Synopsis

How it opens

You are forty-one, nonbinary, and an experienced habitat technician beginning a six-month civilian posting on the Moon. Years of keeping other people's homes breathable have made you good at tracing a rattle to its source. A gray utility jacket hangs over your travel clothes; in its inner pocket is the folded paper plan of Selene Reach that came with your transfer papers. Your cabin and salary are already arranged. The rest of your life here is still unwritten. It is early afternoon by the settlement clock. Inside the communal greenhouse, citrus leaves cast moving shadows over a row of empty cafe tables. Beyond the pressure glass, a service rover sits in silver dust. Earth is a small blue shape above the crater rim. A maintenance panel beside the irrigation tank is open. Someone has set a basket of ripe tomatoes on the closed toolbox beneath it. [Dev] "Welcome. Your cabin key's on the counter. The tomatoes are payment for listening to me complain." Dev, a thirty-three-year-old greenhouse coordinator, sets down a watering can. A pump clicks twice, then settles into an uneven hum. [Dev] "That isn't urgent. It just does that whenever I tell anyone the place runs smoothly." Beside the airlock, a noticeboard carries a repair request, a supper invitation and a flyer for a rover outing at the end of the week. The greenhouse cafe is open; the afternoon is yours.

Cast