-Epilogue-

Moonlighting

Forty-Four Years Later…

A neon sign shaped like a ringed planet cast a dull, mint-coloured glow across the ground outside. It was green and white, punctuated by a comically oversized logo reading 'Lunar Rest Stop.' She felt as though she could hear the buzzing, but the vacuum of space made that impossible, and she couldn't see the sign from her booth.

"We used to stop in a place just like this when my mom drove my sister and I out to summer camp every year. It had a space theme and everything. They had these saltshakers shaped like rocket ships, and outside was a bug zapper that never worked so the flies could still get in when the windows were open. We went every year until Sarah started refusing, and they never fixed the bug zapper."

"We haven't even got a bug zapper," said the waitress behind the counter. The whole diner was empty except for her and Esther. Esther laughed.

"That's true. You've got that sign, though. It's just as pointless. I mean, where else are people gonna stop? There isn't anything for miles around."

"You won't be saying that when they finish building at the South Pole. They've already got the hotel at Marius Hills."

"I always wondered how long it would take them to gentrify the moon. Less than a century." It was 2057. "It's almost exactly a hundred years since Sputnik."

"What happened to your diner? The one you used to go to?"

"…I don't know."

"You never found out?"

"I didn't want to. If I go back and it's gone, the memory will be ruined."

"I hope you don't stop coming here when they start building more developments," the waitress joked, "You're our only reliable customer. I still don't understand how you get here without a suit or a shuttle."

"Trade secrets."

"And you say you're not a Manifest?"

"I'm not. Can I get a fresh cup of coffee?"

"Sure."

"It's the best coffee this side of the Moon."

"So where was that place?" she asked as she walked over with a coffee pot that looked as though it had been manufactured to look well-worn.

"West Virginia. We would go there from D.C., and they'd tell us scary stories around the campfire about the Flatwoods Monster." The waitress, Lily, poured out a fresh cup. Esther had been there for a few hours, watching the Earth spin. It was always further away than she expected. "Y'know, you could fit all the other planets side-to-side in the gap between the Earth and the moon?"

"The planet on the sign is enough for us here."

"You don't think it's strange that the sign is a planet when this is the moon? We're not on Saturn." Though, she'd been to a diner not dissimilar to this one drifting aimlessly through Saturn's icy asteroid belt before. Not as friendly, though.

"We can't put the moon on the sign. The moon is right out there," Lily indicated the vast, alabaster desert stretching beyond the horizon.

"This place reminds me of California."

"They're planning on building a theme park."

"Gosh, really?"

"Dad heard rumours about CyTech buying up the land." Her dad was the cook, but he didn't often leave the kitchen.

"I doubt that. Adam Mitchell isn't interested in space," she said, "Not in building in it, at any rate. He's more concerned with trying to help people on Earth first."

"Well, somebody's going to start developing it. There will be a Lunar Disneyland any day now."

"You'd think they'd at least try to stick one on Halcyon before they came out here," she sighed, looking out of the window. They were too far away from Earth to see Halcyon, which was about the size of Manhattan and stayed perpetually suspended over the Pacific Ocean in orbit, but Esther sometimes imagined she could see a tiny, silver speck where it was supposed to be. She didn't often visit the satellite city, even though it was an easier journey than making it all the way to the Moon; she didn't like it there as much.

"They have better food on Halcyon, it's closer to Earth so the ingredients are fresher. That's what they say, at least," said the waitress, sitting down opposite Esther in the booth. "My family are from D.C., actually."

"Oh, really?"

"But my mom moved before she met dad."

"Where did she move to?"

"Utah. That's where they met. They used to take us camping, near Bryce Canyon. Have you ever been?"

"I've been everywhere," she said. She had been to Bryce Canyon. "Did she ever take you to Maine? There's this place, this tiny kitchen built inside an old lighthouse – they have one of the windows carved out for the customers, no seats – and they make the best lobster rolls you've ever tasted. They catch them fresh off the coast every morning." Alice and Melanie both used to like when Esther would drive them, and Sarah, out to New England. "That's something you can't get out here, I bet – a halfway decent lobster roll."

"We've got a lot of moon rocks?" Lily suggested jokingly. "But they're not edible."

"You're really not worried that if they build a theme park in the crater down the street that you'll go out of business?"

"We'll relocate to Mars and put a rest stop out there. They say the terraforming is going well, maybe they'll make some new seas and bring lobsters across."

"Wouldn't that be something."

"You could bring one, couldn't you?" Lily asked.

"A lobster? No. That's not how I travel, sorry," she said. She could ride magnetic waves into outer space, but she couldn't extend the privilege to a lobster. "But I have a friend who has a shuttle. Faster than most. Maybe I could ask for a favour, if you want?"

"You're very strange," said Lily after studying her for a while as she drank some of her coffee, "Aren't you ever going to tell us your name? Who you are? My dad thinks you're familiar."

"That doesn't surprise me. And I doubt it."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty, ish."

"I don't believe you."

"You shouldn't, I'm lying. But I'm still not a Manifest. And I'm not who you want me to be."

"What does that mean?" Lily implored. Esther's visits to the Lunar Rest Stop always ended this way, they ended will Lily trying to get a straight answer out of her about who she was, what she was doing on the moon at all, why she took the time to visit. "You'll stop coming one day, won't you? And you think if you don't tell us the truth, you can just pretend we're still here."

"You know what they should put out here?" said Esther, standing up, "A motel. For rovers."

"And you say you don't want the theme park to come?"

She sighed, "I've been visiting for a long time, I won't stop."

"But you'll keep lying."

"Maybe. It depends if I come up with a truth that's worth telling. At the moment, I'm… nobody. I'm barely a person at all. A broken bug zapper."

"You're not actually so different from the people who haul rocks and ores around the craters. You don't have any rocks, but… it's a certain type who'll pack up their lives and come up here. It's a lot further away than California."

"One day I'll do something. I like it up here, but… do you ever get tired of orbiting?" She stared out of the windows and across the lunar surface. "I need to get back to people. To Earth."

"I thought you live on Earth?"

"Not quite…" She wasn't sure she lived anywhere. "I need to…"

"Need to what?"

She shrugged listlessly, "I just feel like I need to."