User:Aleister/The second conquest of the moon
Note to readers: Please Don't. A much more polished version will be here soon, this is the contest entry but it has been worked on and expanded. Now go away. Thanks. Aleister 23:12 26-3-'13
Published November, 2038 by UnRandom House (New York, London, Kingston), all rights reserved.
Dedicated, with love, to Miss Baker.
Chapter One: "We choose to go back to the moon in this decade and do the other things."[edit | edit source]
Lars and Debbie never knew they had a good thing going. You ever meet a couple who thought they had it all - success, good looks, and a nice art collection - and yet hated each other without knowing it? That was Lars and Debbie. And now Debbie had to get that rat-like low-life motherfucker out of the fuckin' house before she fucking killed him. Moth-er Fuck-er, what in the nasal passage of Oprah's ghost did he think he was doing? Fucking her sister! No, he did not. He mother-fuckin fucked her sister!? Moth-er fuck-er.
But Debbie knew from studying Wilhelm Reich that when the body's chemistry is given this volume of a jolt, and you're either so god-damned angry you want somebody dead right now, or you're really so deep in grief - like when your mother dies and ain't that a mudderfucker! - that you have enough energy to go straight and deep into your emotional baggage, dig it out, and put it on the stoop and spread it around, that the best idea at those times is to take the energy and use it for something constructive. So Debbie, knowing Reich, walking fast, and all what "Mother fucker Lars slept with my bitch-ass thunder thighed mother-fucking sister? Rubbing his face in her pussy juices, what the fuck is that, in my sister???" Debbie cursed and steamed at people she was passing and the cars on the street, yelling like any normal New Yorker hyped-up about tenfold, as she marched her bony ass thank-you-very-much right across town, walked maybe five miles in her bare feet, stopped to pick up a pretzel, walked another mile and shoved her way right past the surpised guards, walked right down the hall and, shoving another guard aside, burst through the door of the fucking General Assembly of the United Nations and yelled "You mother-fuckers ever going back to the moon or what????"
Jacques LaTree, the ambassador of France to the United Nations and co-chair of the "United Nations Committee on Science, Space Exploration, and Refreshments", bored our of his skull and still half-listening to some Afghani going on and on about his countrymen not having enough clean drinking water, doodling arrows and circles and a pole-vaulting angora bunny onto his note pad, when suddenly he heard that loud cry of anger echo through the hall. He turned around, quick as a spark, just as this short barefoot 340-pound mexican woman, with her hands on her hips and a desert snake tattooed on one exposed shoulder, reared her head back and yelled even louder "What in the ho-ly godforsaken fuck are you waiting for? All the guys who walked on the moon have been dead for like ten mother-fucking years now, and I want some more of them! 'We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things my sweet red and rosy ass'. Now you mother-fuckers get me some more moon men or I swear I'm coming back here!!"
Debbie then turned and marched out the way she'd come in, screaming for the goons to let her-the- fuck-go, let go of her mudder-fucking arms or she swears on goddess' left-tit she'd make sure no baby juice would ever ever again emerge from that scrawny dick you mother-fucking scumbag. And LaTree, still staring at the space where the crazy lady had been, in a spontanious move that he was barely aware of himself, he stood up and applauded.
And like water off a lame duck's back the applause grew. First the ambassadors of Japan, the Netherlands, and Jamaica stood and joined LaTree. Then the entire eastern European block stood as one, and started cheering in some slavic tongue. This caused the Russian ambassador to get all bugged-eyed and angry, like 'Nyet nyet, try to show me up?', and he stood up and tried to clap and yell the loudest. This irritated China and India, and so on down to the Phoenix Islands and Vatican City. And then, by the time Canada and Australia gave in to the emotion of the moment, the United States, Israel, and Great Britain were already cursing their mother-fucking dumb luck and got up to unenthusiastically add to the subdued polite applause of the nations making up the Security Council and the massive overwhelming support from everybody else. By then Haiti was dancing most of all, next to the Jamaican ambassador standing upright on his desk and singing to the tune of "Redemption Song" "We choose to go....we choose to go right now.....we choose to go... we choose to go right now....we choose to go to the moon in this dec-ade, and do ... do do do...do the other things....do the other things...the other things" and before he went into the third verse the translators were going crazy trying to keep up with translating the song as well as the statements of support shouted out by various ambassadors. Within thiry seconds everyone in the room knew that they had been forced to choose to go to the moon in this decade and to do the other things.
Preparations to re-conquer the moon...[edit | edit source]
...took about a week. The internet tech boys and spaceship garage nerd start-ups had been uploading and perfecting the science for decades. Any ten-year old boy with a laptop could get you to the moon. Applying available tech and hardware to the moon mission didn't even require taking a ship out of mothballs - the newly named "Debbie" was fueled and ready to go by the time the real Debbie had gotten home from her walk to kick both her husband and her no-good nasty-ass sister down the stairs and throw his guitars and her goldfish out the third-story window, mother-fuckers no they did not! About the time the goldfish was rescued by a neighbor and Debbie's husband and her 400 pound sister limped to his car, the United Nations had agreed to fund a trip to the moon in this decade and to do the other things, which meant that the United States would fund 90% of it.
So the U.S. was given the right to name the mission's governing body - the World Astronomical Society Americana (WASA) - and to pick its first executive director (the best avilable candidate seemed to be the vice president's brother), but by the time any of those creeps got around to going into the office the mission was up and running and would launch on Thursday.
"That's another small step for man...[edit | edit source]
Thursday came, and the good ship Debbie took off without a hitch. By that time every inch of its trajectory and fuel-pound pressure per tube-cube had been so mapped out that they had been available on 360 and Wii well before the last living moon walker died in 2027.
The ship reached the moon in around eighteen hours, thanks to the Krynski drive - designed by a high school junior in Nebraska who won a ribbon and a kiss from the prom queen for his trouble. And because the earthnauts had literally nothing to do during the whole trip it was a rollicking hollering time for the two earthnauts, Nikola from the Ukraine and Juanita from Peru. And a dog, and a monkey. Nikola had snuck lots of vodka on board, and he and Juanita were plastered most of the way there.
They played drinking games, and tried to outdrink each other. In the process they shut off the communication to earth on a double-dare from Juanita. They tried to take photographs of each other but Juanita kept floating away and giggling. They carried with them the bodies of two of the orignal moon-walkers whose wills stipulated that they should be planted on the moon for future tourists to find and point at.
Also on board were several dozen experiments designed by moon conspiracy theorists, some earth rocks to scatter around the landscape and laugh, and a four-foot tall sculpture of an insect because it had won some on-line contest and there was no way to back out of it.
The dog and chimp were along to honor the first animals in space (which were actually fruit flies and mice, and a few of those were on board for good luck) and gave them the same names just to confuse historians - Laika the Russian dog, and Gordo, the American monkey. The dog kept barking most of the trip, and when Nikola tried to stare it into silence the monkey hooted and hollared and pulled its hair. Somewhere mid-trip it let the mice out of their cages, and then chased them in mid-air and threw them at the dog and the earthnauts. It was a hell of a mess, but the vodka did wonders for the atmosphere in the place. Soon, they arrived.
The touchdown on the moons surface was witnessed by only the dog. Everyone else was drunk and asleep, and when the computer brought "Debbie" down gently, Laika went around and nudged everyone's armpits. The monkey was the first to awaken, rub its eyes, and realize they'd landed - and its chriping woke the others. More vodka flowed. They decided to turn the radio and cameras on again, said "Hello Kingston, we have no problem" and started drinking again, but this time on air. By the time everyone got around to getting into their spacesuits and opening the hatch, the dog and the monkey had alreadly jumped out and began running all around the lunar surface. Nikola got to the lunar surface next, and vaguely remembered he was supposed to say something. "Ah, yeah, that's another small step for man, another giant drink, I mean, ah jeez did I say drink, another giant leap for mankind". By that time Juanieta was already rolling around the surface with the dog and monkey, laughing and tossing the monkey into the air to test the one-sixth gravity. Everyone was loving every minute of it.
"To the moon, Alice"[edit | edit source]
All this time ground control from Kingston was screaming in their mother-fucking ears, trying to tell them to get back on schedule. "Debbie's" computer, nicknamed Alice, was set to blast off the lunar surface in about seven hours. Nobody thought they'd accomplish anything that the six Apollo landers hadn't accomplish. The world had all the moon rocks it would ever need, and every inch of the moon had been photographed and chemically analyzed from generations of moon orbiters which had circled around the moon going on 70 years now. The only reason they were there in the first place was because of that crazy New York woman, and so the missions director - the U.S vice President's brother - still pissed that they had set up the entire mission before he had even walked in the door, gave them eight hours and out. They hardly had to do anything on the moon, yet because of all the playing now, even with their limited assignments, they had to play catch up.
First, they hauled out the experiments demanded by the moon-landing deniers. Numbering in the millions, these people had elected public officials in some important but mostly undeveloped nations, had the backing of all the powerful anti-Mensa societies, and even the endorsements of some of the literate holographic-vid stars, who'd gladly lent their names to the questioning crowd in exchange for some big bucks. So the earthnauts knew they had to waste their time on a fool's errands, although secretly both of them had always doubted that man had been to the moon because they'd seen the videos but never bothered to research and peer review them.
The jolly moon-walkers, as earth was now calling Nikola and Juanita and the dog and the monkey, started tossing plastic bags and ping-pong balls and plastic, metal, and slyme-goo frisbees way up into the air and across the landscape. The dog, chasing the frisbees, jumped into the air as high as 20 feet, and Nikola caught all of this on ground-cam to beam back to earth live to holoyoutube. After a few minutes of that, they let the dog and monkey wrestle over the frisbees and the other stuff, and carefully set up the world famous "pendulum experiment" designed by the esteemed Mr. Professor N of Oxford University. In this test, 300 pendulums, wind-chimes, and bobbleheads would be swung in 1/6 gravity. This test was being replicated and conducted on earth at the exact same moment in full gravity and in a total vaccum. The pendulums, wind-chimes, and bobbleheads were of varied and interesting sizes, weights, fabrics and materials were strung along a clothesline anchored into the ground. When they were hung properly the earthnauts and monkey went from one end to the other electronically setting the stuff in motion with nanobot-driven prearranged swing speeds. It was videotaped, and the chips imbedded in each of the swingers - as they were called - sent readings back to earth in real time. After five boring minutes of watching the things moving back and forth, back and forth, and not slowing down at all, Nikola excused himself and staggered back to the ship to find another sip of Russia's finest.
Contact Light[edit | edit source]
Antikythera mechanism. That's the first thing that came to Juanita's mind when, after having to finish up the doubters-experiments alone, she had spent the next three hours walking on the lunar surface exploring several medium-deep craters within walking distance of the ship. Nikola was in "Debbie", sleeping it off.
Juanita ended up repelling down the wall of the deepest crater, named Pan in honor of some wayward god of nature, the forests, and fertility, stepped onto its dusty floor, and before taking three steps from the wall's very small shadow (WASA planned the crater-exploration portion of the trip so the sun was overhead in the sky, but since she had to do everything alone, except for a dog and a monkey, she was running late) tripped helmet to ass over something just under the dust, upended her dizzy and pissed at the world. The somersault and fall would have blown her knee all to hell if she wasn't six-sheets-to-the-wind and in 1/6th gravity. She jumped up quickly, like they do in the old moon footage, and spun around to face the damn rock that tried to takie her life. And damn if there wasn't right there, upended and sticking out of the dust, this little machine.
It was unmistakable, and it was remarkable. The gear box lay exposed, and a few very human looking dials combined with this undescribable quantum field full of alien doohickeys, whatchamacallits and whatnots that were not always where they were a moment ago. In the middle of this machine, a machine she could only imagine had been seen before by people on either ayahuasca or quinoa, its "arms" (for lack of a better word) reached into a wavy space that looked a little like one of the new vids by J-Ra equipped with the time-tremble app. That was her first thought. But overlayed on it was her knowledge of the antikythere mechanism.
The antikythera mechanism is a fully modern-looking gear driven analog computer found in an ancient shipwreck dating directly to the so-called "first century" A.D. Well over two-thousand years old, the machine - and if there was one of these still in existence then there were lots of them back then - once it was put together from the 80 pieces found, still looked like it could be cleaned up and repaired into operating condition. And now here, in the crater dust of the moon, was something which made the antikythera mechanism look like an antique jack-in-the-box.
Juanita dug it out slowly, and whenever she had to move her hand into the quantum soup it gave a better grip, as she felt things pulling on her gloves while hearing little giggles. When someone gave her a tickle on her palm she could feel her skin crawl even though her glove. "Mother Mary, Our Lady, pray for this sinner," Juanita implored her goddess, asking for strength to get this machine safely out of the lunar soil and back to earth. Suddenly, as if Mary herself was floating there answering her prayers like an omnipresent OnStar representative, the machine moved, shifted, and popped into her arms. In doing so the wavy field momentarily passed over her face and she saw, just for like an instant, little men creating objects of something not-quite light out of sounds and wishes and offering them to her. She stifled a scream, shifted the tiny machine in her arms, and climbed out of the crater.
Before long Juanita was in heaven. Her place in the history books would no longer be alongside a drunken Ukranian, a dog, and a monkey. She would be honored as the discoverer of the age. In a few mintues she saw, way off in the distance, that intoxicated moron Nikola prancing around with the stupid monkey, both of them kicking up dust and slapping their knees, and that's when she realized that she and she alone will have fulfilled the prophecy given by the Brookings Report on the Implications that the Discovery of Alien Life will have on Human Affairs:
| “ | 4. "Though intelligent or semi-intelligent life conceivably exists elsewhere in our solar system, if intelligent extraterrestrial life is discovered... Evidences of its existence might also be found in artifacts left on the moon or other planets." | ” |
With fifteen minutes to spare before the ship took off Juanita was within 100 meters of it when Laika jumped up, wheeeee good dog, grabbed the machine from her arms with his spacesuit's mouth - just like it was a frisbee good dog! - and ran. As Laika's spacesuit tail wagged back and forth, back and forth, the motherfucking god dammned mother-fuck-ing mut went round a hill and was seen no more. Juanita cursed the day her saintly mother-fucking mother gave birth to her. She almost lay down on the ground right there, but made herself walk to the spaceship. With two minutes to go, Laika finally bounded up the stairs with a moon rock in his mouth, tail wagging a mile a minute. Juanita didn't want to let him in, and Nikola was out cold by that time. But the monkey opened the door, helped Laika off with his spacesuit, and hung it up. Laika ran over to Juanita and Nikola, smelled their breath to see if they'd been drinking, licked his balls, and went to sleep. The "Debbie" took off without a hitch, everyone was royally drunk on vodka during the short return trip, and their parachutes splashed them safely into the ocean, which swung the capsule back and forth in the waves, back and forth, just like in the pendulum test.
The monkey was the only one awake to feel it.
