Thinking back, it’s interesting how deeply certain periods are seared into one’s memory in such clarity that they seem to have happened only yesterday. Some of them are pretty much universal: your first kiss, the first time you get laid. Others are more personal. And then there are the ones that are shared by a whole generation, like the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, the first Moon and Mars landings, the fall of the Soviet Union.
For us, the Expulsions had been the big Defining Moment. We all knew where we’d been and what we were doing when the word went through that we were being sent to Shepardsport. And all of us can remember that moment when we heard about the destruction of Luna Station, of the Kitty Hawk Massacre. Especially those of us who’d just gotten up here — the first thing that went through our minds was that could’ve been me. Just a little difference in the schedule of flights and we could’ve been one of those kids getting their names inscribed on the Wall of Honor.
After Shepardsport adapted to this sudden increase in its population, things pretty much settled into a pattern. Life actually started to become ordinary for us. We had our work, our training, our teaching responsibilities, our mandatory exercise hours. And when we didn’t have something scheduled, there was always studying to do, or class preparation for whatever we were helping teach. So it wasn’t like we had a whole lot of time on our hands to go oh wow, I’m on the Moon. And we really didn’t have a lot of time to brood about the tensions with the Administration, unless our work responsibilities related directly to it.
And then the Great Sick came along and suddenly everything was changing — but it was down there, dirtside. For us, the biggest change was the pilots being confined to the port facility down in Innsmouth Sector, so a whole bunch of classes had to be rearranged so that either they could teach by teleconference, or someone else took over.
But there was always the awareness that it was out there, and we had to make sure it didn’t get in here, because if it did, there was no way to keep it from sweeping through the whole settlement. Up here, we just live too close together. Even keeping the pilots in the port facility was probably not a sure shot, because they were still having some contact with other port facility staff who went home at night to their apartments up in Dunwich Sector.
So there was a continual low-level sense of menace, of being a tiny and very fragile bubble of safety, at a level that we hadn’t felt since we first got up here and were super-aware that we were living on a world where everything that sustained life, down to the air we breathe, had to be provided and maintained by an intricate system of technologies. But it was something you could put out of your mind if you weren’t particularly close to any of the pilots or had family still dirtside. After a while the immediacy of the threat started to fade, and life went on.
And then the solar storm alerts started coming through. It’s something you prepare and train for, just like we prepared for hurricanes back in Houston, and people up in the Midwest and Great Plains prepare for tornadoes. Watches and warnings, regular drills where we all had to go trooping down to the storm shelters under the settlement’s water reservoirs. But you usually figure that the Sun will hock one hairball and that’ll be it. This time the Sun’s magnetic field was doing some seriously weird things, to the point that even the solar astronomers weren’t sure how long the danger was apt to last, and NOAA space weather forecasts were outdated almost as soon as they went up.
I was working on a project for one of our resident astronomers, and half the time I was in her office, she’d be on the phone to colleagues all over the Earth-Moon system. People over at Grissom City, people at JPL who ran the big solar observation satellites, even people in Jerusalem and Tokyo and Moscow. Sometimes she’d even get e-mails from Mars, since there’s no way to have a realtime conversation with that kind of light-speed lag. So I was getting a ringside seat on a whole lot of uncertainty, and that was when I started really feeling like we were under siege.
—– Spruance Del Curtin, “Remembering the Diablovirus Outbreak” from The Lunar Resistance: An Oral History. Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater: Kennedy University Press, 2059.