When I was a kid, to everyone apart from a few billionaire geeks, the moon was boring. All the cool stuff had happened in my parents’ generation: The moon landing, the Armstrong bit about the small step for man... Old gray stuff, crusty and dusty, like black and white TV. For us, it was red-hot Mars that was exciting and still unattainable.
So when Donald the First, after his coronation, announced the building of Trump Moon Base, it triggered a global eye-roll. But then Elon Musk agreed, because the idea wasn’t that stupid after all, and we went ahead and built it.
The megafloods did a lot to speed things up: As their beachfront and low-lying properties disappeared, the 1% invested their insurance cash in Selenia, the most exclusive and cramped luxury resort ever known to man. It’s ironic that the moon first became commercially viable as a gated community, an obscenely self-absorbed middle-finger to the huddled masses sloshing around on Earth’s ever-expanding refugee zones. It was only after the Unification and the Beijing Convention that the Reallocation bill was passed, and that we turned the elites’ luxury moon-city into their prison. All it took was welding the airlocks shut from the outside.
Selenia continued to exist, like a festering pimple of frustration and bile on the Sea of Serenity, even as Trump Moon Base grew around it. The…
