To the Moon

prologue

"5....4.....3.....2.....1..... Lift-off!!"

"Shuttle is away!"

"Clean separation."

"Orbit destabilized, preparing for counter orbit thrust."

"Gravity escape velocity achieved."

"Moon orbit achieved! geo-sync orbit stable!"

"Beginning descent..."

I was alone.

I have always been alone.

At school when I was younger I was always top of the class, alone in my superiority.

I let it get to my head.

I pushed away at any attempts of friendship from my fellow classmates, rejecting them over my studies and training.

My parents were proud or at least, I think they were. I never really spoke to them after moving out.

There was always some important piece of study to be done for an upcoming test.

One day the tests stopped.

My teachers all but threw me out of their classes, into the waiting arms of the higher-ups, the business men of tomorrow, all of them clamouring for the minds of the best and brightest in this new generation.

I was the best.

I was the brightest.

I was alone.

Later in my life, I was offered the chance to work as an aeronautics scientist, helping the great minds working on cutting edge tech.... Space Flight.

I quickly grew bored of working in an office or a lab, and decided to submit myself as an astronaut.

Of course I was accepted, to deny me would be to deny the future.

Months passed, I made many well placed acquaintances, world class scholars and scientists, but still...

I was alone.

Acquaintance’s... yes, which is what they were.

They cared for my work but only in passing did they care about me.

The closer they got to me, the more I out shined them, forcing them away, making them hate me.

I was alone in my superiority still, even at the highest level, the peak of mankind.

That is until I met Her.

She was just an intern, looking for a possible career as a lab assistant,

I recognized her talent immediately and decided to tell her, tell her what she could be.

I did not expect to make a friend and even to this day I always referred to her by her title and rank, but she was the closest thing I have ever had as a friend.

Sometimes I wish I had seen it now.

Now that I know that we could have been something.

At the time I did not think much of it, a night out together in town, an uneventful stay at her house.

I didn’t know what I did wrong, but after staying at her house, she got a little distant from me, as though she suspected something of me.

After two years of this, she finally decided to tell me what she had wanted from me.

...Had.

It was the first of February, the year 2012.

Launch day.

I had been working on astronautics for 7 years and not two weeks after my 29th birthday was offered a chance to actually go to space, but not just space, to the Moon.

The space race between the larger countries was coming to a head and as international resources got lower and lower, a cold war like world was that I found myself in.

NASA needed desperately to acquire more funds, sending a man to the moon was considered the ultimate morale booster, everyone agreed.

And so, two years later, I found myself standing in a corridor on the first of February, staring into the eyes of the woman I loved, who was telling me of all here regrets.

Of course at the time I did not think of her as my lover and I did not understand why she was telling me all these things.

All I wanted to do was walk down that hall and exit the building then head over to the launch site and get myself a ticket to space.

When I told her this, she burst into tears, screamed something at me, and ran down the corridor.

I proceeded towards the rocket, thinking quietly about what I had done.

"5....4.....3.....2.....1.... Lift-off!"

"Shuttle is away!"

The words of the announcer drifted through my head, not registering any form of thought.

The shuttles automated computers could have gotten me to the moon if I was asleep, and even then, they were only a backup for the grounded computers that relayed data to the shuttle.

I was only there for two reasons, to lookout of unforeseen errors that only a physical being could fix and to stand on the moon with a flag in hand.

"Beginning Descent"

I jumped at these words, snapping out of my almost dreamlike state to watch the many screens indicating that yes, I was indeed approaching the moon.

It had been days, the fun of space was defiantly over exaggerated but the view of the earth was stunning and really gave me a good perception on the scale of our lives.

The zero gravity had been fun to try for real, having had the experience while training from sub orbital flights.

But for the most part, I had been droning out the same routine checks of the spaceship and watching my progress on TV.

The routine was something I usually enjoyed, but for some reason it was just grating on my nerves instead, I now know why, but at the time I put it down to general nerves about being in space.

Half an hour later, the decent was going smoothly, the landers own computers having taken control of the ship now that we were too far out for a millisecond accurate data relay to earth.

For my part I still had almost nothing to do, just checking and rechecking the monitors in front of me, waiting for the lander to fire its landing rockets.

At around four thousand meters above the moon, the first rockets fired, a loud boom that nearly deafened me.

It was with horror that I realized that the sound could not have been that loud for two reasons.

I listed them in my head:

One: the rockets should have been silent in space, the only sound coming from the vibrations along the support beams holding the rockets.

Two: I was still four thousand meters above the surface, the intended plan was to fire smaller rockets to slow me down and then nearer to the moon, fire the main rockets.

This plan would allow the fastest stop and save a lot more fuel than burning the whole way down.

Going through the plan which I had drilled into my head, I remembered that four thousand meters was when the covers on the rockets were supposed to blow off, these explosive bolts would be tiny compared to the main rockets, I should not have been able to notice them at all.

Then I heard the screams.

In the few short seconds it had taken me to work out what something was wrong, all of my screens that had direct links to the ground were emitting horrible screeching sounds, which I realized were people.

Looking closer I could see all of the operators at mission control running from their screens, I shouted for someone’s attention and saw one of the officers pause and look at me.

He ran over to the screen and picked up the headset sitting there.

"James! Listen, I don’t have any time!"

"What’s going on!?" I shouted back at him

“Its war! One of the eastern countries was fighting another, our peace keeping forces got involved, the rebels took it to their protector's, it escalated and someone somewhere decided to launch the nuclear missiles they were guarding, others on our side had the same idea once they saw what was going on, it’s an all-out missile war!.... no shots have landed on anyone’s side yet as they keep getting shot down, but the fallout and debris has destroyed several cities on the west coast and one is headed right for us!" His words were hasty, almost rambling.

"Why can’t the just shoot it down too? You are in a blast proof bunker that should withstand the fallout" I asked, trying to get my words heard over the commotion.

"THEY ARE TRYING TO" he was forced to shout now that alarms had started up in the room he was in.

"THEY FIRED SOME COUNTER MISSILES AT IT BUT THEY WONT REACH IT IN TIME"

A cold shock shook me as a realized that she would still be within the blast radius of a nuke.

"Why are you not running like everyone else?" I spoke in between the alarms blaring

"THERE IS NO TYPE OF TRANSPORT CAPABLE OF MOVING OUT OF THE BLAST ZONE IN THIS BUNKER; THE BULLET TRAIN LEFT AN HOUR AGO"

With the realization that I was speaking to a doomed man, I tried to reassure him, telling him that the bunker might survive the nuke, the odds were very much not in his favour and we both knew it, his mood suddenly became very calm.

The alarms behind him silenced.

Not a sound could be heard coming from the speakers as a white light started to glow behind him.

"Good luck James" he said in a quiet voice before shutting off the screen at his end.

Donald, known as don by his friends, shut off the screen in front of him and turned to face the window. The dead silence around him was crushing as a bright light emanated from in front of him.

Time seemed to slow down, Don walked slowly to the window as the ground started to shake. A visible tremor was charging towards him along the ground. It was, however, dwarfed by the colossal tremor flying through the air. Tearing through the skies like a giant bubble expanding. Don opened the sliding window and stretched his arm towards the bubble, for not even half a second, he held the godlike power in the palm of his hand… and then it tore him apart.

The shock wave rendered the flash from his bones, and ground those bones to dust, and then it proceeded to rip his very atoms apart and spread them throughout the skies.

It did the same for the bunker, the building almost being ripped out of the ground like a weed at the same time as being torn down into raw component materials. Barely the smallest patch of sub levels and foundations were left standing…

At which point the ground shock wave caught up.

If the shock of the air being displaced on such a large scale was enough to destroy the building, the one in the ground was enough to bury the remains.

Once the shock waves were passed, the only visible sign that a building had been there before, was a lone metal road sign lying in a ditch where a road once was. But soon, that too was buried by the fire and then ash that followed.

I stared at the screen in front of me, that would be the last human I would ever see, the fallout of so many nukes on earth had no doubt disabled all electronic devices that could send a transmission out this far, and what would the other countries want with me anyway?

The shock took a back seat immediately when I noticed that the dials I had been staring at were red.

"Fuel ok, air ok..."

I started to go through the checklist of important in my head but stopped when I came to height.

"Height from moon....... o-one thousand meters"

I stuttered when I read that number, the automated computers would have kept me on course so what could it be?

I brought up a feed from one of the outside cameras and yelled in shock.

"The moons getting bigger!?"

Not only was the moon getting bigger at an exponential rate, it was also changing, it went from a pale white and grey orb to a shallow blue, changing before colour my eyes like some cheap magic trick.

The mountain range comprised mostly of giant craters I was supposed to be landing near was twisting and turning on the surface, writhing like a giant snake.

Several of the larger centre craters merged to form a new crater that was around one sixth of the still growing moons visible surface.

The oddest part of this was a line of craters that was forming, looking like some kind of lance, spearing up towards the top of the moon.

Something didn’t add up about this whole moon thing, if the moon was getting bigger at an exponential rate, then I would have crashed into it by now, and why was I still descending at a calm rate?

Unless the moons mass was not increasing as it got bigger, I would be speeding towards it.

Thinking of that I thought of the drastic consequences on the Earth this would have, so I steeled myself and switched camera's to the one currently facing Earth.

''I was shocked'' would be an understatement.

Not only was the moon getting bigger, the EARTH was too!!

My mind reeled at this new impossibility and asked out loud:

"How am I not dead yet?"

The question rang out into the silence.

As I thought about it in full for the first time, if the Earth and the moon were both getting bigger at insane speeds but my position, speed and gravity were still the same....

I thought hard for a while...

The only thing my overtaxed mind could come up with was...

"The planet and the moon must be getting smaller but closer together."

The only logical reason I could think of was the most illogical thing I had thought in my extremely scientific and practical life, a breaking point if you will.

I passed out.

I awoke to a dead silence.

Cold sweat ran down my back, I sat up in my chair, my mind reeling, remembering the events from before.

My eyes went wide and any resemblance of sleep was pushed from my mind as I realized what the silence could entail. Looking around the cabin, I noticed several warning's on the screens in front of me.

Peering closer I breathed a sigh of relief.

--Orbit stabilized, holding position--

“Thank god the people who designed this craft made sure that it would continue to operate without me, I would have to thank them once I got back..."

It hit me then, there was no going back.

I quickly reconnected with the earth facing camera's only to find them facing the blankness of space. I panicked for a moment, thinking the earth destroyed, before I remembered the moon orbit I was currently in.

I switched from camera to camera until I found one that could see most of the earth.

It was not the earth.

I stared in horror at the screens, staring at what had once been the earth, but was now some huge, earth like giant in space. The earth could not possibly be that close, last I looked at it, when it really was earth; it had been no larger than a tennis ball in my hand.

Now the earth was so large, so close I corrected myself, that if I had been standing on it, the moon would take up nearly a quarter of the sky.

My stomach bottomed out and I felt like passing out as the events around me sunk in.

"This really happened..."

"...This is still happening"

I corrected myself again as several blinking lights caught my attention in front of me.

While I had been sleeping off the effects of shock, the lander had brought me into a semi-stable orbit around the moon, the computers not knowing how to deal with the moon changing.

What struck me as odd was the fact that the moon seemed too big to be real, aside from the fact that it just grew over twice its size being unreal, the amount it grew by was most defiantly more than three thousand meters, its size was easily three times the size of the moon I remembered, the moon I looked up to every night.

This was one of the many questions that my mind wanted to know desperately, one of the many impossibilities that were occurring around me.

I shut them out, I needed to concentrate.

The orbit I was currently on was one that would bring me in to land right in the eye of the unicorn on the moon.

I stopped.

"The unicorn on the moon"

I started as I noticed the face of the moon, it was beautiful.

My mind was not even thinking about how it got there, why it was there or any other questions about this new impossibility I was being confronted with.

All I knew was the tremendous beauty of it. The way its head was shaped, how its horn thrust up through the side of the moon, ending near the top with a sharp point.

In my mind I heard my voice going through the facts, the horn would not be very sharp close up, the eyes would look far less eye-like once landed upon. I brushed these thoughts aside as I continued to stare at the moon.

More red flashing from the screens in front of me forced my eyes off the moon as I looked through the dials and numbers being presented to me.

"Air: 50%"

That would be fine as the current display was designed to show my air by half, I would know when the point of no return was when it reached zero.

"Fuel: 19%"

That would be decidedly less than fine, the trip to the moon was only supposed to use around 35 percent so that I could use the rest for landing and taking off and a little bit of course correction of course.

I checked the reserves... empty.

I was surprisingly calm as I thought about this, running some quick calculations in my head I came to the conclusion that even if the earth had moved closer, I would not have enough fuel to perform a safe entry into the higher gravity atmosphere of earth. I looked across the screens beside me.

"I'm a dumb-ass" was all I could say to myself as I noticed a little green light indicating that I had left the landing thrusters on when I had passed out. The lander had detected anomalies "Really where?" I said sarcastically, and readjusted to get into an unstable moon orbit. Unfortunately for me, it appeared that the "unicorn moon" as I dubbed it, did have a different gravity to earth’s moon, not surprising since it had gotten bigger and closer to the earth but since I had not crashed and burned at this point, I figured that it had a lower mass than the moon I know.

The mass ratio seemed to be messing with my machines, I was not sure how far I was from the surface of the moon, but one thousand meters didn't seem all that accurate, for some reason, I had the urge to try and measure it in hand lengths.

A deep despair threatened to crush me with its weight, my shoulders started to sag as I calculated the chances of returning to earth.

If I went back, the distance should be roughly an eighth of the distance, however, there is no way I could complete turning man-oeuvres with only 19% fuel, and defiantly no way I would have enough for the landing burn.

I was effectively stranded in space.

Being stranded in space was one of the most frightening prospects known to man, one of the reasons that very few people who knew of the dangers truly, wanted to go there. The multitude of things that could go wrong was a list so long that to write it on paper would be like writing every current human language out in triplicate.

"I need to make a decision, do I head back or do I just sit here and wait to die?"

The thought gave me shivers but I accepted the fact that I was not going to make it out of this alive.

"Ever since I was young I wanted to go to the moon... I'm not going to let some small inconvenience stop me now!"

I laughed at my own joke.

A hollow laugh.

An empty laugh.

I stopped to take stock of my situation. Looking around I noticed a few things that had slipped me by in my stress. In the strange calm that overtook me I noticed that everything around me looked... different.

At first I could not put my finger on it, was it me?

Yes and no.

It hit me as I was looking at the different earth.

Every object, from the stars around me to the earth below me looked a bit... cartoony.

It all had a relatively small black outline.

"Kinda like in a cartoon"

With a gasp I looked at myself in a small pocket mirror I had been provided for when I shave.

My face was very similar to what it had been, but there was less variation in the colouring, my eyes were what really struck me the most. Instead of the blend of blue and green they had been, my eyes were both blue and green.

The colours started on opposite sides of my eye and as they went around the middle, the shades slowly started to change until they were blending in the middle as a neutral blue-green colour. If this wasn’t enough, the ring of colour around my eye was also broken up into square like segments, each with its own outline of black, making my eyes look very... cutesy.

The rest of my body was less different, if a bit less varied.

Each of my clothes were now mainly one or two shades of the same colour instead of the many differing spots of colour from use or stains.

I had a feeling that if someone saw me from a distance of more than twenty meters, I would look very flat, like a drawing.

After investigating my other, few personal items I had brought with me, I was ready to eat.

For my tip to the moon, most of the foodstuffs that had been packed were simple, like protein bars and cold coffee in tubes.

However, there was one special package that was for when I arrived on the moon. Hastily opening the package revealed a steak dinner with a side salad and a small tube of wine.

I eyed the wine with hungry eyes, would it be enough to get me drunk? Sadly not…

Instead I pulled out the main dish and heated it in the flash microwave. It smelled a little different than what I remember steak to smell like, but I was too hungry to question it and took a large, uncut, bite out of it.

After I had finished dry heaving and coughing I tossed it into one of the waste compartments and sank back on to my seat.

"What the hell was that?!"

During my life on earth I had always loved a bit of meat every once in a while, and eating a balanced diet was part of the vigorous program I had gone through when training.

Had the meat gone off? Was it poisoned?

The possibilities ran through my mind, chasing each other around my head like wolves after their tails.

I shook myself mentally, cursing at my own indecision.

"If it was poisoned, it would have taken longer than that to kill me; it wasn't even halfway down my throat. No, it was the taste"

I shuddered at the flavours that had assaulted my mouth, like a mix between death and sprouts!

Wiping my mouth with my hand in a futile attempt to at least clear my lips of the stuff, I grabbed what was left of the drink and downed it one go.

After slurping down every last drop, I sighed discontentedly.

Stretching in my chair I stood up to survey the damage the offending morsel had caused.

Food globed on the floor and sprayed across the small HUD screen in front of my chair, I needed to clean this up before it started to smell.

Sighing softly I sat down in the chair, pulled out a rag and began to wipe the sludge and bits that was meat and gravy.

After disposing of the rag in the waste shoot, I stiffened my resolve.

Until this point I had been distracting myself from the real issue; getting to the moon.

Staring down at the screens in front of me, I ran some quick calculations.

My rapidly destabilizing orbit was sending me slowly towards the moon, but the grey-blue orb was barely pulling at the lander.

I wondered briefly how I was in orbit around an object that seemed to have no gravity, and so close!

If I used the lateral thrusters to stop myself against the nearly non-existent pull of the moon, I should be able to float down, using the main rocket to land.

With this goal in mind, I started pre-programming the computer on my course of action, my shadowed forum lit up in the half-light radiating of the screen.