>>> Entry 003_One small step

Moondust squeaks and crunches underfoot. I find this strange for it makes no noise as it falls, and under its muffling layers the Moon becomes an utterly silent place. What we call moondust is actually a combination of minute particles of the lunar crust long ago pulverized by meteoric impacts, and minute ice crystal formations that have accreted around such sedimentary particles; so, it glitters. Glitters, and squeaks and crunches.

I squeaked and crunched down to the hardcopy missives node outside the 2/7ths Habitat today, and saw strange tracks in the glittering moondust. Actions here are frozen in time, not by the life-threateningly low temperatures, but in the ubiquitous moondust. The feeble atmosphere here is barely capable of generating wind, and tracks are left untouched for not just hours, but days and even weeks.

This Tralfamadorian permanence of action, literally crystallizing your every step into a documentation so complete that any layman might as well be a master tracker, is not the only reason Loonies are so territorial.

The Moon is both lonely and claustrophobic, a dichotomy possible only because of the exclusively indoor nature of lunar life. Loonies do not talk about cabin fever for much the same reason that fish don’t have a word for water; and all the moreso for fish who live in fishbowls. We are accustomed to bestriding vast swathes of utter emptiness, without the expectation of seeing another living soul; but likewise do we also construct our habitats clustered tightly together, as far as Lunar Base’s limited infrastructure reaches and no further.

Such spacious solitude makes one feel entitled to some considerable elbow room, and yet environmental limitations mean most of us live less than a stone’s throw away from another of our fellow citizens. An infuriating limitation that actually attracts a certain kind of mentality, the kind that wants to batter itself against the edge of what’s possible: frontiersmen. Alas, only very wealthy individuals or corporate installations can afford to build remotely, so the pioneering Loony spirit of fierce individualism is constantly curbed by sheer necessity. It leaves them very definite on subjects such as privacy and property.

It was with an acquired echo of this strange sentiment that I eyed these tracks, a suburban Robinson Crusoe baffled by unexpected glittering footprints.

But more than a native Loony’s aggressive feelings regarding trespassers, I felt something more in my wordless early-morning fog - the fog of not just a sleepy mind, but in the literal fog of condensed exhalations which billowed from my biosuit - who would be out for a walk in this?

>>> Entry 002_You can trip the light moderate

Yesterday I was walking through the 2nd-level skybridge between the 5/7 Habitat and the Acquisitions and Entertainment nexus, and had to stop when weak but pure sunlight filtered through the safety glass. Color leached back into the world, even if most of it was clinical white and the grim gray of brushed steel. A few other citizens traversing the skybridge were suddenly blooms of color, and I could see their facial features in clear detail. I had to hurry on, because my scheduled midday respite period is only .75 hrs long...and because it is terribly cold in the skybridge, even if it is technically a Habitat-class environment.

I almost hate to admit it; seeing the sunlight again makes me look forward to the Oscillation.

Lunar Base is constructed in the Liminal Illumination zone, the thin band between the light and dark side of the Moon, where the 9% variance of the Moon’s tidal lock with the Earth allows for both days and nights…and, to a lesser extent, seasons. There are two seasons in the Liminal Zone, an unceasing there-and-back-again pattern between mostly-light or mostly-dark; hence “the Oscillation”. Loonies, aka Lunar citizens, get so excited about the Light Oscillation that many services run at limited capacity or shut down entirely at the peak of the Oscillation, so they can go bask in the coveted solar rays.

I'm serious. It's that exciting up here.

When I first arrived on the Moon, I found the Loonies’ mass excitement at the Light Oscillation very quaint. I must admit it, I was downright condescending. Unknowingly saturated with Vitamin D after a lifetime of optimized solar exposure, I could not then feel the biological yearning of a diurnal species being forced to live out of its element for half its life.

Being born and raised on a satellite station, where solar exposure never alternated seasonally, had given me such a reserve of solar nutrition that I could not feel the Loony's hunger for it until several years later…and by then, of course, it was too late. My youthful arrogance and the space winds of chance have blown me to Lunar Base; now I am depleted, underpowered, and cannot help but wonder if I’ll ever make it to Earth. To drift forever behind a desk in the cold dark silence is so peaceful, a death-like lifestyle that is harder to escape than any gravity-well.