June 24, 2010
Prompter: Gibbs
Shuffle-clank. Shuffle-creak. Shuffle-clank. Today was one of her better days. Gert was up out of the wheelchair and walking. The Company supplied leg braces were supposed to give her the mobility of any native terran, but damned if they weren’t noisy, and uncomfortable. Even with the noise they fell far short of the physical aptitude regulations for full citizenship.
Painfully she crossed the short distance from her apartment to the pathetic, dirty excuse of a closet office. Her official title was “Extra-planetary advisory chair,” but really she was a glorified paperweight. Just another one of the moon-rocks that had been so popular during the middle of the 21st century. The company ’employed’ her in an attempt to make amends for taking her from her home, for crippling her, for making her an outcast.
Many called the extra-planetary mining operation a folly, doomed from the start. The cost of supplying a lunar outpost would be tremendous, not to mention returning the raw materials. Still, there was no water to poison on the moon, no atmosphere to pollute. The advantages were enough to sway several wealthy investors, and for a time it seemed there gamble had paid off.
For twenty-three years the operation thrived. The investors were fat and happy. The exotic location attracted some of the brightest to man the mostly mechanized outpost. Among them were Gert’s parents to be, although they didn’t know it yet. For twenty-three years it looked as if life on the moon was a sure thing. Gert was seventeen when the mining company decided to pull out. The damage had been done before she was even born, before her parents even knew she was going to be born. The effects of low gravity on a fetus are irreversible.
Up there it hadn’t mattered. She was perfectly suited for the environment. She was the only child of twenty doting parents. She could hold the whole world in the palm of her hand, and did on more than one occasion in the panoramic observation platform.
The gravity of the closure of luna’s only permanent residence did not fully sink in until the last tender landed at the Space Port of Seattle. She couldn’t see the streaks of rain on the outside of the inches thick viewport, tears of frustration streaked down her own face clouding her vision. She couldn’t move. Her body conspired with the cruel, cruel earth to trap her in her seat.
“No.” She shook the memory from her head, stopping just outside the entrance to the mine administration building. She gazed upward at the fading orb in the morning sky. Her former home called to her, or perhaps some part of her that had never left. With only the heavens as her witness, she made a solemn vow. “No matter the odds, I will see the moon again.” With that, she shuffled inside.