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A short story about the citizens of the moon watching the nuclear war on Earth. |
| As Alex listened to the latest news updates on her way to work, a shiver ran down her spine. It wasn't much; just the remains of a statement her friend John had made earlier in the morning. Things were getting tense down on Earth, and everyone up here knew it. You could read it in people's eyes. The lunar citizens who could leave, had left. There was all kinds of talk about a war on Luna, about bombs that would shut down the ventilation systems, leaving everyone to asphyxiate. But it was all talk. The fact of the matter was that Luna wasn't a major target, for anyone. While down on earth, politicians had the leeway to make threats about other nations, up here, on Luna, no one had such freedoms. While initially, Luna (back when it was just called 'the moon') had had outposts, each of which flew a flag that had originally been created on Earth, over time, it had made more sense to create larger, less independent, conglomerates. Luna was split into two states: one, belonging to the Asian Confederation, and the other half, which flew the flag of the EuroAmerican Union. But unlike the citizens of Earth, who had the ability to be self-sufficient, the Lunans had to rely on each other. The AC had the mining and farming capability, while the EAU had the production capacity. Eventually, the two states decided it made much more sense to operate under the same set of laws, and formed together to create the Allied States of Luna. In this way, they had surpassed most of the infighting that was going on at home, down on Earth. Alex turned her buggy right, into the employee parking lot at Lunar Aerospace. She found her personal parking spot, and pulled in. She turned off the radio, which had now switched from its reports on the latest border clash between China and Russia, and had moved on to weather predictions (mostly sunny, with a few patches of clouds, but no moisture). Alex smiled as she looked out of her buggy, into the pouring rain. When you were living in a giant plastic bubble, she thought, you'd think the meteorologists could at least get the artificial weather forecast right. But that was Terran bureaucracy for you. Just like the fact that, even though most of Earth's power was generated by giant solar panels on Luna, all of the power conversion had to be done down on Earth, and then transferred back. She grabbed her umbrella from under the seat, and put it up. She scampered up the sidewalk and into the lobby. The place was deserted, as it always was this early. That was the prime reason she hated coming her so early, as she had tried to explain to her boss the night before. It was something about the solitude. She'd had to make a lot of changes when moving from Las Vegas (which now stretched all the way up to southern Idaho), but one of the few things she could never get used to was the solitude. After living in a city with 200 million inhabitants, moving to a city with barely 5,000 had been quite a culture shock. But she had to finish this report by noon, in order to get it to the shareholder's conference on earth in time. It hadn't taken her long to realize that, even though Luna had attained semi-independence from Earth the colonies would shut down if it wasn't for the constant income stream coming from the bigwigs down on planet Earth. If the money wasn't there, then neither was the society. There would be anarchy in the streets in days. As Alex looked at her homepage on her computer, this fact hit her suddenly, and she shivered again. |
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