1 EVIL PLUMBING

1 EVIL PLUMBING Earth year 2041 Lunar day 188 Smack in the middle of the night Let's get something straight, right off the bat: Everything the movies have ever taught you about space travel is garbage. Giant spacecraft that are as comfortable as floating cruise ships? Complete fantasy. Warp-speed travel? Never going to happen. Holodecks? Terraforming? Beaming up? Don't count on any of it.

Life in outer space sucks. Trust me, I know. My name is Dashiell Gibson. I'm twelve years old and I live on the moon. On Moon Base Alpha, to be exact. You know this, of course. Everyone on earth knows this, unless they've been living in the Amazon rain forest for the last few years, and since there's barely anything left of the Amazon rain forest, I'm guessing that's unlikely. Moon Base Alpha—along with everyone who lives on it—has been the subject of an absolutely staggering amount of hype: The first human outpost in space! The first people to live on a celestial body besides earth! A glorious first step in mankind's ultimate colonization of the galaxy! The government fed my family all that baloney as well, back when they recruited my parents. And I admit, I completely fell for it. We all did. The recruiters made everything sound so amazing: Moon Base Alpha would have all the comforts of earth—and more. We'd go down in history as one of the first families to live in space. We'd be the newest breed of pioneers, pushing the limits of human achievement. Like I said: garbage.

Living in Moon Base Alpha is like living in a giant tin can built by government contractors. It's as comfortable as an oil refinery. You can't go outside, the food is horrible, it's always cold—and the toilets might as well be medieval torture devices. Ever notice how, in all the science-fiction movies and TV shows you've ever seen—Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica and all 142 versions of Star Trek —no one ever goes to the bathroom? That's not because, in the future, everyone has figured out how to metabolize their own feces. It's because going to the bathroom in space is a complete pain in the butt. Literally. At least the moon-base toilet is better than the one on the spaceship we took here. In zero gravity, you have to take extreme precautions to ensure that whatever comes out of your body doesn't fly up into your face. (There's an old saying in zero-g space travel: If you ever see a piece of chocolate floating around the cabin, don't eat it. It's probably not chocolate.) However, using the toilet on Moon Base Alpha is no picnic. If I'd known how exceptionally complicated and disgusting it would be, I never would have agreed to leave earth. It was because of one of those evil toilets that I

wound up involved in far more trouble and danger than I ever could have imagined. Now, before you get the idea that I'm some whiny, ungrateful kid who just likes to complain and wouldn't be happy anywhere... I'm not. Before my family made the awful decision to come live on the moon, I was happy as any kid you've ever met. Happier, maybe. We lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, which was awesome. Mom worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which runs the telescopes on the peak of Mauna Kea. Although the scopes are thirteen thousand feet up, they're managed remotely from the town of Waimea, which meant we could live down by the beach. So my childhood was pretty idyllic. I had lots of friends. I did well in school and played on every sports team. I surfed every weekend —and when I did, there were usually dolphins in the waves with me. Then the government came calling. See, my parents have a very unique set of skills. Mom is a lunar geologist who wrote some landmark papers about the moon and the consistency of its mantle and core. Dad is a mining engineer with a

specialty in environmentally sound mineral extraction. And one of the major reasons for the moon base is to explore the possibility of mining precious metals there. Separately, Mom and Dad would each have been solid candidates for Moon Base Alpha. Together, they were an impossible combination to beat. Space is limited on the moon. With them, NASA got two scientists without having to send two separate families. So they wanted my folks badly. We got the full-court press. Politicians called us. The chairman of NASA came to visit. We were all flown to Washington, DC, first class for lunch with the vice president. And every last one of them lied to our faces about how great it would be to live on the moon. They made it sound like MBA was going to be incredible. Like our lives there would be nonstop thrills and amazement. Imagine hearing that you've just won a free three-year stay in the most luxurious hotel in the most insane location imaginable. Oh, and you get to be famous, too. Not flash-in-the-pan, one-hit-wonder, reality-TV famous. Have-kids learn-about-you-in-school-a-hundred-years-from now famous. We were going to be lumped in with