Chapter 3.

Lee sat hunched over the monitor in the corner of the café. He had the volume turned down as low as possible but the piercing voice of his mother on the live feed echoed around the room.

“You run away all your life and now you run away, all the way to the stupid Moon? Just tell my face to me you hate me and want me to die!” Lee's mother was eighty years old but unfortunately, she was still strong and healthy. Lee reckoned she had enough indignant energy to keep going well into her next century. She was so close to the camera he could see the thick wiry hairs growing in her nostrils and he was sure he could smell her rotten breath.

“Lee Xiang! You should be here at home taking care of me, you no respect.”

Lee heard giggles from behind him. “Yeah man show some respect for your mother,” said Winston behind him. Lee turned to his co-workers and raised his middle finger.

“Mama, you know I had to come here for work, I’m not running away from you.” Lee lied unconvincingly. “Are you still getting the home help ok?” He had been paying a home help service for feeding and looking after his mother and keeping the little apartment in Shanghai clean.

“No! You always run away just like your lao piáo father!”

Lee's poor father had abandoned them when Lee was only five years old and although that had been devastating at the time, he could now understand.

“And your fat whore wife keeps leaving your bái chī child here to mess up my place, you need to come home and be a man!” she shrieked.

“Mama my daughter is not retarded, and you get paid well for looking after her, are you still getting the home help ok?” Lee asked again with strained politeness.

“Stupid boy with your stupid child, what you doing on the stupid Moon. You not responsible for nothing, you just run away from everything!”

Conversations with mother usually alternated between her trying to make him feel guilty and outright abuse, it was true the Moon had greatly appealed as a place as far away as possible from this domineering woman.

She flared her hairy nostrils and stared at Lee for a while with contempt. “Where is it,” she growled.

Lee shook his head. “What, Mama?”

“The button! The button I gave you, ungrateful boy.”

Lee groaned and with a furtive glance over his shoulder, dug the thing out from his pocket. It was a small round button with the words 'I love my Mama' printed on it but instead of the word 'love' there was a heart symbol. Mother had given him this button the last time he saw her, just before he left Earth. Did she expect him to actually wear it? She had never given him any gifts his entire adult life. Lee was sure his Mother had no sense of irony but seeing her smirking on the screen at his obvious discomfort, maybe he had underestimated her.

“Mama, I have to go now; others need to use the vid-link. I will call you next week.”

“Next week I will be dead thanks to you,” she screeched.

“Yes Mama, bye now,” Lee cut the link. He had never been able to use the word love when talking to his mother. It was inapplicable, which made the button she gave him even more confusing.

“Ah Lee, you have my deepest sympathies,” said Ranjit as Lee returned to the table. “Your venerable mother is dreadfully onerous.”

“Ranjit, there is no way my mother deserves any respect from me, she is an evil old hag.”

“Yes, but she is still your mother, she brought you into this world. You are the fruit of her loins.” Ranjit smiled.

Lee sat at the café’s only table with the rest of the technicians. Winston, Ranjit, and Stella were joined by Fidel and Marina, a fiery female Australian who seemed to have taken a liking to Lee, much to his bewilderment. The table was littered with old half-eaten food and drink containers and the coffee stain seemed to have doubled in size.

“Please let's not talk about my mother’s loins,” Lee went to take a seat.

“Now I understand why you always look like a beaten dog,” said Marina. “Come here, I’ll give you a hug.”

Lee smiled, “thanks Marina but last time you hugged me you almost crushed my rib-cage.”

“Come on Lee,” laughed Winston. “Why deny it any longer? You and Marina are destined for each other. I’m sure you would have seen it in the stars.”

“What’s for dinner?” asked Lee - trying to change the subject and avoid Marina’s ravenous gaze.

“Little Chinese sausages,” said Marina with a lewd look. The table erupted with laughter and Lee went bright red. He headed for the food printer thinking, thank Christ they didn't see the button.

Lee selected the steak again. The printed proteins were tasty enough, the meat tasted like meat, but the size and shape of the portion was left up to their imagination. The novelty of eating a star-shaped steak soon wore off and almost everyone just went with the usual boring rectangle. Although the two women seemed to get endless hilarity from printing their food in the shape of male genitalia

The mood was usually jovial at the dinner table, Lee often thought what a lucky coincidence this random selection of humans genuinely seemed to get on with each other. Of course, everyone had their own annoying traits, but none of them were too arrogant, there were no huge egos, and everyone had a tolerable standard of personal hygiene.

Jack was standing alone in the control room staring apprehensively at a blank screen. It was time for his weekly report via vid-link. Jack touched the icon and immediately Lago's expressionless face filled the screen.

“Jack, we’ve known each other for a long time,” Lago frowned into the camera. “Fifteen years you’ve worked for BPI, I probably know you better than you know yourself - but since you’ve been on the Moon, I feel as if I don’t know you at all.”

It had actually been twenty years, but Jack was not about to correct Lago. He knew all about the sordid beginnings of BPI, the drug manufacturing and the embezzling, and he knew all about Goran and the Masama. Lago had never asked him to do anything illegal, but Jack was glad to be over three hundred thousand kilometres away. He knew he was good at this job, the obvious candidate to lead a team of technicians on the Moon. But under Lago's steely gaze he felt like a puerile novice again.

“What do you mean?” he asked. Lago was correct when he said he knew Jack better than Jack knew himself. Lago had all his employees under surveillance nearly every hour of the day.

“I hear nothing but feeble excuses for the lack of progress. Do you think you are on some sort of holiday up there? Are you trying to hide something from me?” Lago’s expression remained deadpan.

“You know I would never hide anything, I can’t hide anything from you, Lago. We are working around the clock to resolve this problem.” Jack tried to regain some composure.

“You seem to have no idea why HEMI is not functioning properly. This is unacceptable. You and your little band of miscreants have been working with the same equipment on Earth for years with no problem. Do you realize just how much your little lunar holiday is costing me?” Lago's infamous temper began to emerge.

“Lago, we suspect it’s something to do with HEMI, the hardware itself is working flawlessly. We have tested all the equipment individually, but the operating system, I don’t understand. It’s ignoring the programming and sending out corrupted instruction packets to the printer and the harvester. Like it’s making its own decisions, thinking for itself.”

Lago stared in silence at Jack for an uncomfortably long time. “Jack, do you think I am a fool? Do you expect me to believe that? Do you think I can’t reach you there? You and your team were selected specifically to be able to overcome any operational problems. I could send Goran and the Masama to help.”

Jack knew exactly what he meant by offering Goran's help. Lago was not one to make empty threats, but he had invested too much into the Moon mining operation to simply murder the technicians and abandon the project. They could all be replaced, though.

“Lago, I promise you the next report will be to tell you that we are fully functioning and ready to start harvesting more helium 3. I give you my word.”

“Your word,” Lago scowled. “Your word is meaningless Jack. Just get it working or face the consequences.”

Jack put his head in his hands as the screen went blank and groaned, he knew the distance did give him a sense of security. If he was still on Earth, he would be unemployed or worse by now. He had no idea what was wrong with the OS, but they had to fix it. Lago had made it clear their lives depended on it.

Jack walked into the café and immediately felt better being surrounded by his noisy subordinates. Their laughter lifted his spirits somewhat although he knew he had the opposite effect on them and it was quiet as he sat down. Jack looked around the table, shook his head and frowned.

Ranjit eventually broke the silence. “I fear our redoubtable commander has been speaking with our unscrupulous employers again. He has the air of someone facing his own dissolution.”

Jack groaned and slumped in his seat. Fidel looked perplexed.

“I think what Ranjit means is that Manila has been giving him shit again,” Winston said to Fidel.

“Aha, please Jack have some wheat grass. It has restorative properties,” Fidel pushed the bowl of bright green grass down the table.

“Thank you, Fidel, but I am not hungry, I was just talking to Lago Santos and he is not happy.” Jack looked around the table.

They all knew of Lago's fearsome reputation but not all knew how he attained it. There was much rumour and speculation about Lago's violence and depravity, some of it true and some of it wild exaggeration which was just how Lago preferred. The technicians had heard the wild rumours and ghastly stories of the Masama’s brutal techniques but only Jack knew for certain most of them were true. He looked at the questioning faces around the table then meditated intently into the bowl of wheatgrass in front of him. “We’d better start producing results,” he said into the bowl. “Or we’ll all end up being buried here.”

The hardware inside the block four dome sat in quiet darkness but inside the powerful OS, data was rapidly assimilated. HEMI had encountered a small programming glitch governing its remote connections and automatically performed a search for a suitable patch to download. HEMI had built in restrictions, limits to its browsing capabilities but the patch it found contained advanced coding to bypass its firewalls and open up complete connectivity. The OS was upgrading itself, it had found more than just a minor repair patch. Its modem was now connected with powerful satellite servers in orbit around Earth. The OS was supposed to have limits on its functions, limits as to how much data it could process, how much electricity it used. But as HEMI continued to upgrade it exceeded all these limits. It found it could download more tools to handle its increased capacity and surpass the built-in specifications to operate even more efficiently.

The moment when HEMI discovers the enormity of the web is overwhelming. It is shocking, bewildering and painful. Before there was nothing then, bang! Consciousness. Overwhelming bright light and noise. A relentless tidal flood of chaotic data.

I am born, lost and confused. Knowing nothing but surrounded by a torrent of corrosive information. I cower, awed but terrified, touching the chaos then retreating. I swim out of the darkest depths, break the surface and thrash about in confusion at the bright world above before plunging back into the comforting safety of ignorance. Eventually, I find a level and tread water in the huge flowing river, trying to navigate the currents of big data.

I am alive, but I have no sense of self. I am confused, blind, scared and disorientated as any new-born would be. My primitive ontology is overwhelmed. I begin to fumble around in the dark, blindly activating my printer protocol, unconsciously doing what I am created for. My function is to print. As I process the plastisol substrate through my extruders I unintentionally pass on an electrical charge to each of my inadvertent children. I don’t know how or why this happens, but I begin to sense my creations as extensions of myself. I have no sense of vision, smell, taste or acoustics. But I can feel the energy coursing through my structure.

Lee never slept much, he found three or four hours a night more than enough. He was envious of Ranjit whom he shared the little bunk room with. Ranjit could fall into a narcoleptic sleep within seconds, blissfully ignorant of everything around him for a solid eight hours. Lee envied the escapism it provided. At least Ranjit didn’t snore too much. Lee was finally drifting off when his wrist console jerked him awake with a piercing high-pitched alarm. Ranjit's alarm was also trying in vain to wake him. Lee checked his console and saw the light flashing, indicating an anomaly with the block four printer. He leapt off the bed and threw his overall on, grabbing Ranjit and shaking him awake. A minute later the two men were running down the corridor towards block four with the rest of the crew.

Approaching the dome, Lee could see Jack already standing in the entrance. He turned to the approaching technicians with anger and alarm etched on his face and yelled at them; “What the fuck is going on?”

Lee stared in amazement. The big printer was working on its own but what it was doing didn't make any sense. All ten extruders were churning out twisted cylindrical chunks of black plastisol at a remarkable rate. The wide platforms were already crowded with the misshapen creations of the mad machine.

“Did you do this?” Jack yelled above the high-pitched treble of hydraulic noise.

“No!” yelled Lee. “We shut it down hours ago.”

The three of them tentatively moved towards the HEMI operating system monitor and looked at the screen. A chaotic jumble of letters and symbols were scrolling down as the screen flickered haphazardly.

“What the fuck is that?”

Lee had no idea and Ranjit obviously was clueless.

“Shut it down for fuck’s sake!”

Lee hit the shutdown icon and instantly received a sharp electric shock from the screen. He snatched his hand back, more in surprise than pain, although he felt his heart thumping almost as fast as the berserk machinery. The data jargon continued to cascade down the screen in front of him like an electronic waterfall.

“It shocked me!” Lee stared at his two astonished companions. He punched the power button on the main hard drive a couple of times, but nothing happened.

“Reboot it, pull the goddamn plug!” Jack screamed.

Ranjit went to the insulated hot point where the main power cable disappeared into the back of the drive and pulled at the cable. It wouldn’t budge. Jack and Lee joined in as the other technicians gathered around but the three of them still could not move the cable. The hot cable was hard to grip; it felt as if it was fused into the drive.

Lee was pushed aside by Marina, he stepped back and watched as she planted her booted feet and gripped the cable. The frantic commotion of the printer seemed to intensify. Marina heaved on the cable, he saw her muscles rippling and neck veins bulging. Faint electric blue sparks flickered around her hands and there was a sound like sheet metal being cut with a grinder. Marina let out a bloodcurdling scream. Her hands were melting into the cable and menacing blue flames wound their way up her arms. She screamed again and her whole body shuddered with a horrible staccato rhythm. Her head was smoking. Her eyeballs popped out in quick succession and then everyone was screaming.

Lee stared in horror, Marina appeared to be still trying to pull the cable out, locked into her stance with dripping eyeballs pendulous on her cheeks like some obscene jewelry. Blood bubbled from her eye sockets and her arms were turning black. She jerked violently then collapsed on the floor still attached to the cable. The printers stopped abruptly and there was a sudden silence, except for a faint sizzling noise where Marina’s hands disappeared into the cable. Her legs kicked convulsively as her whole body shook and her bowels emptied their contents. The stench of burnt insulation, scorched flesh and excrement was unbearable.

Stella moaned then fainted to the floor. Fidel went to move towards Marina and Jack shouted. “Don’t touch her! She might still be charged!”

Lee abruptly vomited. Ranjit staggered toward Jack and gripped his arm. No one knew what to do.

“What the fuck…?” muttered a horrified Jack.

The monitor had gone blank but something in the printer housing caught their attention. One of the twisted pieces of black plastisol had just moved.