Image by Darren Collis from Pixabay

Monica settled in her seat and fastened the harness. She was excited. Beside her, her best friend Hollis fastened his harness as well. He was less enthusiastic. “Aren’t you in the least bit excited, Hollis?” she asked.

“Why should I be excited?” Hollis asked.

“Only a handful of people were picked to take up residence in the new lunar colony,” Monica said. “It’s a real honor to be chosen.”

“Monica, we’re going to live in a hermetically sealed dome with oxygen being piped in from only the gods know where in a house that was 3D printed so we don’t even know how sturdy it is. We don’t know what we’re going to eat, what we’re going to drink, what we’re going to do for work. What are we going to wear? How are we going to get supplies? None of this was explained to us,” Hollis said.

“They said they’d explain it all to us when we got there,” Monica said.

“I’d rather know before I get there so I can be prepared,” Hollis said.

“It’s only for a year, Hollis,” Monica said. “How bad could it be?”

“Very bad,” Hollis said. “Any time the government gets involved with scientists, things go terribly wrong. Just look at the Juno experiements.”

Monica sighed. Hollis always brought up the ill-fated Juno experiments when he wanted to be a downer about scientific advancements. Monica was the more optimistic of the two of them. She always had been. She and Hollis had known each other since pre-K and he’d always been the serious one while she’d always been the bubbly, bouncy people person. It was what made their friendship work for so long.

The trip to the moon lasted three days, and by the time they arrived, everyone was ready to be off the shuttle. They landed and everyone was bundled into space suits for the walk from the landing pad to the dome. Monica and Hollis joined the rest of the colonists on their shuttle and bounced across the moon’s surface to the air lock that would let them into the first dome.

Once they were inside, the air lock pressurized and another door opened. They were ushered inside and allowed to take off their space suits. “The air smells different here,” Monica said quietly.

“No green and growing things,” Hollis said. “It’s all filtered air.”

“Oh,” Monica said.

They were shown into a large building that must have taken the industrial 3D printers months to print and a man in a suit greeted them. “Welcome to the Lunar Colony. You will live and work here for a year as a way of proving this settlement is viable for long-term use,” he said. “You will be assigned tasks to keep the colony running based on your skills. Your living arrangements will be spartan, but we hope that as time goes on, we will be able to improve upon them. If you earn enough rank points, you can request something be 3D printed to liven up your residence.”

“Rank points?” someone asked.

“Do your job well, and you earn rank points. The more rank points you earn, the wealthier you become here,” the man in the suit said with a smile. “As we do not have a currency based economy here, everything is done with rank points. If you want more than the basic food you will be given, you will have to spend rank points to get it. If you want to decorate your homes, you will have to spend rank points to purchase those decorations. If you want nicer clothing than what we give you, you will have to spend rank points to buy it.”

“I knew this was going to be a con job,” Hollis muttered.

“Everyone work hard and let’s see how productive we can all be,” the man in the suit said.

Hollis and Monica were assigned a duplex that was really two boxes joined together with a bed on each side. There were no television sets, no bookcases, nothing for entertainment. It was just a box with a bed.

“What do we do for entertainment?” Monica asked.

“You have to earn rank points if you want entertainment,” one of the men in uniform on the street said. “Otherwise you eat, you sleep, you work. Those are the only parameters of your existence here.”

“No one can live like that,” Monica protested.

“You’re going to have to learn,” the man in uniform said.

“I told you,” Hollis said. “I knew it was too good to be true.”

Monica stared around her in horror at the boxes people were being shoved into. This was not the life she’d imagined. A year. She had to live here for a year. She wanted to go home to Earth.