Work Text:
Lunar Base Alpha is 10,000 years old, built in the style of a future that was never coming, by people who knew their dreams were obsolete. It's a happier place than you'd expect under the circumstances. Nano-assisted resource fabrication and construction have rendered the hallways wide and airy, a network of bright aluminum tubes and streak-free glass windows radiating from a central domed atrium, which features a miniature forest of living, utterly gratuitous trees. The whole base looks the way that even science fiction stopped looking after a certain point in the 20th century, when space travel had gotten far enough for everyone to realize just how cramped and grimy our future on the moon was likely to be; of course, that future didn't come either. By the time anyone was building a moon base, survivability and cost were no longer an object, and the golden-age dreamers won out. It would be a perfect triumph, except for the fact that there's no reason to live on the moon besides stubbornness. Lunar Base Alpha can house 50,000 people, but there's rarely more than a thousand here, most of them drifting between the moon and Earth every few months as the whim takes them. There are maybe 300 lifers, and Renee Aguilar is one of them. She's into mini golf these days.
Mini golf on the moon is stupid, which is why Renee is into it. One of the few things the moon is good for is regular golf, or maxi golf, courses groomed like Zen rock gardens to take advantage of the limited gravity. (Renee plays a round now or then, when a friend's visiting from Earth and wants to indulge, but she's never seen the appeal of the long drive.) Her lunar mini golf is cultivated in the parts of Lunar Base Alpha that are neglected or were never used in the first place. Her favorite is unused personal quarters, in such abundance that there's an entire sub-sub-wing that's her longest "course," 240 holes built around the stock furnishings of single-person bunks and kitchenettes. When she gets bored, she takes a year off, and then spite gets her back in the game.
When Renee gets the call that her ex-best-friend is back on the moon, she's finishing up an experimental hole, one intended for a marble-sized golf ball and a miniature putter. She's precision-machined all the ramps and tunnels in the base wood shop (someone else's pet project from a few thousand years ago), fitted for a smooth glide, calibrated precisely to guide the ball to rest in the ideal conditions for each shot to make par. Renee can tell it's a good design because she's actually looking forward to playing it, and the sound of her phone is an unpleasant interruption from her mental force and trajectory calculations. The fact that it's Chelsea's ringtone is even less pleasant. Why does she still have a custom ringtone set for Chelsea?
She picks up anyway, because why the hell not? "You're alive?"
"No, I'm space dust, and this is the nanos calling on my behalf." Chelsea doesn't sound any different, although there's no reason she should have. "Of course I'm alive, you dink. I just set down at the spaceport. Come meet me."
For the first few hundred years or so after Chelsea left, Renee practiced responses to this: mostly variations on "I'm not beholden to you," "you made your choice when you got on that ship," "you can't possibly think I owe you anything." The ones that come to mind now are more to the point. "You blew me off," say, or "I'm kind of busy." Maybe just "screw off." Instead, what she says, before she can stop herself, is "how long has it been?"
"3170 years. 1585 out, 1585 back. You lost count?"
"I've been busy. What brought you back? Did you hit the limit?"
"I got bored. C'mon, get down here. I'll buy you dinner."
Now would be another decent time for "screw off," but Renee says "yes" instead.
Human space exploration has always been an endurance challenge. In its infancy, it was a simple game of "can we do this at all?", followed closely by "can we do this and bring people back alive?" Once it became clear you could, but only with a lot of practice and a modicum of luck, space became both a skill game and a question of enduring the indignities of survival and bodily functions in zero-g. When 2025 took the question of death off the table, and the nanos hammered out the fine points of living comfortably, the dream of space without misery bloomed anew: no generation ships, no cryo-sleep, just journeys into the infinite unknown. Reality slammed home in the centuries and millennia to follow. Nobody was able to break Einstein's big speed limit for anything much bigger than a particle, so those long journeys out into the unknown would be very long indeed. Every telescope and probe showed cosmic grandeur but no signs of life, past or present. In a world without birth, colonizing an empty galaxy would just mean spreading the human population thinner and thinner. Post-death space is a worse endurance test than ever: endurance of tedium, of loneliness, of endless distance with nothing waiting at the end of the trip. And, of course, there's the million-dollar question: if you get far enough from Earth, away from the great miracle of 2025, is death possible again?
Space is boring as hell. It's lonely, because the maniacs who still travel don't tend to have a lot of friends. It's maybe even dangerous, the kind of danger that everyone on the big playground of Earth is still afraid of. About the only reason to do it is sheer spite. Thankfully, Chelsea Hranec has always had spite in spades.
It started as a stupid late-night bullshit idea: take a single-seater craft out, and see how far she could go before something happened: her vital signs changing, finding somewhere worth going, or just getting tired. Renee hadn't been a fan. "Okay, but what if you just die out there as soon as you hit the wall? We're all ten thousand years old, Chels. Maybe your telomeres just unravel and all your cells explode. You want to risk that?"
"I mean, why not? It'd suck to die, but I'd figure something new out, right? Send some data back. Be the last motherfucker ever to die, beat the hell out of the last chump. What am I doing here, anyway?"
"Living the dream, I thought," said Renee, and killed her vape. "Living on the moon. Isn't that enough for you?"
It had been for a few thousand years, sure, but you could only play pinball at the Lunar Base Alpha Cosmo-Lounge and kibitz with the rest of the spiteful astronauts for so long before you got a little antsy. Sure, everyone on the base could bond over being the kids who wore glasses and flunked gym and had some kind of weird intestinal thing -- the kids who'd decided to be astronauts and were told, gently or not, that there was a snowball's chance in Hell of that ever happening, and were now spitting in the universe's eye for crushing that dream -- but everyone talked around the fact that the dream, if not crushed, was pretty worn and dented. They'd gotten to the moon, but no farther. Why not break through the cowardice and do it right?
The argument went on for hours. Chelsea replayed it over and over in her mind, and now waiting in the spaceport, it's all coming back. Mostly Renee telling her she was a stubborn moron, and her saying, you fucking know it, a stubborn moron born and bred, what do you want from me --
And then Renee's there, and Chelsea sets it aside. It's the first human face she's seen in three thousand years.
"Good to see you," says Chelsea, though she doesn't go for a hug. "I mean it. Where's good to eat around here?"
"There's this barbecue joint that opened in Wing 5. Texas-style, not very saucy, none of that vinegar crap. C'mon." Renee sets out, and Chelsea follows, realizing how little she remembers of the Base Alpha layout or of navigating anything bigger than the shiny silver pod she's been piloting. "What were you eating in the spaceship?"
"This and that. Nanos had a lot of cookbooks. Been mostly Indian for the past, I dunno, 200 years?"
"I hope you haven't lost your taste for red meat, then," replies Renee as they reach the people-mover to Wing 5. "Take it easy on the brisket if your stomach's not up for it." Her voice is trying hard to be cheerful, but she's pulled her arms in tight, like she's trying to narrow herself to a single line. If they weren't stuck on the people-mover, she looks like she'd be searching for an exit. Just how badly was Chelsea a dick on the phone, anyway?
The barbecue place has a bunch battered tin signs on the wall, maybe to try and cancel out the smooth space-age lines of a Lunar Base Alpha commercial unit, and there are real cooking fires burning behind the counter. Chelsea orders a half-pound of brisket: nanofabbed meat, of course, but cooked by a human being instead of spun whole-cloth from carbohydrate chains or what the hell ever the shipborne food-nanos use, so that's nice. Renee doesn't order a thing. They sit down at a booth, and Renee leans back, and Chelsea leans in. "Renee," she starts, because she won't be able to eat with this bile in her mouth. "You're pissed, right? You look pissed."
"Is there a good reason I shouldn't be pissed? We had that dumb conversation, and inside the month, you took off. I heard from you maybe twice before you got out of contact range."
"I had a lot of shit to set up. You lose track of time out there, okay? And contact range is shorter than you think."
"You knew all your damn variables before you got on that ship. I know you like to play dumb, Chelsea, but you're not that dumb. You left me in the dust, all so, what, you could fuck around and die? I couldn't sleep for a month. I knew you'd find the limit, and you'd die, and all we'd get back was some shitty little data transmission once your ship autopiloted back. Or didn't, and we'd never know."
Fuck. Fucking fuck. Renee'd taken all that shit about being the last person to die seriously, some kind of declaration of intent, not the stupid half-stoned bravado she'd intended. How does she talk herself out of this one? "I didn't... shit. Okay. I set up a ton of monitors with the nano. Heart rate, respiration, blood chemistry, all of it. Anything divergent, the alarms start blaring, the autopilot kicks in reverse, and I turn back with a minimum of my cells exploded, you get me? I always meant to come home."
"So what took you 1600 years?"
"I had a lot of books to get through. Wrote a couple myself. Took a lot of video, tried to edit it down. I've got some decent supercuts, the best few hours of every 100 years or so. And then I ran out of books, and the ship's stereo speakers started getting shitty, and one morning I woke up and said 'fuck it, time to go home.'"
"That's it, huh? That's all you're giving me?" Renee sits up, leans in closer, and her face falls. "... and you're telling the truth, because you're a godawful liar."
"You can't say I'm not honest. What have you been up to, anyway?"
"Mini golf. Hundreds of holes, all over the base. Don't you dare laugh."
"Why would I laugh? That's rad. I wanna see for myself, maybe play a few, if you'll let me? I gotta stretch my legs, but maybe not regular-golf stretch my legs." Chelsea pokes at her brisket with her plastic fork, risks putting a slice in her mouth, hoping it's not too awkward to remember to eat. It's lukewarm, but moist and crumbly, with a good peppery dry rub. "Yeah, this place was a good call," she says once she's swallowed. "I said it was mostly Indian the past few centuries, but half the time it was granola bars. You get bored enough and you start choosing whatever damn food the nano can make the fastest."
Renee is silent a little while longer, watching as Chelsea chews another slice of brisket. "My courses are public access; there's a directory in the information kiosk in the atrium. I won't stop you from playing. ... You stupid fucking asshole, I thought I'd never see you again."
Shit. Chelsea almost chokes, swallowing hard before the coughing can start. "Jesus. I really didn't -- I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry. Look, I won't stick around if you don't want me to. I could use some time on Earth. I'll take the elevator down and you can forget I ever came back, okay?"
Renee shakes her head. Something relaxes in her face, and Chelsea feels a faint spark of hope again. "No. Stay a while. Let's give it a week or two. Maybe... maybe you'll want to go, or maybe you'll want to stay. Maybe I'll get over myself. Besides, don't you want to show me your videos?"
"It's like 75 hours of footage."
"I don't have plans. Call it a trade -- you play my courses, I watch your videos, and... and then we see where we stand."
It may be more of a chance than Chelsea deserves. She knows she's a stupid, stubborn asshole, even by the standards of post-mortal astronauts. She's going to have to get good at mini golf in a hurry, or hope that her flailing is entertaining, but it's a mission she's willing to take on. "Deal," she says, before Renee can change her mind.
"Deal," replies Renee. "Now you get back to eating. That creamed corn goes to absolute Hell if it gets cold."