The Moon Surveyor

Between a sun’s surface of spewing plasma and an almost desolate moon, there is nothing. There is no life, no debris and no organic matter. In five minutes, two divergent strands of energy will burst through the sun’s exterior, only to be pulled back in by its electromagnetic field. This will create two loops that, on collision, will break each other apart and release several explosions of light into that area of space where nothing resides. Then the light will dissipate, returning the nothingness to its original state. These occurrences are commonly known across all twenty-seven stellar systems as solar flares, and if it weren’t for the moon surveyor, nobody would even know they happened. But they did, and he recorded them.

'Unalon Sparse,' he muttered while scribbling his name onto the document in front of him. Just as Unalon reached the tail of his signature, his pen jittered empty. Knowing how much of a stickler the admin team used to be at the Planetary Bureau HQ, he twisted the body of the pen to separate the core from its other components and laid them flat on the desk. The core element was where the ink was held, in a hard-set tube of gelatin so that it could be used in the bio-replicator. Unalon pulled the cylindrical device from the top drawer of the desk, and used it to shuffle a little black toggle and a mic to the side of his station. Then he returned to the top drawer, pulling out a half-eaten bar of Mopson Cookie-Milk chocolate, and peeled back the foil, before breaking off two chunks. He placed one onto the desk, and the other on his tongue to let it melt below the roof of his mouth. The milky chocolate spread across his gums, and the cookie remnants sat stationed on his tongue. He sucked the cookie pieces onto his teeth and crunched them down into a pulp with the melted chocolate, swallowing it all and releasing an audible hum. Satisfied, Unalon folded the foil over the bar and slid it back into his desk drawer. After tapping on the replicator’s display, he dropped the remaining fragment of chocolate and the pen’s empty core element into the cylinder. The machine whirred like a microwave for a few seconds, then clicked to indicate it was finished. Out of the replicator he took a fresh ink tube and started to reassemble the pen. 

Slumping into his seat, Unalon let the curvature of his spine fit against the chair as though one was designed especially for the other. The chair was, however, just an old edition of standard Planetary Bureau equipment. 

'Stellar System 27. Moon Surveyor.’ Unalon continued jotting between the lines of the paper, placed squarely against the steel ridges of the desk.

The Planetary Bureau was in charge of all twenty-seven stellar systems in the galaxy, ranked by their amount of habitable planets. Stellar System 1 had over forty-nine, while Stellar System 27 no longer had any. The only sentient creatures Unalon had seen outside of the mirror were a few croga rats leaping across the moon’s surface. The blue, fist-sized pom poms bounced along in packs of half-a-dozen, bumping into each other and creating static to push their bounces further. As a predominantly female species, croga rats gathered sustenance through prolific binary self-reproduction, consuming their male offspring (indicated by their red pigmentation) and raising their blue daughters. The cold conditioning of the moon kept the male bodies from decomposing between the birth stages, allowing the species to store a supply of their dead offspring until they birthed more. Unalon often pondered on what his life would’ve been like if he were born a croga rat. Most likely he would be eaten before being conscious enough to question his own existence. On the off chance that he was born a shade of purple, he’d try and survive long enough to find whoever had replaced him as the moon surveyor, and come bouncing against the glass until he was taken in as a rare pet. Then he would only have to pray that this surveyor had not come from a planet where croga rats were a delicacy. In Unalon’s own stellar system, ‘croga rat’ was a derogatory term, coined from their rampant presence amongst the frost hills. Though they were native to his stellar system, they were very rare across the other twenty-six, so the species reminded him of home.

'Solar flare entered the prohibited region for roughly 2.75 seconds.’ Unualon scribbled into a text box labelled “notes”. 'It seems to be extending over time.'

Reclining back in his chair for a moment, Unalon gazed out of the circular window ahead of him. Most of what he could see was grey dust particles sifting across the moon’s surface, foregrounded by a black sky and specks of faraway stars. Neither dust nor star distracted him from the little, red marble of a sun that the moon orbited. His training assured that his observing and surveying of the subject remained at the forefront of his mind while he worked. 

Unalon stood up and walked over to his hyperscope. This machine had been developed specifically for surveyors, and compiled a simple tripod with a dual eye-scope and a varpo-crystal lens for quality magnification. For comfort, he had made some adjustments to the visor, adding some padding to the eyepiece using the stuffing from a pillow and a needle to compress the fibres.

At the end of a day’s cycle, Unalon packed his papers into a file, scanned the documents to create copies for his own store, stamped them with the day’s date, and placed them in the transport tube to be gathered and taken to the Bureau’s headquarters. He would then retreat into his rounded coffin of a bed, surrounded by environmental emulators programmed to recreate the cold conditions of his home planet in Stellar System 5. The sleep chamber was a gift from the Planetary Bureau in response to a wellness report he’d sent off a couple years after being stationed, detailing the loneliness of his isolation. Sometimes, Unalon would try to stay up as long as he could with his eyes closed, pretending that he was a child running through ice meadows and playing puddle cracks at the park. He even thought about his adolescence: picnicking beneath the frozen willows with other boys; hiding behind the drooping icicle leaves that sparkled like a chandelier when the sun tickled them. 

When Unalon turned sixteen, his dad made him find work, but the only place that would accept someone so young was a nearby bulb factory just across the Frost Hills. The job paid in cash and mostly hired agency workers from off-planet. Unalon would take the cable cars up the Frost Hills and cycle all the way down the other side so that he didn’t have to wake up too early for the six o’clock start. The job was dull, with Unalon’s primary role consisting of sitting in a dark room, screwing industrial-strength bulbs into power circuits and measuring their light quantity. It was of the utmost importance that the paths and roads of the ice-planet were well-lit as, although the technology that the Planetary Bureau provided was accustomed to regular ice, any large clumps or patches of black ice could cause fatal collisions. 

After telling his father about his new job, Unalon watched his dad’s eyes swell with pride, earning the respect he’d always been clawing back at since being caught having an intimate moment with the snowplougher’s son. 

‘Well done.’ His dad placed a firm hand on his shoulder. ‘I think it’s time I gave you these.’ He pulled a large pair of goggles from the deepest pocket of his chore coat. The goggles’ straps were hexagonally woven with intricate polyester fibres, and the lenses had a strange, matte texture which was unnoticeable when worn. ‘These have been in your mother’s family for generations, and though she may have wanted to see you with them, I decided to wait until I was sure that you’d be responsible enough to treat them with caution.’

Unalon’s dad rarely brought up his mother after she died, and her feature in the passing comment, disregarding her wants, angered him.

‘What’s so special about them, then?’ Unalon spoke with spite.

‘They’re goggles, you wear them on your head.’ His father pinged the straps and placed them in his son’s hands. 

Unalon could read his dad like a croga rat could read the colour of its young, and knew that he was lying. 

‘They will help you, as long as you value them properly. Clean and polish them everyday, just as I have.’

They clearly meant a lot to his father, and to his mother, so he would wear them even if they were a late gift.

Unalon’s journey to work became far safer than it had been before, now able to see past the snow without it flittering into his eyes, and more capable of dodging rogue iceboarders. He even started arriving early to work and reading the old glass factory guidebooks from the office. This caught Bill, his Boss’, interest, who decided to give Unalon the opportunity to scribe for the innovator meetings. During these meetings, the branch managers across the planet would gather to develop new strategies for efficient product development, and shared techniques for their businesses to thrive. More often than not, this meant cutting corners and taking advantage of cheap materials, so it was no surprise to watch each member of the faculty limber out of their own private aircraft. 

After a particularly inspiring meeting, Unalon began to do his own tests on the bulbs. Using the old guidebooks, he experimented with wrapping film, twisting coils with different metals, and even filling the bulbs up with various liquids. None of his experiments were fruitful, until he stumbled across a page about the Frost Hills. They were once sacred hills, absent of snow, and the people lived in humble villages on the flatlands between. When the ice age disrupted the planet’s climate, there was no communication between other planets, and they were forced to take solace below ground. Decades passed until they had built enough of an infrastructure to return to the surface, and by then a whole new generation had developed. It was one that refused to remain isolated, despite their elders' dismay at the new innovations in discussion. They created cable cars, excavating what was now the surface of the Frost Hills, in order to adapt to the new conditions. During the excavation, rumours spread of a crystal with valuable qualities to the planet, but conservation restrictions prevented further investigation. 

Below this explanation in the guidebook, a diagram had been sketched with annotations of supposed qualities, including: frost resistance, intense magnification of light, and complete impenetrability. The picture was labelled ‘Annogline’. Unalon tried to compose himself, but couldn’t suppress the connection in properties between the Annogline in the sketch and the material of his own goggles. What if they were made of that same glass? Could they have been passed down the family for that long?

Unalon followed the usual procedure, screwing a standard bulb into its energy source. This time, however, he hung his goggles over the top of the bulb. With his hand in a protective glove, Unalon picked up another bulb and held it above the goggles. Nothing happened for a few seconds, but then the bulb began tinting a reddish hue. Before long, the bulb was glowing red and exerting a heat that he could feel through the glove. The bulb had melted and started dripping onto his goggles. Unalon quickly took them aside and disposed of the bulb remnants. 

At the end of the day, he rushed home, keeping the goggles safe in his bag rather than wearing them. That evening, he would have something valuable to bring to the innovator meetings which would earn him a place amongst the branch managers. When his dad returned from work, Unalon met him at the door with the goggles hanging from his clenched fist.

‘Annogline glass. They’re annogline glass, aren’t they?’

His dad’s complexion sunk like snow and darkened the shadows underneath his eyes.

‘That’s a word I haven’t heard—’ he paused. ‘Take a seat.’

I sat down at the table, keeping the goggles clutched in my hands.

‘Our ancestors were some of the first people to inhabit the world as we know it today. They emerged from below ground after the ice age, and helped to build the cable cars. I’m sure you remember your mum’s mother spouting on about your five times great grandmother, Clarice. Well, Clarice found something in the frost hills—an ore of sorts—and took it home to her father. He brought it to his friend, the blacksmith, who observed its qualities and offered to weld goggles from them, on the condition that she could keep a pair for her own son, Asmod, and that they would remain a secret so as to not disrupt the sacred land further.’

‘They did a good job of that, cause I’ve never heard of it,’ said Unalon.

‘Yes. In fact, the only reason we know about it now is because your mother traced the goggles through collections of diaries in the attic, and records of similar substances in the restricted section of the town library.’

Unalon’s father went into his bedroom and returned with a stack of frayed, brown paper clippings which he placed on the centre of the table.

‘Decades passed, and these job stubs indicate that both Clarice and Asmod would use their goggles to collect firewood for people during snowstorms. This marriage document states that “The two bonded over their ability to see the world despite its cold countenance” and these are the birth certificates of their three daughters.’ His father spread the papers across the table, keeping the larger pieces close to himself, with one hand firmly pressing them into the table. ‘Clarice, generous and selfless, gave her goggles to their firstborn on her sixteenth birthday. Asmod, reserved and materialistic, reluctantly gave his pair to their lastborn when she turned sixteen. The middle child, however, received nothing but spite towards her siblings, who stole her little sister’s goggles and marched them down to the local newsroom.’ Unalon’s dad foiled up the paper he had been reading from and placed it back into his pocket. ‘The newsroom had her visit on record, but didn’t believe her fantastical story. This is the final document we have.’ His father released the newspaper below his pressed hand and watched Unalon as he read the cover: “Parents arrested for neglect after their daughters’ ice-olation”.

‘She never made it home?’ Unalon asked.

‘A gentleman on the next page says she got on the cable cars at the top…but.’

Unalon piled all the papers back up and pushed them back towards his father. ‘Wait.’ He pulled the newspaper up and scanned the cover. ‘Daughters?’

‘The youngest went after her sister—or the goggles. She may have found her—them—but neither of them were seen again.’

Unalon picked the goggles up off the table, but as he started to walk away, his father grabbed his wrist and said, ‘Not all good things do good. Use them to see clearly and you will.’

That evening, when Unalon had returned to the factory for the innovator meeting, he waited until all the men had finished their discussions and pronounced a cough for attention. He was met with the shock of a dozen men, all hunched over in red suits of different shades and heavy, fur-lined coats. Each could’ve been mistaken for bears, and had an irritated expression storming between bundles of their facial hair.

'Yes?' Bill spoke, turning his head so that his sharp beard pointed towards the boy.

'I…have an idea,' said Unalon. 'Annogline glass has the unique-'

'Annogline glass!' One of the bears laughed. 'Where are you getting your workers, Bill? The nursery?'

Bill held a straight face. 'The boy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Stand down ki-'

'It’s real, and I know it works—look!' Unalon pulled the goggles out of his coat pocket and held them up in front of the bears.

The men began to scuffle in their seats, turning to each other to mutter an astoundment. Bill took the goggles out of Unalon’s hands and placed them on the table.

'Come with me,' he spoke firmly, taking his arm and leading him out of the room. 'Our bulbs are for government use only; therefore, either you stole a piece of technology from the factory, hence you are fired, or you were experimenting with company property on company time and, yet again, you’re fired.'

Unalon stormed back into the room, snatched the goggles out of the hands of a gawking bear, and left the factory. Heading home, he took a detour around the frost hills and through the city centre. Unalon walked between the market stalls beneath the snow shutters, now saturated in neon lights and warm smells. He wandered past two pink-haired Glorbians in high-vis vests who appeared to be cleaning a piece of graffiti outside a market stall selling PB regulation firewood. As they reluctantly scrubbed the words “WE’RE BURNING TIME”, the letters only became clearer than they had been before.

“Burning Time” was how activist groups labelled Stellar System 5’s plans to keep the system’s ranking stable after legislation on what could be considered “habitable” placed pressure on the planet to control their climate. The system’s council provided funding to struggling planets, and this planet received the largest amount. However, as time passed, few improvements were made, and people started to doubt their leaders, theorising that the government had an ulterior motive. Some propagated the idea that, instead of adapting infrastructure to the climate, they were planning to melt the ice and sell the planet as a tourist destination. Protests went on for months and appeared successful in their method to halt the progress of “Burning Time”, but then one of the workers released a document exposing the council’s inability to melt ice at the rate and frequency it appeared. It cost the hidden salaries of too many workers, working too many hours, to make any impact, and this wasn’t feasible after the government officials skimmed their parts off the top. Protests started to slow down with little to protest against, and rebellious acts became limited to the odd bit of graffiti on a market stall.

A sign ahead of the graffiti read “Bark’s Breakfast Bowls”, and had a picture of a little cartoon man showing off his bowl of eggs, shamla bacon, toast, beans, and maaqua juice. The man on the sign looked happy enough, so Unalon wandered over.

'How much for a bowl?' he asked.

'Eight for a small bowl; a growing lad like yourself will want the regular. Ten,' the creature behind the bar replied.

'What about eight for a regular?'

'I don’t barter with food, boy, I make the best,' the creature grunted back, its protruding nose dilating to expose spirals of dark hair follicles like whirlpools.

'Well…What about a pair of unbreakable annogline goggles? They must be worth a couple klarp?' 

'Fairytale goggles with a lens missing? You must be having me on, boy! I’ll take them for scraps, but I’ll be giving you scraps in return!' The Barkonian laughed.

Unalon looked down at the state of the goggles, all beaten and broken, and debated if it would be worse to bring them back to his dad like this, or not at all. 

'Hold up,' a voice from behind interrupted. 'You don’t want to be selling those—not for scraps anyway.'

Unalon turned to see a man dressed in an extravagant, royal red jumpsuit with gold lining and a black trim around the neck. He had a formal array of badges in a diamond formation on his chest, below a sewed-on badge that read “Stellar System 5”. On his cuff was an unscathed, blue button labelled “E” with a darker blue circle embroidered around it. His hands were covered by frost-white gloves, stained by colourful dyes. 

'What’s it to you?' said Unalon.

'My name’s Harper; I’m a ranger for the Planetary Bureau, and if that’s really annogline glass, as you say, then they’re worth more to me than they are to this Barkonian.'

'Ay! Get outta here, you croga rat!' the Barkonian berated.

'So you want the goggles? How much?' Unalon ignored the Barkonian.

'Look, kid, how about I pay for your food and you keep the goggles?' said the Ranger. 'But you gotta do something for me.'

'Sorry guy, I’m not gonna do anything weird.' Unalon refused, taking a step away from the market stall and across towards the row’s exit

'If you want to earn your piece, take this,' said the Ranger, handing him a pamphlet for the Planetary Bureau. 'And it’s Harper, Harper Vassel.'

Unalon ate his breakfast bowl on the way home, hoping that the Barkonian hadn’t snotted in it. When he got back, he emptied the contents of his pockets onto his bed. The receipt for the bowl now laid next to the pamphlet for the Planetary Bureau. Unalon unfolded the pamphlet with his fingers, skimming the words once again.

A week went by, and Unalon had avoided telling his dad about losing the job. Instead, he left every day and rationed his money by sitting in coffee shops, applying for the few jobs that were left in the area, and revising for the Bureau’s examination. He passed with an exceptional score, however, after failing the physical assessment, was counselled into becoming a “great surveyor”. Told he would become a glorious observer of life, providing him with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience outer space, Unalon abandoned his home to train at the Bureau’s headquarters. He completed his training five years later and was positioned on a moon in the desolate Stellar System 27.

Harper Vassel came to visit him once, staying for a weekend while out on duty but was called off abruptly, leaving his spare Ranger suit and a pack of marshmallows. Unalon supposed that Harper would return one day to pick the suit up. He didn’t, and although a few ships sped past, travelling between stellar systems, they never steered too close to the sun. 

'IT IS 5:27. IT IS 5:27. IT IS 5:27,' his alarm sounded, jolting Unalon up in his bed chamber.

The weary surveyor reached up towards the alarm monitor and pressed a blue button labelled “wake”, sliding the bed out from the environmental emulators. The alarm went off like this every morning, and Unalon would proceed to sit at his desk and perform some out-of-office surveying. This included radiation checks, diameter measures, and temporary comms extensions. He perched at the round window, and the red marble seemed larger to his tired eyes. He looked around at the stars in all the space, mapping out which stellar systems he could see. A singular croga rat puffed into his view and pulled his gaze down to the surface, where the dust was darker than usual. The difference between the shade of the grey dust and the colour of space above was narrowing. Unalon leaned over to the black toggle on his desk and used it to redirect the comms satellite. He flicked the switch at the top of the toggle and ducked down to the mic as the satellite convexed itself in the direction of the sun. He held his lips together, tight enough that the mic wouldn’t pick up the sound of his breathing, and a blind silence entered the room.

A bubbling sound began to boil through the speaker until the computer announced, 'EXCESS RADIATION DETECTED.' 

Unalon dove towards his hyperscope and peered through the lens. It was another solar flare; its fiery essence proudly exerting bursts of light into the darkness. Unalon input the data into his bank and calculated the probability of another flare that day. Not only was it likely, but the computer had malfunctioned in giving a quantitative value to its unprecedented size. He had to contact the Planetary Bureau immediately, as the exponential growth of the flare could threaten not only this stellar system, but also its highly populated neighbouring systems. Reaching down to the second drawer of the desk, Unalon took out a large, rectangular binder and started flicking through the documents. At the front of the binder were the copies of the documents he had sent off, and at the back were those he had received. The date stamps flitted through his time there, bringing him all the way to the present. The Bureau’s stamps then repeated the process, guiding him through every response until it landed on an empty folder wallet. After a brief pause for thought, he started to flick back and forth between the beginning of the entries from the Bureau and the vast empty slots where the responses were missing. The last received document on record was a request to fill out a wellness report.

The moon surveyor returned to his station and turned up the speaker; the planet rattled like wobbling sheet-metal in water. Spinning his computer monitor around to face the window, Unalon moved to the front of the desk, pulled out the third drawer, and placed it on top, exposing some of the contents for the first time in years. The smell of old, crumpled paper and splintered pencils reminded him of the guidebooks he’d studied in the office of the bulb factory. After scribbling down a message between the creases of the pages, he built up the courage to lift the goggles from the drawer. Unalon wiped them as clean as he could with his sleeve and strapped them around his head, before taking the replicator from the top drawer and exhaling onto its metallic surface. He polished it with his sleeve and looked upon his reflection. The remaining lens was still intact, with the three glass tears he’d shed a long time ago. 

Packed into the corner of the drawer was Harper’s bag of marshmallows, which Unalon tucked under his arm along with a couple long skewers. Wielding the skewers like a jousting knight, Unalon galloped over to the folded-up Ranger uniform and climbed inside, tightening up the straps to fit his body. A transparent hood was tucked into the neckline, so he pulled it up over his head before exiting the main door.

It was the first time he had left the facility in years, having been warned to avoid unnecessary exploration. Even though he was surrounded by emptiness, everything felt so teeming with energy. Unalon pried the marshmallows open, prodded a few onto the end of his skewer, and walked towards the outside of the round window so he could look in at the clock on his monitor. 5:55. As Unalon turned towards the planet and held out his skewer, the flare bounded towards the surveyor, exerting itself with vigour, and, just as it was about to engulf him entirely, the flare stretched to its limit. The radiation tickled the marshmallows, gently crisping their exteriors and melting their insides. He looked in wonder at the creation in his hands, then down to the blue button on his cuff, labelled “E”. Unalon ran his finger around the dark embroidery on the button, each stitch pulling him back into the decisions that had led him there.

There is an area of space between a sun’s surface of spewing plasma and an entirely desolate moon where there is nothing. Nothing but a desk, in a station that a surveyor used to inhabit, where a letter that was written too late reads:

'Something’s been banging on the door for years, ringing the bell that’s not wired in and shouting through the keyhole when I’m fast asleep. I’ve been ignoring it; pretending I don’t hear; knowing it’s harder to thaw than to be secure, watching and surveying. I set my observations on a burning planet and watched it convulse for so long that I almost forgot what it used to be. I woke up each morning at the rotation of an old bulb factory and recorded my mistakes becoming ever clearer, louder, and hotter. I continued to work, not for glory or reward, and waited long enough to know that I wouldn’t receive either. I never felt like I deserved any more than I had, or suffered any more than I deserved, yet a man’s promise rattled in all the space, telling me I’d one day earn my piece. Yet there is no peace here. Here, I am alone, with the anger that I have learnt so dutifully to repress as my only accomplice. It is a cold flame lit by rich men burning money until it could no longer warm them (though I should’ve known it never would). It is an anguish caressed by the permanent winter that taught generations to keep their secrets frozen; and now it has melted the ice that had always kept me compliant as a single strand of energy, bursting through the surface without realising I’d been looped back in. I refuse to stagnate in the choices I made when I was too young to know that the smallest ideas can make the greatest change, even if they come from someone as unimportant as me. Unalon Sparse, Moon Surveyor.'

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The Moon Surveyor is a short story I've been developing over the past couple years, and draws some clear parallels between the world of stellar systems and the world of solar systems. I was inspired by solitude and sacrifice, with the narrative orbiting around a spaceman roasting marshmallows on a solar flare. From that scene, I allowed my own curiosity to spiral chaos, then used logic, emotion and politics to bring back order. Although I don't enjoy explaining meaning, I think being vulnerable about my process can be beneficial. I hope you enjoyed reading, and please leave a comment to let me know what you thought or how it made you feel. I promise I'll keep it between me and you.

P.S. Sorry that this was posted late, I had some trouble with formatting, along with some other projects that took a firm grasp on my attention. Unfortunately, I have made a point of holding myself accountable for posting here; therefore I will be making another blog post later today to make up for it. It is a work-in-progress piece of flash fiction, appropriate to the season, entitled: 'Uriel'. Happy Christmas Eve!