2054: MURDER ON THE MOON

Could you live on the moon in 2054? Memories of Mom remind me that home is not a place but a state of mind. In many ways, living on the moon resembles home anywhere — frequently feeling like when you take a call from a friend. On the other hand, and perhaps more often than not, I consciously avoid the persistent fear of being alone. That lonely feeling overwhelms any recollection, any perception of embrace. I’m missing a sense of belonging. Like everyone else here, I’m damaged goods. There’s no actual sense of home here on the moon except for what lives in our minds. This place, unlike a place of comfort or rest, is an obstacle course, a brutal test of stamina. Perhaps an accurate measure of human endurance, in the face of isolation, is the distance between memory and a person’s mindset. In reality, there’s no space between the two, just an imaginary partition dividing light that shines on one and the shrouded darkness engulfing the other. Very much like the two halves of the moon. From the Author: "They talk to their shared computer like a friend. And the computer is seemingly omniscient, it's everywhere." "AIRI" (Artificial Intelligence Response Interface), the moon-global communications system sometimes needs to get private input from people, like a password for secure data. Rather than speaking his password into the open room, Lt. Anderson Cronauer (Crony) just holds up his hands, wriggles his fingers, and says, "AIRI, give me control over here." Then Crony air-types his response. Like air guitar, he uses an imaginary typewriter in the air or on a table. Tiny tattoos with magnetic ink on his fingertips give him the advantage. "I want to watch televised Moonball games." Ray has invented basketball in a gravitationally challenged world. With only 16% of earth's gravity, on the moon, the ball trajectory, like other things, is mostly a straight line. Surrealistically, the players seem to fly around the court. It's not all fun and games, though. Limited gravity or something similar seems to work deviously on the human psyche. One's usually stable mindset is often vertically challenged by both unexpected situations and other moon-bound people.