Winning Peace - Chapter 26 (Patreon)

Ivan sighed as he looked up towards the slowly-expanding ring around Luna. The basic structure was finished, a full reinforced scaffold of some composite material he couldn't hope to say on his best day. No, his job was directing a crew of robots to move stuff about in preparation for the next stage already being built. The plan was for a full orbital construction ring to be put into place around the moon eventually, with multiple anchor points by which to install orbital elevators and turn Luna into the shipbuilding hub of the Sol System.

With the latest discoveries, the priority on those plans had moved up considerably.

“Hey, Diego! It's time to clock off for lunch!” Ivan called, tapping the radio on his neck to carry his voice over towards the other man. The quiet music he'd had playing the in background cutoff as the radio slotted on.

“Roger-Roger,” Diego called back with a tinge of snark in his voice and Ivan gave in to the urge to roll his eyes as he walked over towards the lunar buggy which was sitting nearby.

“Yeah, yeah, you shiny metal asshole. Get in the cab or I'm leaving you here,” Ivan ordered, tapping at the small console on his wrist as the various Autos around them curled up into a more stable position for sleep-mode. The coring devices next to them and the trailer full of stacked cylinders being left where they lay for the moment.

“I don't see why we can't just leave the bots working out here while we eat,” Diego griped. “It'd cut project time down by twenty-percent, at least.”

“And give the Oversight Committee a reason to strangle us on system-wide television?” Ivan asked sarcastically.

“You're doing that thing again,” Diego noted absently, the man finally buckling into the seat next to him and triggering a comfort device that wiped his forehead free of the light sheen of sweat that had been building.

“Hmm?” Ivan asked, tapping a button on the buggy and putting light pressure on the accelerator. Regolith meant you had to get off the starting block slowly or you'd spin out and go nowhere. He longed for the day when the initial round of prospecting was done and the construction could begin on the local roads.

 “That thing where you refer to the oversight committee as a proper noun,” Diego stated. “They're not. They're just a bunch of government bureaucrats who were given too much power.”

“They're a name to conjure with, kid, and you'd best learn that now,” Ivan replied. “As much as you're right, they're also field experts for the projects. Gone are the days where you can just pick someone's kid with a liberal arts degree to oversee the back end of a major construction project.”

And good riddance.

The thought was an earnest one, something he'd been having more of ever since he'd moved moon-side. It surprised him how often the biting cynicism of the past two decades was now fading into a more shallow sarcastic good-natured grumble or joke.

It felt good, after the hell he'd been through.

It felt normal. Normal like before the bombs dropped. Normal like when he was growing up in Denver back when he was a kid, only with the added advantage of working in goddamn space on an orbital ring of the moon.

The kind of new normal he could get behind.

 Then, Diego just had to go and spoil the quiet moment of zen he'd worked himself into.

“So... aliens,” the passenger on the buggy asked, Ivan able to see an icon with his brown face highlighted to indicate he was speaking on his hub, even if he wasn't going to look at the man while driving.

“Aliens,” Ivan stated with a grunt of agreement, keeping his eyes on the uneven regolith marked only by the previous tracks of his rover. He still remembered coming out here the first time, idly mapping the place while figuring out how to use the arcing belt of technology and the rising blue-green world on the horizon to navigate like an ancient mariner of old.

Sure, he'd had lunar-synchronous satellites and a precisely laser-mapped three-dimensional rendering of the region to reference, but...

Where was the fun in that?

It had been a long time since he'd had a thought like that, at the time. Something silly and wasteful to the point where it had surprised even himself and brought him laughing nearly to the point of crying. Diego, thankfully, hadn't brought the incident up since.

“Think they're friendly?” His friend and coworker asked.

“I think they're dead,” Ivan replied dryly. “That thing in the center of Charon is covered by ice and debris that's older than the dinosaurs. Whatever that thing is, it looks like it's still in working order given the signal it's putting out. Seems like they left a guidance beacon or something beeping away in case they wanted to find their way back, to me. But the important part is that's a long time. That's a long time on a geological scale. That thing might be so old it's seen the rise and fall of multiple supercontinents back on Earth. If whoever built those things is still around, odds are they're evolved or uploaded or augmented themselves biologically to the point where they're functionally something new. My personal vote is that they either extincted themselves, something else came along and did it, or they just fucked off somewhere more interesting after getting bored.”

Diego chuckled and Ivan could see the other surveyor turning to look at him out of the corner of his eye. “That's a lot to take in. Normally you don't say much.”

Ivan grunted with a self-conscious shrug. “It's a big thing to think about. I've got twenty years on you, boy, even if you are Luna-born. Don't act like I haven't got a thought in my head.”

The other man just chuckled, having long become familiar with Ivan's coarse attitudes. “And what about the Mars aliens? I think they're calling them the Protheans. They're still arguing about what to call-”

“The Mi-Go,” Ivan interjected.

“...you're way more into this than I thought you'd be,” Diego commented idly after a moment of thoughtful silence. “I really thought you wouldn't care... for some reason.”

 “I'll care more when we find a live one,” Ivan replied. “And not all the weird shit living on the moons out there or the creepy-crawlies they found in those caves on Mars. Show me a real, proper alien in a spaceship and everything and I'll give a shit.”

“That might not be too far off. The Martian ones are only supposed to be a few tens of thousands of years old, you know? As opposed to hundreds of millions.” Diego, comment drew another scoff from the older man as he shook his head.

While Ivan reflected that the few strands of hair escaping the space-cap he wore underneath the suit should have started to gray given how old he was, he knew without checking that they were as black as they had been in his twenties. Another little miracle.

Or a big one, depending on how you looked at it.

Pushing away the still-unanswered questions about contemporary humanity's longevity, Ivan replied. “Forty or fifty thousand. Feh, I'll be surprised if they're still around, too. Less, though. Those servers were evidently still running down in the bowels of the outpost. That's some impressive stuff... but look at what's happened every couple of decades in modern human history. You really think another race could survive something like that for thousands of years? Let alone tens of thousands?”

He could hear the uncomfortable frown in Diego's tone, even if he couldn't see it on his face. “Maybe we're just that bad at this whole civilization game? Is it wrong to hope that someone else got it right and didn't have to go through all this?”

“Wrong, no. It ain't that.” Ivan stated, his voice absently slipping into his mother's old southern twang he'd picked up in bits and pieces. The sound of his own voice hitting his ears made him sigh. “Ain't realistic, either. Just sayin.”

Diego grunted, sighing himself as they pulled up to the only thing out here in the middle of nowhere, Luna. The hab units loomed large against the desolate landscape, a dozen blocky shapes jutting out from the white-gray regolith. Ivan steered for one in particular, where another dozen buggies were all parked on a large ultracrete pad.

There was something, he considered absently, so very human about putting a parking lot on the moon.

Shaking his head at the thought and turning off the motor, he unbuckled himself as Diego did the same, each of them stepping out and making their way towards the airlock in companionable, if thoughtful, silence. A swipe of his wrist-mounted computer opened the door and allowed them into a room with metal grates covering every side of it from floor to ceiling.

“Hate this part,” Diego bitched quietly as the door behind them shut and air began rushing at them in pressurized waves. Even with their suits working to dampen the noise of the process, it was still like standing in a tornado for a few moments as they were battered and blown clean.

 Ivan hated it too, truth be told, but he kept quiet due to the necessity of it. As much of a tune-up as the vaccine had given his battered old smoker's lungs, no one sane wanted to inhale aerosolized quick-setting cement. Which, in a nutshell, was what moon dust really was. As a bonus, with no atmosphere to speak of here on Luna, millions of years had done nothing to dull the knife-like edges of each and every microscopic particle. So quick-setting cement that was also glass.

Thankfully, their modern suits had a lot fewer nooks and crannies than the old astronaut suits, so they tracked less of the shit in on themselves. Still, as the final stage of the process came and went, misting them down with water before drying them off insufficiently like an old shitty bathroom hand-dryer, the airlock finally equalized pressure and the light over the door snapped from red to green before opening the door.

Amanda Childress greeted them on the other side, offering a pair of towels with a grin. “Look at what the cat finally dragged in, thought you two were going to skip lunch there for a minute.”

Lifting off the headpiece of his suit, Ivan shook his head and took a deep breath of fresh-ish air. “We just don't get in the buggy until lunch break actually hits, unlike some people.”

“Yep, that's us. Brown-nosers and goody-two-shoes,” Diego grinned, pulling free the glove around his head and shaking out his sweat-damp shaggy black hair.

“Suppose someone around here has to be,” Jenny Simmons chuckled from a nearby table with a tray of food in front of her, green eyes and red hair visually startling against dark skin and her high-visibility space suit.

A chorus of other greetings and jokes rang out from the various teams, all of them settling in with food and entertainment of their own. Many stared down at small screens, white hoops of material over their ears. Two were seemingly unconscious, solid helmets obscuring their heads as they reclined in large seats with a few prepackaged food wrappers on their laps. The helmets themselves bore the signs of half-cleaned graffiti, the eternal cost of taking a nap, VR or no, around a bunch of adult children in a high-stress environment. Ivan was comforted by the fact that everyone drew the line at fucking with the suits themselves, at least.

That was a one-way ticket to getting fired and blacklisted. Which, well... it wasn't the death sentence it would have been decades ago, but it still wasn't something anyone with an ounce of ambition and drive wanted to see happen to themselves. That, and it would mean flushing three years of seminars, testing, apprenticed field work, and other hassles down the fucking drain. Which didn't even account for the extra two years of dedicated academic study required to get into the program in the first place.

It's almost like they don't want just any idiot playing around with killer robots and industrial power tools in hard vacuum at one-sixth G.

There it was again, he noticed in the back of his mind, another spot of humor that was almost nostalgic in how it reminded him of the way things used to be. As he swiped his wrist-computer over the nanofabber with one of his preselected meals, his eyes traced the busy room full of people he knew by name and routinely trusted with his life now. That thought, more than anything, made something deep inside of him ache and rage at the raw waste of so many years.

So many lives. Sorry sis, I won't forget. I'll never forget.

As he went to pick up the newly-printed food, plate, and utensils, his hand brushed an airtight pouch at his side with a non-regulation silver locket.

“-so, all I'm saying is why don't they just go ask Lopez to come out of retirement, politely, and help out with this whole alien mess?” Swen asked with a shrug and absent gesture with his fork.

“Because it would piss off at least half of parliament?” Jenna asked in reply, arching a brow eyebrow over a blue eye. The other, slightly unsettlingly, was an obvious cybernetic that glowed red. Ivan was one of the few people she'd admitted to keeping it 'raw' in order to fuck with people. He also remembered the memo the site manager had sent out on how to personalize communication icons.

Ivan himself had set hers to an old ape-jpeg that some idiots a century ago had thought was worth thousands of dollars.

“The bio-con faction is never happy, I don't see why we should keep catering to them,” a third voice rang out, half-garbled through a mouthful of food.

“Because they're reasonable on everything else,” Diego replied, sitting down nearby with his own food, another tray of spicy curry as opposed to Ivan's own more staid beef stew. “Industry, military, economics... they're chill on all that and open to compromise. They're just stupid assholes about the genome.”

“Yeah, but even they have to admit we should have humanity's brightest minds working on the alien artifacts,” Swen pointed out, the younger man still unfamiliar with politics. “I mean, who do they really think put together the Gene Lock that went into testing last year?”

“An unnamed group of specialists from across the system working together to ensure no unwilling alteration to any individual human or humanity at large's genome will be allowed to happen,” Jenna quoted nearly verbatim from the press release that Ivan remembered seeing.

It was still startling how well he remembered things like that, sometimes. Especially with how many brain cells he'd pickled after his sister died.

“Just like every other group of politicians throughout history. As long as you slap a pretty package on it and don't mention whoever they identify as the cause of all human misery, they'll happily take it if it furthers their agenda.” Amanda paused, grinning a cynical smile at everyone as she spooned ice cream into her mouth. “Even if they all probably know, deep down, who made it.”

“Truth,” someone Ivan couldn't pick out mumbled.

 “So to answer your question, Lopez is likely already working on it, just unofficially,” Jenna nodded towards the blonde Norwegian. “And everyone involved is going to lie to themselves, he's not going to ask for any credit, and we're all going to pretend it didn't happen.”

Swen clicked his tongue, scowling down at his food. “That really fucking sucks.”

“It's what happens when you scare people,” an older man with prematurely gray hair stated, picking up a pouch of fluid with a cherry on it and taking a long draw through the straw. Luna wasn't quite as strict with liquids as dwarf planets, asteroids, and standalone colonies were, but fluids still behaved rather oddly in one-sixth gravity and, at a worksite, it was better to be safe than sorry.

“Didn't pick you for a bio-con, doc,” Diego commented idly, the words just a hair's breadth away from being a dangerous insinuation.

Several people shuffled uncomfortably at what would have been, long ago, 'fighting words.'

“I'm not,” Doc Sato, the site's resident astro-paleo-biologist replied without offense. The Japanese-Lunarian shrugged and continued. “But you don't have to be, to be afraid of Ezekiel Lopez.”

A couple of people around the room scoffed.

Swen, in particular, decided to argue the subject. “I'm not afraid of him. He's a good man. A good person. He saved humanity at least twice and probably more besides. He's the reason we're still in space.”

Sato nodded, rubbing at the stubble on his chin as he stared into the middle distance and took another sip of his drink. “I agree with everything you just said, yes.”

Swen blinked and he wasn't the only one. Around the room, conversations stalled at the unexpected reply. The younger blonde stared at the asian man oddly. “Then why'd you say you're scared of him.”

Doc Sato looked at his coworker with a stern expression. “That is not what I said, young man.” His features softened. “But I suppose it is what I meant. Even if my ego does not like to admit it.”

There was a stretching silence as Sato drained his pouch and set it aside, smacking his lips at the flavor before sighing. “I say it does not take prejudicial beliefs to be afraid of Ezekiel Lopez because it does not. If you do not fear him, you do not understand what he has done. Not that it is anything bad, truly. There are questions of morality and ethics and deception. But put those aside. Think not of the way in which he did these things, but of what he did.”

There were clueless looks around the room exchanged between working groups.

“He... cured the rabies virus, He stopped the Rabid Years,” Jenna stated slowly, unsurely, not understanding what the other man was getting at.

Doc Sato hummed and nodded, tapping at his head. “He rewrote the entire human genome and did not cause a single death. The work of hundreds of millions of years of evolution reworked into a seamless, unfailingly better and more capable biological machine in the span of a year.”

Many, who had nod pondered the reality of the infamous or famous human figure's accomplishment, frowned thoughtfully.

Sato continued. “What is more? He rewired the human brain, that most complicated of organs which even now we struggle to comprehend. To adjust something as seemingly mundane as memory throws off our ability to pay attention. Then there is empathy, where one might accidentally turn another into a manic-depressive should they tamper too freely.”

“So he's really good at what he does. I'm still not seeing why we should be scared of him,” Diego stated, another spoonful of rice and meat sauce entering his mouth.

“He is not merely good,” Doc Sato replied, his gaze turning to this Hispanic-Lunarian. “He is the greatest mind humanity has ever produced. There is a difference between mere superior skill and intelligence and accomplishing what literally every other mind in a field considers utterly impossible. Ezekiel Lopez does the latter as a matter of course. Such a man is barely a man at all, more a force of nature than a living being.”

Swen was visibly chewing on the words the older man was saying, nodding slowly. “But... he's still a good person, right? Or, at least, the things he's done... they've all been good.”

Sato nodded. “For which I am thankful for. Thankful beyond what words convey. But my fear is not of a scientist in a laboratory making miracles. My fear, and the fear of those who truly understand what the man has accomplished, it is the fear of a hurricane or a tidal wave.”

Ivan hesitated, then cleared his throat, drawing attention to himself.

After a moment swallowing his last bite of food, he took a breath. “I met him, you know? Couple of years back, when I just got up to Armstrong. Fresh off the boat. Went to that big old cavern he carved out for himself on a day there weren't protestors there.”

“...and he let you in?” Swen asked in disbelief, Ivan seeing the man staring out of the corner of his eyes. Sato was looking at him too, an intense expression on his face. “He never lets anyone in.”

“He did not the first time, or the second, or even the third...” Ivan admitted, pausing to chew on the inside of his cheek as he worked out the words he wanted to say. “I think it was the seventh. He cooked a meal, and we spoke over dinner. It was not long. I merely wished to thank him. I think he was surprised by that.”

Ivan turned towards Sato and shook his head. “You may call him a thunderhead or any manner of natural disaster. If that is how you see him, I will not argue with it. The man I ate with was none of those things. He was quiet, not like how he acted on the internet. Thoughtful. Calm. If you want to think of him as some kind of unknowable god, then do so, but if he is that, it was only by what the rest of us forced him to become.”

Sato blinked, nodding slowly to himself. “I... will hope you are right, Ivan. Then let us hope that nothing else conspires to bring him forth again. I dearly hope the world will allow him the peace he wishes for.”

~~~

As promised, here's the next chapter Winning Peace. And it's still Monday on the Pacific coast, so it's still on time! So there!

More seriously, I'll have the next chapter up in a day or two. It will either be Winning Peace or Where Your God Is. I really want to get the next chapter of that out soon. But WP did win the poll, so it still has priority and will get more chapters this month.

Peace out, rock on, and stay awesome!