Читать книгу The Moon Platoon - Jeramey Kraatz, Jeramey Kraatz - Страница 12

Benny stopped half a metre inside his assigned room. The rucksack he had slung over one shoulder dropped, hitting the floor behind him. He’d been expecting the place to be nice, but hadn’t really given a lot of thought as to what that might actually look like. And now he was here, standing in a suite that was at least ten times bigger than his RV on Earth. Everything was plush material and dark, polished metal, the walls a slate grey with thick red stripes shooting across the room. Huge pictures of distant planets and celestial bodies hung in metallic frames on all the walls except the furthest one, by the bed, which was just one big window looking out onto the Moon. There were multiple sofas, a small dining table, and—

There was a flicker of light a few metres away from him, and suddenly a woman with blond hair piled high on top of her head was standing beside a tufted chair.

“Hello there, Mr Love,” she said.

Benny took a step back, nearly tripping over his bag as he let out a string of half-words.

The woman smirked. “Sorry, I probably should have warned you before I appeared. We haven’t been officially introduced. I’m Pinky, the artificial intelligence who runs the Lunar Taj, and your personal concierge for the duration of your stay. We’ve found that our guests are much more comfortable being able to visualise the entity keeping their oxygen regulated and appointments in order instead of trusting a dismembered voice. And, as a privacy measure for our guests, my holographic form serves as a reminder that I’m not always watching or listening. I’m only present in your room when I’m here, if that makes sense. Do you understand, Mr Love?”

Benny stared back at her in silence.

“No one’s ever called me Mr Love before.”

“Would you prefer Benny?”

He nodded. Pinky smiled.

“All right, Benny. How about a quick tour?” She turned away from him, motioning to the kitchen at her left. “Against my nutritional recommendations, Elijah insisted that the pantries be stocked with all sorts of packaged snacks and pastries in addition to fruits and vegetables grown in our lower-level greenhouses.”

Benny made a mental note to fill his rucksack with anything left over on the last day – free souvenirs for his brothers.

Pinky continued, leading him deeper into the room.

“This wardrobe is full of custom-fit space suits and some casual clothing for downtime. Of course, that’s all yours to take with you in two weeks. This desk is equipped with a holosurface that can project three-dimensional images of the resort, your daily schedule, et cetera. Ah, and the entire wall across from your bed is a screen operated by your new HoloTek. You should find any sort of media you want streaming from our servers – music, videos, games. We have everything.”

“Everything?” Benny asked. He’d rarely been able to pick up enough of a signal to watch clips of cartoons whenever they were deep in the Drylands, and now he had anything he wanted at his fingertips, presented in trillions of ultradef pixels.

Pinky nodded. “If we don’t have it already, we’ll get it for you. Just say the word. Now, a next-gen gaming system is built into the server. You’ll find instructions on operating the holographic interface on your HoloTek, but there are a variety of controllers on the dresser should you prefer something a little more old-school. Apart from that, everything should be self-explanatory. Is there any way I can be of service now, before I go?” Pinky asked.

Benny could feel goosebumps prickling his arms underneath his space suit. He was pretty sure it wasn’t from the sight of the room alone.

“It’s kind of cold,” he said.

“The suite is set at an optimal temperature of twenty-one degrees Celsius,” Pinky said. Then she adjusted her glasses and bounced her head back and forth. “Of course, that’s probably a little chilly for someone coming from the Drylands.”

Benny felt warmer air blow across his face from a hidden vent.

Pinky continued. “This should be more comfortable, but if you’d like an adjustment, just let me know. All you have to do is say my name. Otherwise, please enjoy yourself.” She grinned, and then she was gone, blinked out of existence in an instant.

Benny stood still for a few moments, unsure of what to do first. Eventually he started walking around slowly, looking at all the shiny surfaces and electronics. Everything was so clean. He was almost afraid to touch anything for fear of getting grime on it. Despite all the amenities, though, the thing that he ended up focusing on was the kitchen sink. He stood in front of it, just staring for a while, before turning on the tap and taking a step back. For someone who’d spent most of his life in the desert searching for clean water, seeing a seemingly endless supply shooting out of the tap was almost as exhilarating as the high-tech electronics or the fact that he was on the Moon at all. He splashed his face, and then drank deeply from the stream – huge gulps that hurt his throat – before suddenly feeling guilty and turning it off. The tap seemed almost wasteful, too indulgent, though he assumed the water would be recycled somehow and that the people who normally visited the Taj were probably far less concerned with such things.

It didn’t take him long to unpack his stuff once he managed to stop gawking over his temporary accommodation. He didn’t have many belongings on Earth to begin with, apart from a handful of gadgets he’d either salvaged or traded for, and knowing that the resort was going to provide space suits, he hadn’t brought much in the way of clothes. He tossed a few ragged T-shirts in one corner and fished out the small voice modulator he’d packed and placed it on the bedside table. At least his little brothers hadn’t taken that. He pulled his beaten-up old HoloTek from his rucksack, the screen cracked and clouded with dirt that had somehow become embedded in the datapad, and then tapped on his shiny new device to start a data transfer, importing all his old files. After a few seconds, the transfer was complete, and he scrolled through some videos to make sure everything seemed in order. Most of them were outtakes from his scholarship vid. There was one, though, that looked unfamiliar. He checked the file’s info and found it had been created the day before. He tapped on it.

To his surprise, the video began to play not just on the HoloTek but on the wall across from him as well. His grandmother and two younger brothers sat inside their RV, threadbare curtains tacked up over the windows, dust motes floating in the shafts of light that poured through the many holes. Their faces were all smiles, blown up to huge proportions and illuminating Benny’s room.

“Hi, Benny!” all three of them said at once, waving. He wondered when they could have recorded this – maybe while he was out saying goodbye to the rest of the caravan.

“We wanted to leave you a surprise,” his grandmother said. “I hope you find this! Otherwise we messed up. Boys, tell your brother that you love him.”

Both his brothers rolled their eyes, putting up a fight for a few seconds.

“Just don’t forget about us,” Alejandro, the youngest, said.

“Sure, and bring us back some cool stuff.” Justin grinned.

“Oh, yeah, and we took your holospider out of your bag. If you want it back for your trip, tell us before you leave, OK?”

“And tell Elijah how cool I am. I’ll be old enough to apply next year!”

His brothers started to bicker over which of them deserved to go to the Moon before the other. Benny sat on the bed, his knees feeling wobbly. It made no sense, given the extreme luck he’d had in winning the EW-SCAB, but suddenly he kind of wished he were back on Earth.

Eventually, his grandmother turned the camera so that it focused only on her. She was all smiles, her darkly tanned flesh crinkling like raisin skin around her eyes.

“Your father would be so proud,” she said, tears threatening to fall at any moment. “You know that, right, Benicio?”

The video ended like that, with her frozen, staring into the camera, as if waiting for him to respond.

Benny set the HoloTek down and fished the last remaining item out of the bottom of his rucksack. A tarnished silver hood ornament in the abstract shape of a human. The figure appeared to be moving so quickly through the air that its body blurred, trailing behind it like wings or the tail of a comet. His father had pulled it off an old car he and Benny had found on a salvage trip one day when Benny was six or seven.

“See this?” his dad had asked. “This is like us. Always moving forward. We keep going, no matter what. We never give up.”

Benny brushed a piece of lint off the statue and put it on the nightstand beside his bed. It looked shabby in the high-tech room. Benny could relate.

He wasn’t surprised his brothers had taken the spider but left the hood ornament. The three of them might have spent a lot of their days pulling pranks on one another and fighting over toys or tech, but Justin and Alejandro both knew what that silver piece of metal meant to Benny. Each of them had mementos that the others knew were off-limits. Stuff from their father. Salvaged junk that meant the world to them. Now that their dad was gone, it was all they had of him other than their memories.

It hadn’t even been a year since he’d led a small team out into the Drylands in search of water. Only two people had returned. Benny’s father was not one of them. In the course of a day, the world as Benny knew it had ended.

Benny had already been filming for his EW-SCAB video when it happened – he had always planned to try for the scholarship. But he’d almost abandoned the application in the week following his father’s death. Part of this was because of sheer exhaustion. He spent all his time making sure his brothers were OK, talking to them or trying to distract them when tears cut streaks down their dust-covered cheeks. He tried to turn himself into a rock, stone-faced, promising them he’d never leave – another reason he almost gave up on the EW-SCAB. It was only at night that he let himself really think about his father, when he’d climb up to the top of the RV after everyone else was asleep and wonder how in the world they were going to survive without him. One night, he’d taken the hood ornament up to the roof and realised that his dad would have wanted him to apply. Of course he would have. He’d want Benny to keep fighting, keep trying for everything he yearned for in life. Always moving forward. Never giving up. And what Benny wanted more than anything was to help his family.

So he went for it. He poured every ounce of his heart into his application materials.

And somehow that had been enough to get him this far.

Now, with the hood ornament on his bedside table, he almost felt like his father had guided him there. And he knew that despite being away from his family right now, he’d be back soon. He’d take care of them. He’d be the kind of person his dad would have wanted him to be.