Solar Umbrella (Book 1)

Chapter 16: Arrays for Days

THE GROUP HAD five days to enjoy their time at LunaOne, which was the standard trip length. Parker filled his days easily. His favourite spot, surprisingly, turned out to be the garden which was not only necessary to keep the air clean in the hotel but also beautiful. It had an enormous glass dome to let in light and was misted by sprinklers regularly. Being in there was calming and magical. It felt like a rainforest and made him forget he was on the moon at all. There was talk of adding animal life to the garden, but the hotel decided not to wade into the ethics of forcing animals to live in 1/6th gravity and stick to making fistfuls of money. He and DJ spent several hours there chatting about everything and anything.

A close second favourite event was the lunar walk excursion. He had gone with Alex and Valentina the first time and they had a blast walking around the surface. He especially enjoyed visiting the solar field that fed the hotel with its energy. The rainforest full of light, life and movement couldn't have been more different than the solar array. Grey, quiet, dead. Nothing moved, nothing made a sound. It just sat and collected energy.

Valentina approached him one day and asked if he wanted to head back out to the array. She wanted to study something about the electrical conversion rates of the field, and SpaceOne had agreed to give her access to one of the array's control panels. It was against the rules to go out on an excursion alone, so Parker agreed to join her.

Valentina had been strangely quiet and aloof as they walked towards the airlock. "What's up Valentina? You seem a little off today."

"I am not rude Parker, but when you come, can you not talk to me?" Valentina asked him. Her face was all scrunched up. He could tell she didn't like having this conversation, and she was searching for the right words as she said them—likely converting them from Russian as she spoke.

"Shit Valentina, you could find a better way to tell me I'm annoying without just getting right to the point," Parker replied.

"Oh! No! It isn't that," her face reddened as she explained, "I need to work when it's quiet or my brain can't...focus on the task. Sorry, my English is bad. I am explaining this bad. I thought you would be...strong enough to understand this need for me?"

Parker gave her a friendly laugh in response. "Well, that's actually pretty high praise, Valentina. I'm happy to roll out there on the surface with you. I like the silence too. I'll just do my own thing and you give me a shout if you need me. Deal?"

The awkwardness left Valentina's face, and her usual confidence returned. "Deal Parker, I knew you would get it."

They suited up under the watch of the hotel employees who checked their gear and rotated the airlock for them. Valentina got right down to business at the array, so Parker wandered off a few metres to sit alone and enjoy the view. His view was the sun and a bunch of stars. The first time he took that view in, it was magical—something so few people had ever seen. Today, it got him thinking about just how big space was. Enormous. Unimaginably infinitely huge. But also empty. You could go into orbit, or visit a space station or even go to the moon. People theoretically could go anywhere in the solar system, but why? Parker loved science and exploration, but the reality was robots could do a much better job of collecting images, video and data than humans ever could. Humans were limited by the meat sack that carried their brains. Robots could survive so much more and required no air, no food, not much of anything. Chuck a solar panel on a little ship and send it to wherever. NASA's manned exploration was basically done. Companies didn't bother sending people up much past orbit either. There were workers who built and fixed spacecraft in orbit on stations, but that was about it. And they were only there to send ships out to find and mine asteroids. If people wanted to get out there—really out there, something would have to change. A new engine, and new something to make the incredibly vast emptiness between stars disappear. Or, humans would need to be more like robots somehow. One thing was for sure, whatever the next step for humans was, they needed to buy some time to get there. Terraforming other planets, genetically altering humans in a meaningful way, inserting human consciousness into a robot—these were all decades away at least. Humans might not make it that far. Parker reconsidered what he talked to Kate about. He wanted to be part of that time of change. He wanted to help think of a way to make Earth better, to help bridge the gap required for whatever was next. Parker loved time like this. Settle in and think about a problem and possible solutions. He liked to hope humanity could get out of this darkness it was stuck in now. The question was how?

"I said let's go, Parker!" Valentina was tapping him on the shoulder.

"Uh, sure thing!" he replied. "Lost in my thoughts! Sorry."

"I knew you were the perfect choice," she winked.