prominent private astronautic companies like MUNDI and KONY.

What I did at Seymour had nothing to do with the greatest feat of human civilization; my job was to simply monitor the electromagnetic propulsion system on The Iris to ensure the skyhook’s momentum was sufficient to carry out the next launch. Each launch cost the skyhook a bit of its momentum, so if the propulsion system failed to adjust it back to its original state, the skyhook would fall off its orbit and eventually crash into Earth. If that ever happens, everyone that I knew, from my instructors to my colleagues, would get a life sentence from every national court on Earth for dereliction of duties.

Pramod got the same job as me, only that he was also an independent contractor of MUNDI thanks to his Indian nationality, helping debris removal missions to be carried out on The Iris. Despite the name of that program and Pramod’s orotund speeches, we were still low-skilled laborers. Unremarkable, interchangeable, and disposable if the times come.

Most of our past classmates worked in the same company, and during those preprandial chit-chats, I could always see Pramod expanding his ever-growing friend groups. I eventually got to acquaint myself with Cinder as a colleague. To a stranger, he was an utterly boring and reserved swot, yet once made an acquaintance, his ostentatious timorousness just could not obscure the erudite yet piquant spirit within.

“You know about the game as well?”

I explained to him that the game really didn’t attract me as much as it clearly did for him.

“I know. I just want to have some company, to be honest. Do you mind me talking about it? Pramod and Cull never listen to a word I say whenever the game is brought up.”

I gave him my consent. He proceeded to gush about every aspect of the game for ten minutes straight with ever-incandescent passion sundering in every move and every expression he made. He really did like that game, I gathered. I asked him how his day went.

“I’m trying to get onto our company’s director board, that’s something.”

I admitted my ignorance on the subject. He explained to me in laborious detail; he must have put a lot of effort into it, despite his nonchalant tone. I asked him if he really wanted that director position that badly.

“What else could you do in this squalor?” He smiled at me, and I laughed.

April 15th, 2088. All three of the major Abrahamic religious holidays -- Passover, Ramadan, and Easter -- concurred on that same weekend. Most staff members went home to their families, and only a few of us, the foreign and the homeless, stayed in our company-assigned dormitory. Cull bought a whole bunch of liquor for us to get drunk on while playing poker. Pramod was shitface on cannabis. At exactly a quarter before midnight, we called the night and everyone returned to their rooms. I gave myself a rough wash and sunk into my bed, hoping that unconsciousness would take me without any hindrance from my rhinitis.

The darkness of the room faded, and I saw God standing at the end of my bed.