Prompt Lost
Dark Side Of The Moon
“Copy Home Base. Heading back.”
Janson’s transmitter clicked and silence returned to his helmet, broken only by a basso profondo inflection of his own breath. He looked down at his wrist where the oxygen levels read out in bright LED colors. 61% full. More than enough for the return journey across the lunar surface.
As he lifted his gaze up from the diagnostic screen on his arm a faint glint of white light caught his eye about 200 meters ahead of him in the midst of the unending dunes of gray dust. On Earth a small shiny object wouldn’t be cause for surprise. But here things that didn’t belong really popped against the dead landscape.
“Home Base, I have a small visual anomaly up ahead. I’m gonna take a brief detour, Jim.”
Jim’s voice came over the radio moment’s later. “Sounds good, not too late though, it’s lasagna tonight.”
Janson laughed. “Be home soon Corporal.”
Another click and Janson started out toward the object. As he approached Janson looked up at the starfull sky. Even with a high powered beam lighting the ground for 500 meters in an arc before him, the dark side of the Moon still made for one hell of a light show.
About ten meters out from the object Janson stopped short and his breath stopped with him, stuck in his throat. With trepidation Janson leaned forward and peered more closely at the small object.
“Captain, your heart-rate just skyrocketed, you OK?”
Jim’s voice brought Janson back and he made himself breath again. He could feel his heart beating in his head. “Yeah, copy that Jim, I’m fine. Just, give me a second.”
Janson got closer. With each step the small patch came into clearer focus. Its color was all bleached away by the sun, but the texture of its inlayed threads was unequivocal, the albino patch spelling out “NASA” in big, optimistic letters.
Janson bent down and grabbed at the ancient suit. Modern suits were quite thin and allowed complete mobility in the digits. Janson wiped away some dirt, gripped the area around the patch firmly, and tugged.
The object came clear of the dirt fairly easily in the low gravity. As the plume of lunar dust kicked up, Janson lost sight of it at first. But slowly he walked out of the impromptu dust cloud and saw the object in all its confounding glory.
A thick, heavy white vacuum suit, like an ancient diving bell for the incipient space traveler, floated before him, held aloft in his hand. The series of blue and red valves on the chest and the orbital glass helmet gave it away, but the name tag sealed the deal beyond all doubt, and raised the specter of an impossible possibility beyond all imagining.
It read “Armstrong”.
Janson instinctively dropped the suit as if it were on fire as his heart began to palpitate. Jim’s voice came back over the speaker but it was broken up by some kind of interference. As the old suit slowly fell flat onto the lunar surface, kicking up miniature tsunamis of dust, Janson swung around and leaped.
As he hopped in long, frustratingly slow movements, Janson ran just a few of the impossibilities of this discovery through his mind. Neil Armstrong did not land on the Moon’s dark side, he did not leave behind a suit, and most importantly, famously, he returned to Earth, a hero among men. This could not be happening.
His light went out and he was plunged into blackness. Janson began to panic and tried to use the radio but it was no longer functioning at all. The stars were now the only source of light available to him, but his eyes were having a hard time adjusting and it was so dark.
It began as a blue shimmer, the hint of a touch of energy, floating in space in front of him. The shimmer grew in intensity, brightening steadily until it floated before him in sheets of light, waves of blue and green, like a miniature aurora borealis.
Janson watched the vision, astonished. An outside observer would have seen only the ghostly blue glow of the ephemeral dance of reflected light coming off of Jansen’s domed helmet.
All at once the light exploded in size and vibrancy, numerous ribbons of every color imaginable, dancing and waving around before Janson in mid air, filling his field of vision completely. The lunar dust was not disturbed by the display, even as the light waves coalesced into a perfect tesseract, the impossible shape glowing brighter than a sun.
Janson stood, mouth agape, legs locked in place, unable to move, no longer afraid. His breath was steady in his ears and he had forgotten about the old spacesuit entirely. He just stood there, amazed, watching, as the tesseract approached him, passed into him, wondering all the while why the light didn’t hurt his eyes, even as it filled his eyes, over filled them, and then his mouth and then the skin of his face, which began to glow…
Jim waited inside the ship, nervous. He tried the radio for the hundredth time and got the same dead air.
“Goddamn it Janson.” He was about to start suiting up when he heard it. A crackle on the radio followed by a buzz and, underneath, the hint of a voice slowly coming into focus.
“Jim, do you copy? Jim?” One by one Janson’s vital signs began reappearing, first his brain waves, then his pulse and finally his breathing and blood oxygenation. Jim sighed out of sheer relief.
“Jesus Christ Henry, you scared the crap out of me. What happened out there?”
Janson paused and then his voice came over loud and clear, and calm. “I don’t know – some kind of EM pulse I think. Blew out my core diagnostics. They needed to reboot. I’m on my way back”
Jim sucked his front teeth and shook his head. “You gave me a real scare there boss. You sure you’re OK?”
Approximately 2 kilometers away, Janson looked down at the ground, back at the thin, modern spacesuit, empty and laying only a few meters from the ancient one, the latter reading Armstrong, the former reading Janson.
Still looking down, his voice level and flat, Janson answered.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“What about the object? What’d it turn out to be?”
Jim looked up and turned around to face the direction of the ship.
“It was nothing. Just a rock. Heading back now.”
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