Chameleon is Hope
by Pete D. Manison
Illustration by Vincent Di Fate
Chameleon was Dread. Which didn’t surprise Mallory, since Chameleon was always Dread for him. Under the circumstances, he thought, perhaps it was best, today, that Chameleon was Dread.
“We’ll never make it,” said Dread. “It’s too far. We don’t have enough air. We are going to die.”
Mallory laughed, the sound going flat inside the helmet of his spacesuit. Behind him, Lunar Defense Complex 3 was a blackened pit in Mare Nubium; a crater so new the dust was still settling, black and scorched, all around the hole, giving the overhead stars a misty shimmer that covered Mallory’s suit with black snow whenever he stood still long enough.
And ahead, somewhere ahead, was his only chance for survival.
“Ah, my dear Dread! What adventure, what challenge. This is what living is all about. This is what legends are made of.”
Dread groaned.
Mallory replayed the last battle in his mind. The Cascadian invasion fleet was broken, defeated. The last great cruiser swept low over the Moon, its alien pilot desperate or dead, its winged mass turning, dipping. LDC-3 fired its main batteries in desperation. A hit. Another. The cruiser, sliced almost in half, disappeared over the horizon. But not before that great bird gave birth to one tiny, red egg.
The egg was a fission device.
LDC-3 was its target.
Now, Mallory was alone. Alone on all the Moon to celebrate humanity’s final victory, a victory bought with blood, but a victory nonetheless.
“I hate people who are happy all the time,” said Dread. “I always wonder what they’re trying to hide.”
Mallory smiled at this, but he didn’t answer the voice in his head. Instead, he activated his suit’s locator, using precious battery life to get an accurate fix on his destination. There. Air Station Omega. Life. There, just there. Just…
“Thirty-seven kilometers? You must be joking, Mallory.”
“We can make it,” he told Dread. “We’ll travel south first, into the substation grid. The air caches will lead us to the station. There’s all the air we need there, and we can contact Earth.”
He glanced up at the blue orb as he spoke. Earth, a sapphire on black velvet. So close he could almost reach out and touch it.
“Maybe some Cascadian weapons got through,” said Dread. “Maybe there’s no one left on Earth to contact.”
Mallory laughed. He tried to associate the disembodied voice with the tiny pellet he knew nestled at the base of his brain. As usual, he failed. Chameleon implants, he thought. Artificial intelligence. What a pain in the brain. Just once I’d like to be alone with my thoughts. “If that were true, Dread, which it isn’t, then what productive strategy would you recommend?”
Dread’s voice was a cold tickle along the aural receptors of Mallory’s brain, as cold as the airless world around them. “Save yourself the burden of hope,” he said, “the pain of lingering death. Open your helmet now.”
Mallory shivered. “We’re wasting time,” he said, and he called up the substation grid. Green lines splashed across his visor, virtual vectors that moved as he turned through a complete circle. The nearest substation was less than a kilometer away.
He started walking.
Chameleon was Dread, and Dread didn’t take well to having his suggestions ignored. Dread sulked all the way to the substation. Mallory’s senses fed on themselves as he moved in bounding leaps along the green line. The lunar soil shifted each time his boots dug in for the next leap, its consistency that of powdered chalk. His breath rasped inside the helmet, in time to the beating pulse in his ears: thud thud rasp, thud thud rasp. He’d set his oxygen mix at MAX-CONSERVE, and the tang of impoverished air burned his nostrils and made his mouth pucker, like biting into a lemon.
He laughed. He was alive! Think of all the poor slobs who never see beyond the walls of their safe, drab lives. Think of their arteries clogged with sediment and their minds set in thickening molasses and their hopes and dreams all smothered by monotony and routine. I could never live like that, thought Mallory. Would never want to. I am exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to do, being exactly who I want to be.
“Our oxygen supply is half depleted,” said Dread, a few minutes later. “Or would an optimist say half full?”
Mallory grinned. “Don’t be sarcastic, Dread. You’re right: the tank’s half empty. But guess what? We’ll be filling it momentarily.”
Dread sighed, disappointed no doubt. Two minutes later they reached the substation. It was nothing but a white and black checkered cylinder, set half below the surface and half above, about the size of a man. Mallory jacked in, turned two safety knobs on the cylinder, two more on his suit. A faint hiss confirmed his tank was being filled.
He waited.
“So, Dread, we’re still alive.” He’d taken to teasing the AI implant lately, which was probably cruel, and almost certainly a waste of breath, but he could hardly resist.
“A temporary condition,” answered Dread.
“Of course! Death is inevitable one day. And when it comes, I think I shall embrace it, eager to learn what awaits me on the other side.”
“Nothing awaits you but oblivion, Mallory. You die, your life’s work is forgotten, and you cease to exist. Anything else is a delusion.”
Mallory nodded. It was an argument they’d had many times. “I’ll be happy however it turns out,” he said.
“Probably. That’s the depressing part.”
The tank was full. Mallory closed both sets of safety valves and jacked out. The green vector on his visor beckoned him onward. He moved out.
The next substation was empty. A micrometeorite impact and a slow leak, it looked like. A frosting of ice on the surrounding rocks confirmed the hypothesis.
“We’re finished,” observed Dread.
Mallory shook his head. “Not at all. We’ve got more than enough air to make the next substation. Then only a little farther to Omega.” He pictured the air station vividly, its life module small by some standards, spacious alter the long hours in the suit. Plenty of air there, plenty of food. Maybe other survivors had made it in ahead of him. Maybe they’d already contacted Earth and gotten a rescue ship dispatched.
Then home. Returning as a hero. The lone survivor of LDC-3, or one of the proud few. Stories to impress the ladies, their eyes big and round in wonder. Then, later, the children, the grandchildren. “What did you do in the war, Grandpa?”
“Oh, not much. Just saved the Earth single-handedly is all.”
Mallory stopped, giving his legs and back a moment to rest while he took in the stark beauty of the lunar landscape. His coworkers at the defense complex had often complained of “the grays,” a state of pseudodepression they claimed was induced by the dreariness of their surroundings. To Mallory, the great sweeping plains and the angular mountains and the sharp divisions between light and shadow had always combined to form new and surprising depths of alien beauty.
“Mallory,” asked Dread, “what do you see when you look out there?”
They were halfway between substations now. Mallory thought if he could remove his helmet, the lunar night would be silent and crisp, like the predawn hours of a winter morning back home in Juneau.
“Alaska,” he said. “I see Alaska. That’s my home, you know. Parts of it are very much like this: rugged, alien, inhospitable. Not a place meant for human beings. But we go where we weren’t meant to, don’t we? And we thrive there. It’s part of our nature. Part of what makes us great.”
Dread made a noncommittal grunt. “Alaska,” he said. “That figures. It supports my theory, too.”