“Welcome to the free crater,” one of their guides said to Valerie and John. “We hope you enjoyed your arrival?”
“Loved it,” John replied.
Valerie nodded, feeling flushed. “Very nice,” she said. She was still disconcerted by Anna’s presence, by her ironic smile.
They were led to a table at the center of the platform, where several people already stood eating and drinking.
“Tell us about this place,” John requested. “Who are you people?”
The locals took turns to describe different parts of their project. The crater had been domed by an engineering and design team from Russia, but now they all operated it together. They were just free crater people; national origins were irrelevant. Languages were several, mainly Russian, Chinese, and Spanish, with English admittedly the lingua franca, as everywhere. The dome was a triple layer of translucent compounds which protected them from cosmic radiation. The crater floor held a substantial layer of ancient water ice, two hundred meters at its thickest, only slightly mixed with lunar dust. Extremely cold, extremely valuable. They had covered it with insulation and flooring and were mining one quadrant of it as needed, tunneling in from the side. The aerial village’s population was small, less than three thousand people, but there was room to grow, and energy to fuel that growth, as the temperature differential between the sunny rim and the frozen floor was about six hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Lots could be done with that!
“Who pays for it all?” John asked.
It paid for itself, their hosts said. The start had been privately funded by an international group of interested parties. Some Chinese and Russians, some Americans and Europeans, some Africans and Australians, some Indonesians and South Americans. But again, nationality didn’t matter (Anna rolled her eyes at this). Everyone was welcome, everyone was equal. Everyone was rich, Anna added. They mostly slept in a one g centrifuge embedded in the crater rim, and were hoping that would allow them to live their days in lunar gravity without adverse health effects. No one knew for sure about that, of course; they were an experiment, like everything else on the moon. They were mining and selling their water ice to pay for equipment and supplies. They were involved with the international group that was sending robotic spacecraft out to various carbonaceous chondritic asteroids, then building mass drivers on them to direct them down into orbit around the moon. “Ah yes, we just saw one of those crash into Procellarum during the eclipse!” John said.
The free crater people were happy to hear they had seen that. Meanwhile, their daily work in the crater was to build its infrastructure and its social system, and to make it beautiful. Life as art, the world as a poem—a poem about flying. It was all self-organizing, although they did make some plans. They were there to do what Luna told them to do and allowed them to do. They would be the capital of nothing. They would free themselves of all the mistakes of the past, they would make something new. Everyone was welcome—up to a point, of course, given the limits of the crater’s size. Not the billion, Anna commented, just the billionaires. But of course other craters could be domed and inhabited in this same way. There were a million craters like this one on the moon—although in terms of having water, Anna added, more like a hundred. For now, no one cared enough to stop them doing this, and the people who stayed cared more than anyone else what happened in here. It was a new kind of commons, a new way of living. To this even Anna nodded. It’s interesting, she said to Valerie. It’s the start of something, I’ll give them that.
Valerie glanced at John Semple. “It sounds great!” he said. “Show us more!”
Their hosts agreed happily, and dove off the edge of the platform. John and Valerie followed; Valerie missed the netting the others had grabbed, floated down and hit the big mesh again, bobbed down and up, down and up, until the mesh had stilled and she could crawl over it to a rope ladder leading down. This was easier than she would have imagined; the same lunar g that made walking hard made crawling easy.
On a clear deck over the crater floor, their hosts were already explaining to John that they were separated from the crater’s ice by a clear polymer sheet set over a thick insulation layer of transparent aerogel. They could still see the crater floor under all that, a nobbled icy surface, like a Boston gutter in March, Valerie thought. Ugly; but it was water on the moon, and therefore precious.
One of their guides pointed out a long low building set right on the crater floor, such that it appeared to be half-buried in ice. This building, they were told, housed a server bank of quantum computers, which took advantage of the extreme cold to run arrays of the various kinds of qubits that needed supercool temperatures. Some of these worked at the temperature of the ice, others used the ice to help sustain temperatures just a fraction above absolute zero. This computer complex was another source of income, their guides said, and it also gave them some leverage when it came to keeping their independence; they had almost as many yottaflops available as all the servers in the United States combined. Which was only another way of saying that the US had fallen far behind in quantum computing, but still, it was a startling fact. Computing power was economic power, they said; and economic power was political power. So that small building down there buried in the ice of their crater floor could in theory house a major player in Terran politics.
Through the transparent decking and insulation they could see a giant pit that had been excavated out of the ice, near one arc of the crater wall. Vehicles like roadbuilding machines rolled around cutting the ice into cracked blocks and then trundling these blocks over a flat stretch of crater floor toward the inner wall of the crater, where they would be hauled up in freight elevators to the rim, there to be distributed all over the moon. Ice this cold acted differently than ordinary ice, it was extremely hard and brittle. The crater harbored about a billion cubic meters of ice, and every drop mined from it would be recycled as long as possible. The goal was to keep every drop of it in circulation forever, with zero water loss in all downstream uses. That was impossible, of course, but still a goal to be attempted.
“As a form of money it’s got very high liquidity,” John joked. “Just add heat and serve!”
“See that tilted slope down there? That was an avalanche.” One of their hosts indicated a big scoop and slide in the wall of excavated ice. “Back when they began mining this ice, my friend John was down there when that slope gave way. The ice partially buried him, they had a hell of a time freeing him up. It was only a few minutes, but by the time they got him out, his feet were frostbitten. He lost all his toes. That was how we found out that you really need your toes to be able to walk on the moon. We call him Mr. Pogo Stick now.”
“Sorry to hear,” John Semple said. “Does he still live here?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Don’t you know who lives here?”
“Oh yeah, we have to keep track of that, to keep the gas exchange and everything else. I just don’t know if John moved on or not.”
“We do blockchain governance,” one of the others said. “The census is part of that.”
“Blockchain governance? Meaning what?”
“All our activities and decisions are recorded in a secure distributed network, including our comings and goings, but also everything we do as a town. We call it documented anarchy. A full-disclosure commons. Anyone can do anything, but everyone gets to know what that is.”
“Is that what the blockchain governance movement on Earth is trying for?”
“I don’t know.”
Valerie said, “Since you keep track of everyone, could you look for someone we’re looking for, see if they’re in town?”