Lunar Colony 3 E-Book

Suzann Dodd

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This is speculative fiction focusing on Lunar Settlers who decide to create a new colony under different rules.  The Politics behind it are not speculative.

Leseprobe

Suzann Dodd

Lunar Colony 3

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG80331 Munich

The Beginning

Most of what think you know about Lunar Colony Three is a lie. I can say this with the boldness of having been there. Not a dissenter, who for validation paints a portrait with dark colours, but a component of the Movement.

A component, who held minor positions in the Liberation Movement, the Luna Liberation Party, and finally the Government.

Yes, I was one of them.

And now I am one of the fifty who volunteered for the mission to 'New Earth', four light years away. By the time you read this I will be dead or beyond sanction.

Let me begin with a taste of history, I won't dwell on it, you've studied it at school. You know that citizens of LC 1 and LC 2 participated in creating LC 3.

We had the experience of creation, development and importantly, residence. We were not explorers but average people who had gone to the moon as settlers wanting a better life.

The Thalia crater, as we came to call it, was on that line between light and darkness. It was just under a kilometer in diameter and just over one hundred and thirty meters deep.

We had eight tunnel diggers then, taken from LC 1 and LC 2, and went into the crater with exuberance.

The Work

 I wish I could capture the excitement, the commitment we had riding down into the crater. We'd held a lottery to determine who'd drive the diggers.

A ceremony we made of it, carefully lining up the diggers to take that famous photo, before racing into the sides of the crater to start digging, while others constructed the furnace to manufacture slabs of gaglas.

I suppose you're familiar with that pseudo material, a semi-transparent gas plastiglass. It covered the walls of the tunnels and the living tubes which were inserted into the side corridors.

I don't know when you'll read this, assume gaglas is still being used, as it's cheap enough.

Us oldsters used to call it 'plastic ', though of course it wasn't, but if you read anything written in those days referring to plastic, we're talking gaglas.

Anyway, there were over two hundred of us working on the tunnels. Wanting to work on the tunnels. We started with two hour shifts to allow everyone to have a hand in.

We liked that system. Work two, be relieved, sit on the ground attached to the purifiers until the shift came around again.

Connecting to the purifiers came as close to ecstasy as we could get.

Remember no intoxicants were allowed on the Moon in those days. Sure folks tried to make wine out of the fruits grown in the garden section, but the law was so stiff that one bottle wasn't worth arrest and deportation.

But getting on a purifier, well there was a minute there where the carbon dioxide was being sucked out that the air got a bit thin and the oxygen coming in gave a high unlike any other. It was only a minute, maybe two, but it was good.

I don't want you to think we worked on LC 3 just for the high, no, that was extra. We worked on its creation because we had the first chance to bust Earth Law.

Our first opportunity to lock out stupidvisors who forgot we weren't robots or clones or mind dead minions, but people. People who wanted to live and enjoy life, not be lab rats.

We began building when those who would push rules and regulations were giving their reports to the United Nations. We'd jerked around the starting date on L.C. 3 until it coincided with the departure of our bureaucrats. Then we behaved as if we were only digging because we had to.

That's a lesson I want you to learn.

People have a streak of evil running up their backbones. If they think you want something, they will deny it. It gives them a blush of power. If they believe it's a matter of indifference, they'll give it to you because it makes them feel they aren't pleasing you.

The reason we fall in love is because someone tries to please us. Think about it, when you get the chance.

Anyway, our bureaucrats, thinking that the work teams of LC 1 and LC 2 were going to build LC 3 because they were required to, left Luna with more than a clear conscience.

The construction of LC 3 went non-stop from beginning to end. The tunneling machines never shut, the furnace never stopped squeezing out panels of gaglas and we never left the site, putting up envirohuts for down time.

Considering the hassle of suiting up and going out, then unsuiting and coming in, we pushed ourselves to the limit.

We had feeders in our visors, so would suck Go Juice, that overly enriched mixture of whatever which, in those days, tasted like grapefruit, but later on, flavours were introduced.

For hours we'd be out there, working, getting 'hits' of oxygen from the purifiers, drinking Go Juice, until our brains shut down. Then we'd be taken to an envirohut, wiped down, put on a cot.

This work schedule was our first 'defiance', as according to 'law' we were to 'work' no more than four hours in succession.