Alone on the Moon [A Short Story] (Patreon)

I've been wary of posting my writing, mostly because on the Internet it's hard to get anyone to read anything that isn't skimming an article.

But I wanted to take a chance, in case you all are interested. I am writing a visual novel, after all and your probably want to know if I can back that up.

I wrote this last night in a sitting. An idea I had and am running with it. I'll be writing more and, if there's interest, I'll post them here. (I may just post them anyway.) They aren't meant to be great, just interesting. Hope you get something out of them.

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Alone on the Moon [FULL STORY HERE] 

A man lived alone on the moon. He pushed a few buttons on the console. A steady beep-- beep-- beep-- kept him company. Radar was clear. Radio was clear. He slouched. The skies were empty today, just as they were every day.

He'd last heard from Mission Control a few weeks ago. Back in the old days when NASA-- when there were still only national-- was dipping their toes up here, Mission Control actually mattered. They'd control the mission. Now-- it was less of a mission and more of a sentence. They had better things to do than check on a signal tower on the edge of the moon.

The astronaut sipped his coffee, thrice filtered and tasting like fetid animal. The tinny walls breathed old air pressed through CO2 scrubbers. He filled his lungs and pressed them flat. Cold, canned air.

He had left his hometown in Arizona, a savagely orange place where it's difficult to breathe, to work in a civilian tourist center called 'Wink' on the Sea of Tranquility, a savagely white place where it's impossible to breathe.

This was all he'd ever wanted. To go to space. Visit the moon, see the Earth. Be left alone.

He wasn't hungry anymore. He'd tired of drinking filtered and re-filtered urine. No rain. Never was any back home, he thought, but now it was true. He looked out the window he imagined he had. Stars twinkled, but the cameras only caught a pixel-worth of each if at all.

When he came to this place, he'd been issued a single drive. It was only a few petabytes, but it came with a few libraries of things to occupy his time. He'd watched half of the movies and shows before even setting foot in anything that had a thruster and the games never really held his attention being they were old and often didn't run on the machinery he was assigned to anyway.

The static crackled and popped...

Just noise. Space was filled with strange signals, none of them intelligible. Here he was though, just in case. Much more likely Russian shuttles, or whoever, would attempt to land and claim bits of the moon for their country. He didn't care for the politics of it all, but the (now multinational) MASA did and they paid him to report chatter and visual contact. Not that he'd had any.

No, his expertise was in programming. That's ultimately why he was called in. To keep this place running and report things. Today he was pulling on the weight machines to keep up his muscle mass. He felt weak and exhausted. He was withered.

Motion led to an idea. A basic idea that he'd had back in college where he'd learn to design fundamental AI neural pathways and, in essence, render a highly trained, knowledgeable personality to interface with. You know, a chatbot.

[FULL STORY HERE]