There was no sound as the harvester took its first tentative steps. The lumbering contraption woke from its slumber and shook off the dust. Lee sat in the cramped wheelhouse, he tried to stretch his sore knees then briefly closed his tired eyes. It looked like an incredibly noisy machine but all he could sense was a high-pitched hydraulic friction, then a deep bass vibration echoing in his chest. He looked around at the trembling machinery and blinking lights with satisfaction as the harvester rumbled into life.

“Finally, we got the big beetle moving.” Winston’s voice came through the suit comms.

“Yeah seems ok, green lights everywhere. I have no idea why it went down though.”

“I’m putting it back on remote, programming a drive-by to check the treads and auger. HEMI is back in charge.”

“Fine by me, let the tour commence.”

Lee watched the displays in the wheelhouse as the helium harvester began crawling over the Moon’s surface. The harvester was a massive flat vehicle, ten meters across and thirty meters long. A giant grey bug with a flat shell and sharp incisors. It moved slowly, on continuous caterpillar tracks. At the front, it had teeth. A long cylindrical auger of rotating spikes designed to dig into the surface, churning up the regolith. Behind the auger, steel dredge plates conveyed the rock and dust for heat treatment to extract the helium 3. The machine had a small wheelhouse built into the front for manual control, but it was designed to be operated remotely by HEMI, the moon base core computer. Lee had spent two months assembling the prototype harvester with the rest of the crew. They all knew it intimately.

He tried to relax. At this speed, it would take at least an hour to complete a circumference of the base. He watched as the auger spun the angular spikes into the velvet grey surface, ploughing and processing a path of destruction, leaving a gouged trail behind. The wheelhouse was a skeletal frame with manual controls built in, open to the vacuum. He tried to stretch his legs again in the cramped space and watched the dirty bubble dwellings of the moon base crawl past. All he could hear was the sound of his own breath inside his helmet.

Home was a shabby collection of domes connected by bulbous tubes. A central hub with five connected domes, speckled black and grey. Lee pondered its history as he drove past, imagining the tragedy of the original mining pioneers. The base had been built almost twenty years ago by an ambitious Chinese mining corporation called Sustainable Systems Inc. Sustainability had never been a high priority as they mined fossil fuels and minerals wherever they had permission. They abandoned their lunar project when the money ran out and left their employees there to die. Lee’s employers Benevolent Progress Inc. moved in years later intending to harvest the abundant helium 3 embedded in the regolith.

The harvester came to an unexpected juddering halt. “Shit, all systems down, going to look under the hood again,” he said into the suit comms.

Lee unravelled himself from the wheelhouse and climbed down onto the surface. He made his way to the front of the dormant machine in loping slow-motion strides. Economy of movement was an important consideration outside. As always, everything was tranquil; the loudest noise coming from his inquisitive brain. The harvester had stopped near the graves of their predecessors. Arriving at the moon base six months ago, Lee had discovered the mummified remains of four prospectors, wrapped in blankets, who had chosen to die outside under the stars. The corpses looked peaceful, resigned to their fate. He couldn’t help but ponder their decision twenty years ago, they decided to lie down and briefly look at the stars for one last time before surrendering to the lunar elements they had intended to exploit. Lee had planted a little metal cross at the head of each skeleton.

Winston's rasping voice instantly destroyed his quiet contemplation; “Lee! What is going on? Why has it stopped?”

“No idea, I’ll check the remote receiver again.”

Lee slowly walked along in front of the auger, careful to avoid the sharp spikes. In the middle, there was a control panel which showed the signal strength from HEMI. It was dead. Lee sighed and looked around at the huge partial crater surrounding them. A smooth amphitheatre rose up to a steep ridgeline that provided a breath-taking backdrop to the humble collection of domes. The crater reminded him something massive had once smashed into this Moon. Always surrounded by death potential, he thought. Any small mistake out on the surface would result in rapid freezing, suffocation or decompression. Being this close to his own mortality made Lee feel more alive than ever. He looked at his boots in the dust and savoured the silence, standing on the surface of the Moon, not another human in sight. You could think some weird thoughts in a vacuum.

“What the fuck is going on Lee?” Winston once more shattered his thoughts. “Every time we send you out there you end up staring into space like some brain-dead retard. There's nothing to even see out there.”

He sounded angry, but Lee knew Winston was grateful to have someone who seemed to enjoy venturing out onto the Moon's surface to soak up the cosmic rays. No-one else ever volunteered.

Lee was about to swear back at him when the harvester abruptly burst back into life. The auger started rotating, sharp spinning spikes almost impaling Lee where he stood. He hastily backed away and noticed the light on the control panel indicating the signal from HEMI was re-established. He wasn’t in any danger, the harvester moved too slowly but as he backed away, he noticed the harvester was not moving in a straight line. It was turning towards the moon base.

“Are you seeing this?”

“Yes! Can you point the harvester somewhere else please?”

“It's not me, I’ll try to stop it.”

Lee walked back and around to the side of the harvester as it continued its slow arc towards the moon base. He climbed back into the wheelhouse and tried to change its direction. “It’s not responding.” Lee frantically pushed buttons in the wheelhouse, but the harvester ignored him and continued its ponderous progress towards the looming grey domes.

“Shut the fucking thing down!” shouted Winston.

“I’m trying, nothing’s happening. Do it from your end.”

Lee heard muffled curses from his suit comms. “No response from HEMI, hit the kill switch.”

Lee reached down and lifted a panel in the wheelhouse floor revealing a red lever which was supposed to cut all power to the harvester. Only to be used in emergencies. He pulled the lever up and felt it click into place, but the harvester rolled on.

“It's not working,”

“Nothing from this end either, HEMI is active but unresponsive.”

“It’s going to smash into the green room, get Fidel out of there and close all the doors.”

Lee could hear the moon base sirens through his suit comms as he imagined Fidel quietly looking after his plants in the green room, unaware of the danger he was in. He tugged on the kill switch a couple more times and futilely jabbed at the buttons.

“Fidel is out, green room sealed,” said Winston. “What a fucking disaster.”

Lee climbed out of the wheelhouse and walked alongside the harvester. There was nothing else they could do. It was almost upon the green room now, everything happening in slow motion. Then just metres from the dome, the harvester abruptly stopped dead in its tracks again.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” replied Winston. “Absolutely nothing. It just stopped. Thing’s got a mind of its own.”

Lee stayed fully suited for the decontamination blast. The lower half of his suit was coated in pale grey powder, it was impossible to get rid of all the dust despite the high-pressure decontamination. The suit's integrity was rated at one hundred percent and there was no conceivable way for the dust to get inside yet every time he took off his boots after a walk on the surface, there were always faint traces of moon dust between his toes. He shook his head and breathed deeply through his nostrils. He was used to the smell of gunpowder now. It is the smell of the Moon. Calcium, Magnesium and Silicon dioxide, all present in the dust combining to create the cordite smell. He could taste it on his tongue as he took his work overalls from the locker. Sharp, metallic and slightly salty. It was not unpleasant.

The airlock opened into the central dome where Winston and Jack could usually be found. As he emerged blinking into the light, he was not surprised to hear them shouting at each other.

“Why is HEMI malfunctioning? What are you morons doing? I swear out of all those billions of Chinese; how come I get the most retarded ones working for me? Your inbred parents should have thrown you in the river when you were born.” Jack breathlessly finished his tirade.

“Stupid redneck,” retorted Winston. “Why did your father have to fuck the ugliest pig on your yankee farm to be your mother?”

Lee was used to this kind of language. Winston and Jack enjoyed the abusive banter which passed as a unique type of comradeship and released the tension they both felt. “The harvester can’t just run on its own, something must be wrong with the HEMI signal.”

“We have to shut it down, run diagnostics and reboot it. This fucking place,” muttered Jack. “Always one step forward and two steps back.”

Lee turned, shaking his head and made for the corridor to block four. The computing core was housed there next to the huge 3D printer, which had been manufacturing harvester parts and other moon base necessities. He took a detour to the café for a tea. Hot green tea always made him feel more alert and refreshed but he hesitated when he saw Fidel slumped over the table.

“Fidel, do you realise how close you were just now to being minced up by the harvester?”

Fidel nodded. “This place has got it in for us, it feels like there is something here, something manipulating things. We should never have come.”

“It’s just technical glitches, don’t be so paranoid. If you came outside with me you would see how beautiful it is Fidel, it’s peaceful. I would rather be here than Earth”

“Cuba is peaceful,” Fidel mumbled. “This place sucks.”

“I don’t know about Cuba, but where I come from it’s overpopulated and filthy. The Earth we left behind is a shithole.”

“The only reason you like it here is because you think it’s an improvement, but what was so bad about your home?” asked Fidel.

Lee rubbed his temples and frowned. “Have you ever been to Shanghai?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “It’s horrible. Dirty, noisy, overpopulated and dangerous. Impossible to make a decent life there.”

“What about your family?”

“My wife left me when I lost my job. She wouldn’t let me see my daughter. I was depressed, and I think I had every right to be. My apartment was slowly falling apart around me, like my life.”

Fidel nodded sympathetically.

“My mother is a dragon and my friends only showed interest on the odd occasion I had money. I had gambling debts I struggled to pay the interest on, the entire system was designed to grind me down.”

“So, you ran away from it all, as far as you could go. All the way to the Moon.”

The dull background murmur of the moon base was ever present. Comforting in its functionality. A coffee stain on the white plastic table was an almost perfect circle between them.

Lee sighed into his tea. “I even thought about suicide, but it all seemed so messy and I knew deep down I didn't have the guts. It felt like I was walking through life in a coma; never properly awake but never a good night’s sleep. I didn’t have enough energy to care about anything, especially my own future.”

“Negotiating the potholes of modern existence is never easy.”

Lee ignored Fidel’s amateur philosophy. “I was in a bad way, but I found a job in a print factory which probably saved my life. Then Benevolent Progress bought us out and doubled the size. We soon began mass producing their orders with the best printers available. Mostly weapon parts and medical equipment.”

“Yeah, our employer has grown into a massive organisation, one of the conspiracy theories I’ve heard BPI will instigate small wars then provide weapons and medical expertise for both sides,”

Lee shrugged and drank his tea. “I never thought I could escape from Shanghai, all those people, the pollution and the pessimism. BPI gave me an opportunity. Leaving the city was a big step never mind leaving the entire planet.”

“I understand, we come from different places. Cuba is oppressed and corrupt, but I miss the nature, the beaches, the lifestyle and my family.” Fidel looked as if he was going to cry.

Lee stuck his nose in the tea and inhaled the steam. He understood but couldn’t relate. For the first time in his life, he was looking at some sort of future. A lunar future. BPI was making long-term investments on the Moon and he wanted to be part of it. Outside, Lee would gaze back at his home planet and think of the billions of humans scurrying over its tired surface. Busily obsessing over their mundane lives, their daft preoccupation with procreation and social stature. They would never see this view, no-one could see through the Shanghai smog. Out here the entire universe was his own colossal secret.

“You should come outside with me Fidel; it will give you perspective. It’s not good for you to be cooped up in these domes the entire time. It’s beautiful out there.”

“I’ve been out there, but every time I look up at the Earth, I just break down. It’s so far away.”

Lee watched a tear roll down Fidel’s cheek and splash onto the table. He didn’t feel any sympathy. He couldn’t help Fidel if he continued to wallow in his own self-pity. Lee knew from experience.

“When I look at the Earth, I see a disaster waiting to happen,” Lee said insistently and reached over the table to grip Fidel’s arm. “The Earth is fucked.”

“Are you a disillusioned environmentalist? or a pessimistic humanist? Instead of trying to do some good, instead of trying to make a difference you just ran away to the Moon?”

Lee shook his head. “Yes, I ran away, what could I do? Maybe I am just a loner. Uncomfortable in company.” He replied diffusing Fidel’s anger. “I like the isolation.”

“A beta person like me. Maybe we can help each other,” said Fidel with a weak smile.

Lee didn’t think he needed any help and he knew Fidel was beyond helping unless he changed his despondent attitude. He was much happier on the Moon; the life was simple. He had adjusted to the solitude and now he cherished it.

“You can help each other find new fucking jobs if you don’t get back to work!” Winston appeared in the café seething with anger at finding two technicians in conversation over tea.

“On my way,” Lee said, happy for the interruption. He finished his tea and pushed past a glaring Winston.

Ranjit was immersed in cables, data pads, and external sensory augments, he didn’t notice Lee enter the block four dome. He was singing loudly to himself with headphones on while he worked, badly out of tune, much to Stella’s annoyance. Ranjit was oblivious to her complaints. Lee knelt and tugged on his leg.

“Lee Xiang, hello my friend! Why are you looking so lugubrious today?”

Lee looked blankly back at him. “Lugubrious? Ranjit even if I knew what that word meant... oh never mind, just tell me what to do.”

Stella's pink hair appeared from under the printer chassis. “Memorizing words from the dictionary no one has heard before does not make you a smart person Ranjit.” Stella promptly disappeared back under the chassis.

Ranjit looked exasperated as he uncoiled himself from the mess of cables. “The art of conversation is a beautiful thing Stella; it sets us apart from the primitives. If you learn an unfamiliar word every day you will benefit yourself and those around you.”

Stella's head appeared again. “No Ranjit, you just annoy those around you.”

Ranjit laughed. “I do love this verbal sparring Stella, it makes our mundane tasks much more bearable, but enough of your excoriating argument. We have work to do.”

Ranjit handed Lee a datapad. “This is where we are up to, we shut down HEMI and isolated every function, then we ran programming diagnostics. We rebooted and managed to gain control of the harvester which is safely parked but now the printer is playing up. Producing variations from the template again.”

“Trouble-shooter programs?” Lee asked.

Ranjit rolled his eyes. “Lee, since when has a trouble-shooter program ever found the trouble.”

Lee grunted agreement as Ranjit continued. “The block four printer is the only one capable of printing the largest parts for the harvesters. It receives its instruction protocol from HEMI but now the printer had stopped responding to protocol and started printing parts out of spec, twisted variants of the templates.

Ok, but if it’s not the printer software, and we installed all the hardware to the exact specifications then why is it producing aberrations? It must be the protocol.”

Ranjit nodded in agreement. “It seems like HEMI is making its own rules.”