Two
Armstrong City, Luna
“Andrea, don’t just stand there. The checked bags have gone on ahead. There’s no turning back now. Jenny, have you got your stuff? Let’s go!”
Paul Aggruder was more than ready to leave the Moon’s gypsum mining colony. Three years they had spent living in a dusty pressure dome. Three years of Paul’s life gone, driving an ore skimmer from the mine site to the processing stations. Three years in a pressure suit for ten hours a day, four days a week. Three years of the whole family spending two hours a day on an exercise bike in the Centrifuge, keeping their bones and muscles up in the Moon’s low gravity.
His wife and daughter were less enthusiastic.
“Daddy, the shuttle doesn’t leave for two hours. It only takes five minutes to walk to the station. What’s the rush?” Jenny was sixteen, and well into the throes of teenage smart-aleck-ness. She dropped her bag on the floor and plopped down on the couch. The furniture came with the house, which was leased from the mining company.
“Don’t you want to get good seats on the shuttle? It’s going to be our last look at the Moon. Last look at Earth, for that matter. Don’t you want to get a window seat?” Paul teased.
“Paul, relax. Jenny’s right. There’s no rush to go leave a nice, civilized, established colony to run off and pioneer some new wilderness planet that’s just opened up.”
The decision to immigrate to the new world of Forest had been hotly contested in the Aggruder household.
“Now, Andrea, let’s not start that up again. We talked it over a hundred times. Why stay in some dusty, dry-bones lunar pressure dome, paying rent to a mining company for three rooms and a parking stall, when there’s a whole planet out there for the taking?”
“Yes, a whole planet. A whole, uninhabited, undeveloped, howling wilderness, just waiting for us to take our teenage daughter out God knows where to start a dirt farm.” Andrea Aggruder threw herself down on the couch next to her daughter.
Paul threw up his hands. “Andrea, I’ve told you, I can’t stay here any longer, breathing recycled air, eating recycled food, drinking recycled water. I need to get out where there’s some fresh air! Don’t you? Wouldn’t you like to get some fresh food for once?”
“I would!” Jenny piped in. Her mother gave her a stern, be-silent look.
“Yes, Paul, you know I do. I just don’t see why you can’t try for a spot on Caliban, or Corinthia, or one of the planets that’s been open a while. They need farmers, too. Why pick some wilderness like Forest?”
Paul grabbed his wife’s shoulders, dragging her protesting off the couch and swinging her around the room. “It’s an opportunity, baby! We’re going to be settlers, just like on Earth in the old days!” He grabbed her waist with one hand, took her left hand in his right, and began dancing her around the room, singing:
In a cavern, in a pressure suit, excavating for a mine,
Dwelt a wore out gypsum miner, and his daughter Clementine.
Oh my darling,
Oh my darling,
Oh my darling, Clementine,
Thou art lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine!
On the couch, Jennifer collapsed in laughter. Andrea pushed her husband away, feigning a cross look. She turned away to hide the smile she couldn’t quite suppress.
“Paul Aggruder, you really are certifiable.”
“My Dad’s a freak,” Jenny giggled. Paul Aggruder stood in the middle of the tiny living room, arms akimbo, and regarded his daughter sternly. “Well, come on, Clementine, if you don’t want to end up in a pressure suit excavating gypsum like your poor old freak Dad, you’d best grab your stuff!”
Andrea Aggruder picked up her overnight bag and suitcase. “Well, we might as well wait at the station.”
“Let’s go!” Jenny agreed.
The family gathered bag and baggage, and left their leased house for the last time.
The five-minute walk to the shuttle station was extended to fifteen, as it happened. Paul and Andrea Aggruder were a well-liked couple, and with shift change a half-hour away, the dusty streets of the Armstrong City pressure dome were crowded with people. Repeated goodbyes had Andrea and Jennifer both red-eyed and tear-streaked by the time they arrived at the shuttle station.
After presenting their tickets, the Aggruders were ushered into the departure lounge. The family went to the window to get a look at their ride off the Moon.
Outside the dome, the battered white lunar shuttle Perigee sat on its landing pads in the gray lunar dust. Pressure-suited maintenance techs scurried about with fuel lines and baggage carts, raising little puffs of dust with every step.
“That’s one thing I sure won’t miss about this place,” Andrea pointed at the techs. “That horrible gray dust that gets all over everything. Even in the dome, that stuff gets everywhere.”
“Yecch.” Jenny agreed.
To the left, a door swung open and a bored-looking forty-ish woman stepped out. “All passengers bound for OWME ship Hidalgo to Forest, gather your stuff and follow me.”
The Aggruder family obediently picked up their bags and followed the woman to the shuttle. Ten months from now, they’d be on Forest, starting a new life.
To see more of Animal’s writing, visit his page at Crimson Dragon Publishing or Amazon.
Is there a lot of call for drywall in outer space?
I get that there’s a lot of colonizing going on…but is drywall still the preferred building material?
Building material? It’s field rations.
What? You think you can disregard building codes just because you’re a space explorer?
Yes.
I mean, how exlse are we supposed to get fantastical sci-fi cities if we have to abide by earthly design philosophies?
I’m more of a mind that the conditions on the moon would not produce gypsum at all.
?!?!
That’s why they prefer to eat the drywall.
That corn just went right through you.
Also what’s the coffee that has gone through the digestive system of a civet called? Kopi luwak.
You’re supposed to treat corn with an alkaline solution to soften the husks so that you can actually digest them.
What do you mean you grind yours into meal and make bread out of it!? Next you’ll tell me you throw out the husks and cob.
Hominy is a lye!
Taking such a stance requires some true grits.
Paging The Human Centipede, Human Centipede to the white courtesy phone…
refried beans? bread pudding?
Are not recycled.
Soylent green?
I think more like “soylent brown.”
“it’s the circle of poo!”
From the ded-thred – about the cattle ranch shut down in Utah. I went and looked up the local story there and it still doesn’t make sense. If the land was federal, there’s no freaking way it was sold off to a developer. If the land was privately owned, BLM had no jurisdiction over it. Which makes me wonder if it wasn’t owned by the state of Utah, and this is a sweetheart deal, and the endangered species story wasn’t just a lot of BS/obfuscation.
Shhh. Don’t question the details. Let the outrage flow and click the bait.
X is down for me again, apparently the 3rd or 4th outage of the day. This will be interesting.
It’s under a massive cyber attack. The blob is fighting back.
Russian hackers!!!!
There have been coordinated arson attacks at Tesla dealerships. I think this is part of that “resistance”. The good thing is, this time the DOJ won’t just look the other way.
Oh, look.
Verified by Elon. Cyberattack by stupid commies. I hope it gets traced back to the EU.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/musk-confirms-x-outage-due-massive-cyberattack
My DuckDuckGo is running very very slow and will hardly load images.
Killing X is a fantastic strategy for winning everyone over.
And on a day I wanted to name and shame a business (Great Clips) publicly, too.
I’m going to go with this as my conspiracy theory. Big Hair is behind this.
If they shut down the activist money pipeline, how are they going to be able to buy vats of bright hair dye?!
Big Hair? The ’80s are back? Fuck.
I had a punk cut in the 80s. I had big hair in the 90s. Now I’m just an old hippie.
Name and shame!
If they shut down the activist money pipeline, how are they going to be able to buy vats of bright hair dye?!
.1% of them can start an Only Fans, the rest will have to cope.
Vent here. What did GC do, or not do?
Today I went there to get my (coarse, thick, dry, frizzy, matted) hair combed out and washed. I got a hostile “We’re not a detangling service.” And “Every 15 minutes, we’ll have to charge you a haircut.” Okay…? I was prepared to pay. Maybe I looked too poor. I don’t know.
I was just so taken aback by the hostility. Like…I’m not asking for galaxy hair for a walk-in. I just want you to comb my hair out and wash it. That’s it. Yeah, it’ll take time. Sorry about that. I’ve had a lot on my mind and my scalp does NOT produce oil AT ALL.
Anyway, I went to Beauty Brands and they didn’t even blink. Did a super-good job AND I got a treatment I desperately needed (stripping all the hard water deposits out of my hair).
Sounds like they were not competent to deal with unusual hair, and defensive about it.
We have an office at the back of the gym that we’ve been renting to two stylists. They made a nice little salon out of it. When my kid moved home, we couldn’t comb out all the knots. We took her to one of our stylists and they gave her a great cut and style.
For years I’ve been saying that it seems like businesses just don’t want customers. It’s nuts.
There are entire salons that specialize in combing out matted hair, and some post on YouTube. There’s even a lady who specializes in treating lice. They’re always very empathetic to the plight of people whose hair has gone to mats and their life circumstances that led to it, so I was quite shocked. I just looked at her and went “okay” and walked right out again.
Listen to yourself, Ruth
A top political columnist for The Washington Post resigned today, accusing Post chief executive and publisher Will Lewis of killing her column that criticized owner Jeff Bezos’s drive to overhaul the opinion pages to focus on his libertarian priorities.
Post columnist and Associate Editor Ruth Marcus, who has worked at the paper for four decades, says she can no longer stay there.
“Jeff’s announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable,” Marcus wrote in a resignation letter obtained by NPR.
He’s trampling on our long standing institutional scorn for the individual! I won’t stand for it.
Wake me up when Bezos announces “Fuck Off, Slaver” as the official slogan of the Post.
I dont know why anyone would be surprised that censorship’s strongest advocates are the news media. They all wish they were Soviet era Pravda with a monopoly on speech.
If we are going to take back academia the journalism schools would be a very good place to start.
That would be fascinating. The modern generations, mine included, really don’t have that ‘Go out, meet strangers and get a story’ ability. (Nor do many /most of them have the chops to write a good story, reporting or otherwise.) We’re far too isolated in our little bubbles Technology provides. No legwork!
Looks like the stock market agrees with Trump. Recession time
Gosh, Donnie, you don’t suppose the tariffs could have had anything to do with it?
Honestly, I think the laying off of all those federal workers is as damaging as the tariffs. I don’t think he could have taken any corrective/retaliatory measures that wouldn’t have crashed the economy.
There might be an initial shock from their reduced spending, but the removal of their dead weight effect on the economy will led to a rebound above where we started.
UCS:
Only if we get the required regulation reductions as well. Otherwise, it’ll just lead to more delays in approvals and the like.
There better be – else what’s the point.
“Id getting rid of grift, graft, and waste triggers a recession, then we were already in a recession that was being obscured by….wait for it…grift, graft, and waste.”
https://x.com/DavidBCollum/status/1899172096309121395
Yes, there will be a massive economic disruption. Lots of unemployed (and not particularly employable) ex-Feds on the street. Would have been less disruptive to phase in the cuts over time, but then the cuts would never happen all.
Will this recession be the first in 25 years that will not piss away money on stimulus or support for too big to fail industries and companies?
Tune in next week for the next episode of “The Terrible Tariff Tribulations of Trump.
This.
No. This is hysteria over tariffs. Those aren’t even completely in place.
Yeah, freakout.
Most of those people don’t do anything useful so when their work which is typically included in the GDP and the removal of it looks like a “recession”… I think it’s misleading.
In his Congressional address, Trump clearly laid out the goal of the tariff bickering: Reciprocal, 50-50 tariffs. It’s a ‘speak softly,’ diplomatic moment. If Canada doesn’t like the tariffs, just reduce theirs. I’m sure further negotiations on various goods, but it’s at least clear. Canada+ can lose x share of the US market, or they can play along.
Shows firm statesmanship, IMO. Wields the threat of US market share to help domestic industries. The goal of 50:50 tariffs seems to be largely ignored, or at least I haven’t seen much talk about it, let alone a positive reaction. It sounds good and makes sense to me, but like Costanza, my importer-exporter knowledge is lacking.
Thoughts? I’m sure I’m missing many things cuz I always do. Oooh – Thoughts on his apparent push for more US timber?
Before we all get too off topic, I want to thank Animal for this excellent new story! The past few weeks have been filled with anxiety so I have not directly commented on his work.
Honestly, I think the laying off of all those federal workers is as damaging as the tariffs. I don’t think he could have taken any corrective/retaliatory measures that wouldn’t have crashed the economy.
We have to stop digging, at some point.
It’s probably good for military recruiting though
I’m with mom… dah-ling I love you but give me Park Avenue.
Heh.
https://x.com/DNIGabbard/status/1899176257406857274
That’s the part of exploration I don’t fully understand: Taking someone else with you, unless they’re aware of ‘the plan’ and are still fully on-board. I’ve traveled with girlfriends, sometimes with a group of friends on a mission.
But human history is full of people, men, just picking up their family mid-scene and plopping ’em into somewhere new. Bro and I were born in WV, and our family moved when he was 7, me ~6 mo. (Dad got a job with the Evansville Courier. I was named before any thought of a job offer.)
How many of y’all were moved by parents/etc to a new place when you were young? (I’m guessing most of us and most people, these days? Why’d you guys move? How’d ya like it?
We moved when I was around 12. Nobody asked us what we thought about it, it was just “Dad’s got a new, better job. We’ll be moving this summer”.
It was fine. Within a few months or so, Bro Dean and I both had a new circle of friends and were settled in. I don’t understand the Current Day “We can’t move because it might disrupt our children’s social lives” thing. They’re children. They’ll be fine.
We got moved about 45 miles west when I was 7, because dad couldn’t afford a house any closer to the city and the apartment wasn’t viable anymore with 3 kids. Didn’t really phase us either.