Bang, Zoom - Straight to the Moon
“What I said was a minimum two million percent guaranteed return on investment. That’s the part you really need to be focusing on, not the legal mumbo jumbo. Leave that to the lawyers."
“As Mark Twain famously never said; buy moons – they’re not making more of them,” the spryly old man said as he fanned out brochures advertising Lunar Real Estate in front of me. Orville’s Old-Fashioned Oddity Outlet was one of Sombermorey’s more infamous tourist traps, shelling out all manner of alleged paranormal paraphernalia. Whether it was clairvoyant goggles, haunted paintings, or possessed Halloween masks, you were guaranteed to find something out of the ordinary whenever you stopped in.
What had caught my attention on this particular visit was a sign in the window claiming Orville was now a fully authorized Lunar Real Estate agent for something called Oppenheimer’s Opportunities. When I googled the company, I initially got a ‘Can’t generate AI overview right now’ for a second, but then it glitched slightly, and I got a full summary with links to a retro-looking website. The overview didn’t sound like Gemini or any other AI I was familiar with, and the logo was six curved blades chasing each other to make a shuriken shape with a shifting blue colour gradient. In the center, there was a pair of broken, concentric triangles to make a kind of futuristic pyramid. I think I might have seen the name Kurisu at some point. At the time, I just shrugged it off as them testing new models. I decided that the company was legitimate enough, so I went in to see what exactly Orville had for sale, blatantly ignoring the large ‘Caveat Emptor’ emblazoned on his front door.
“There’s nearly ten billion acres of land up for grabs up there, and you had better believe the price is going to skyrocket once development kicks off!” Orville claimed enthusiastically. “Everything I got here is all prime real estate, too. There’s plots along the rim of Tycho crater, the Peaks of Eternal Light, the historic Sea of Tranquility; take your pick! Some of these plots are under a hundred dollars an acre, and they could easily resell for millions! I’m talking a minimum of two million percent profit, guaranteed! Name something else with that kind of return on investment. You can’t! Well, maybe Bitcoin, but crypto’s pure speculation. No underlying fundamentals; the rug can get pulled out from under you in a heartbeat. Moon’s been up though for 4 billion years though and it’s not likely to leave anytime soon. We’re talking a massive return on investment based on a literally rock-solid foundation. You’d be crazy not to get in on the ground floor of this! Are you crazy, or do you want to invest in your retirement chateau in the Lunar Alps?”
I remained fully uninfected by Mr. Bucklesby’s infectious enthusiasm, glaring down at the pamphlets with a mix of skepticism and contempt.
“Mr. Bucklesby; unless I’m quite mistaken, both the Outer Space Treaty and the Artemis Accords forbid any sovereign claim upon any celestial bodies,” I said calmly. “These deeds are unenforceable and worthless as anything other than overpriced novelties.”
“Deeds? What deeds? Who said deeds? I never said deeds. If you said I said deeds, that is besmirchment of character. These are development licenses,” Orville clarified. “Sovereign ownership might not be legal, but establishing exclusive use rights certainly is. What my good friends at Oppenheimer’s Opportunities intend to do is launch an orbiting probe to rain down golf-ball-sized tungsten spheres embedded with radioactive pellets of Americium-241 – that’s one nucleon for every future American State – each with their own unique isotopic signature for identification. Officially, this will be part of a Lunargraphical mapping survey – and totally allowed by international space law – but it will establish first use. Anything within a detectable range of these markers’ radiation will fall within the claim of their development licence. One of these babies could literally have your name laser-etched onto it. Then all you have to do is wait for the Lunar Boom to kick off, and the tycoons will be so desperate for these development licenses they won’t care how flimsy the claims are. Cheaper just to scoop them all up than to waste precious time hashing it out in court. It will be the easiest money you ever make.”
He tossed me the ball, and when I caught it, it had a surprising amount of heft to it. It was dark grey, with a single bright grey dimple at the top. I think that was supposed to be a window for the radiation, so I instinctively pointed it away from me… and towards Bucklesby. On one side, the equator was laser etched with the words Oppenheimer’s Opportunities ~ Aerospace Division in a calligraphic, 1950s-style font, along with a logo of a cartoon atom. On the other side was a serial number, along with the words ‘Generously Sponsored by’, followed by a blank space for the donor’s name.
“So, this private space company, which I’ve never heard of, is going to drop these things on the Moon for their research. As a reward for sponsoring them, I get my name on one of these spheres, which in no way entitles me to the land it falls on, but you’re claiming that the usage rights are ambiguous enough that even the threat of me filing an injuction would be enough incentive for a future Lunar land developer to just buy it off me?”
“What I said was a minimum two million percent guaranteed return on investment. That’s the part you really need to be focusing on, not the legal mumbo jumbo. Leave that to the lawyers,” was his reply. “But it’s a limited-time offer. Once the rocket goes up, it may never go back up again! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stake a claim on another world for pocket change, and ensure your future prosperity. Are you going to seize the day, or spend the rest of your life staring up at the Moon, wondering what might have been?”
…
And that’s how I ended up buying an acre of Lunar Real Estate. The End. Seriously, that’s it. That’s the end of story. You can stop reading now.
…
Look, it’s not like I bought it as an actual investment. The odds that anyone would actually be willing to buy that acre off me are minuscule, and the odds that they’d actually be legally required to do so are infinitesimal. I bought it because I liked the idea of something with my name on it one day ending up on the Moon, just sitting there in the magnificent desolation for ages, and maybe eventually being stumbled upon by some far-future astronaut.
I was honestly eighty percent sure even that was a scam. The amount I paid for that acre wouldn’t even be enough to launch that little orb into orbit. Orville had said something about the mission not being launched until reusable rocket technology had brought launch costs down enough, but frankly, I had tuned him out at that point. It was all 19th-century style chicanery with a few 21st-century tech buzzwords tossed in to give a veneer of legitimacy. I didn’t expect anything more out of it than the occasional e-mail explaining why the project had once again been pushed back.
That’s what I told myself at least, and it’s what I’m telling you now, but the fact that I bought it meant that some small part of me wanted to believe in the retrofuturistic lunar colonialism that Orville was spouting. And as it turned out, that’s what Oppenheimer’s Opportunities actually wanted from me.
I was awoken in the middle of the night by a phone ringing beside my bed. Not my phone, mine you, but that slipped my attention at the time.
“Ah, hello?” I said groggily, fumbling with the old-fashioned handset that somewhere in the periphery of my mind I knew shouldn’t have been there.
“Evening, son. This is Paxton Brinkman, CEO of Oppenheimer’s Opportunities,” an older man with an even more old-fashioned voice greeted me. “I’m calling about your recent purchase of our Lunar Real Estate package.”
“Uh-huh. Look, can this wait until tomorrow?” I groaned.
“ ’Fraid not, son. The Future waits for no man. It keeps coming nonstop, whether you want it or not!” he said with a theatrical enthusiasm that more than made up for my own lackluster participation in the conversation.
“All right then. What’s this about? You want more money?” I asked, as it seemed obvious this guy and Orville had been cut from the same cloth.
“Not from you, son. We’re still on the gold standard over here. No, we let Orville keep all of your pretend paper pesos and delusional digital dollars for himself,” he replied. “What we need from you is something a little more… abstract, let’s say. Do you know what the Tinkerbell effect is, son?”
“I… no? What are you going on about?” I demanded, awake enough now to be thoroughly irritated by the fact that this was what this guy had called me about in the middle of the night.
“So many things that we cherish and take for granted – democracy, capitalism, and the rule of law – only exist because people believe in them, and stop existing when we stop believing,” he rambled proudly, seemingly oblivious to my irritation. “A thriving space age is a future that never came to be because people stopped believing in it. Imagine what NASA could have accomplished by now if its funding had never been cut from Apollo-era levels? You’d’ve had nuclear-powered space shuttles and Moon bases in the 70s, manned missions to Mars and Venus in the 80s, and long before now, you’d’ve damn well better believe that real estate developers would be racing to build the first luxury condominiums on the Moon! Disaster would have of course struck sooner if we kept burning so bright, but this time it wouldn’t have been a school teacher or Big Bird getting blown up to Kingdom Come. It would have been real American heroes, men who knew the risks and willingly sacrificed themselves upon the altar of progress, and the only way to honour that sacrifice would be to keep pushing forward; otherwise, their deaths would have been for nothing! Think of what could have been if we had never lost both the means and the will to bring our dreams to fruition. Dreams are only fantasies when you stop fighting for them, and our mission aims to remind the world what dreams are worth fighting for. The radioactive signatures of each of the orbs will be tuned to a precise psychotronic signature copied from their donors, an amplified version of the very belief that led them to support the project to begin with. The more orbs we plant, and the longer Earthlings gaze upwards at them, the more they will become infatuated with the same longing for expansion and exploration that took us to the Moon in the first place! The spirit of the Apollo Age will be rekindled, a new and brighter space race will commence, and yes son, you’ll be able to sell that acre of lunar land for ten thousand times what you paid for it. All we need from you now is for you to clap your hands if you believe.
“Do you believe in fairies, son?”
A forcefully cheery dial tone suddenly screeched out of the phone, and before I was even aware of what was happening, I was unconscious. I instantly found myself transported to a lunar dreamscape, the glowing Earth hung high above me as I stood at the edge of a vast crater filled with glass and chrome Googie domes, towering rocket ships with massive fins, and a monorail snaking through all of it. Standing a few steps away from me was a tall and broad man in a blue suit and combed back grey hair, lining up his tee at the edge of the crater. He pulled back his club and, with one smooth stroke, sent the ball soaring right over the crater.
“Magnificent, isn’t it, son?” he asked, pulling out another ball from his pocket, which I now recognized as one of the marker spheres Orville had shown me in his shop, and playfully tossed it up to watch it descend at a fraction of the speed it would have on Earth. “Care to take a swing?”
“Mr. Brinkman?” I asked, immediately recognizing his voice. “What is all this? What did you do to me? What do you want?”
“What I want is to look up at the Moon and see shining cities like this twinkling with my own waking eyes, just once, before I die,” he said, a weary wistfulness creeping into his voice that made it seem that he was much older than he looked. “But this here? This isn’t my vision. It’s yours, and I’m going to share it with the whole world, son. I made a deal with the Fair – sorry, fine – folks at the Dire Insomnium to help refine and redistribute the right dreamstuff to make my dreams a reality. Soon, when people look up at the Moon, this is what they’ll see, first with their hearts and then with their eyes. It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it son?”
I gazed out at the lunar city in the crater before me, and I couldn’t deny that it was indeed a vision straight out of my own head.
“But, I just wanted to help map the Moon, not…” I muttered and trailed off.
“Cartography is the first step to colonization. Our brochure was very clear about that,” Brinkman said, teeing up another golf ball before extending the club towards me. “Dreams work best when you believe in them fully, of course, and you don’t sound one hundred percent convinced just yet. That’s why I’m here, showing you yesterday’s tomorrow in all its glorious technicolour wonder! Just knock one of these babies straight over this magnificent Moon base, and see if there’s any doubt left in your mind that this isn’t a dream worth fighting for!”
I took a good, long look at the proffered club, considering carefully before I took it.
“And if I don’t, you’ll just use someone else’s dream instead?” I asked.
“That’s how progress works, son. You can’t fight it; you can only be left behind,” he insisted.
I nodded, still staring wistfully at the club, but still not reaching for it.
“I think, Mr. Brinkman, that I would rather be left behind with my dreams than go along with someone who would twist them to serve their own ends,” I said softly, gently pushing his golf club back towards him.
“I understand, son,” he sighed sadly, taking a moment to examine the head of his club. “But unfortunately, the fine folks at the Dire Insominium will not.”
He raised his club in the air, and before I could even register what he was doing, I was knocked unconscious.
I was awakened by the hideous screeching of my antiquated alarm clock, and if it wasn’t for the throbbing sensation in my head, I would have been willing to dismiss the whole incident as a bizarre fever dream. I looked to my bedside for any sign of an old phone, but instead I saw that I was clutching one of the marker spheres that Orville had shown me, this one with my name engraved upon it. Under it was a small, folded piece of paper that I raced to open.
‘I know that getting a refund from Orville is a bigger moonshot than anything I’m working on, so I’ll let you have this instead. You can take it to the Moon yourself. I believe in you. ~ Paxton Brinkman, CEO of Oppenheimer Opportunities, est. ∞59.’