To the moon

"20:00, 31/1/2170." Hologram numbers are glittering on the dashboard. The control panel shows "Autodrive", and no one is here in the driving room of a spaceship.

There is no sound in the spaceship, except whirring of machines and low breathing from a man. He is the only passenger of the spaceship, along with a bunch of cargoes tagged "Moon Frontier". This man is wearing an orange jumpsuit, with buckles fastening his arms and legs to the seat.

It is a quiet night, maybe the quietest night for Victor Spencer among these days. He went through hard times struggling with everything on the earth. Although victor still feels dizzy due to both the acceleration that push him against the earth and the absence of gravity after it, the scene of endless darkness between glittering stars shows on the porthole reminds him -- he is already in space now, maybe several hundred thousand kilometers away from the solid ground.

The last days Victor spent on the earth is a mess. The very first adversity is about his breakfast. Victor always adds peanut butter to his toast, but on that day he ran out of it. He had no alternative but to use butter. Then he went to work but found that he was fired by the company, with the smell of butter in his mouth.

Shortly afterwards he remembered that the company was hit by the crisis about leaking the personal information of its clients, and Victor happened to be the security counsellor of the company.

"Damn it! " He thought, whoever planted this must be responsible for his dismission, and his neglect of buying a new bottle of peanut butter.

However, the information-devulge crisis ended up Victor facing the charge of desertion and finally got "sentences" on the moon.

Well, Victor's traveling to the moon is not actually imprisonment. The prosecutor didn't present any convincing evidence about the presumptive crime. Yet his company still wanted him to vanish for a while, which is beneficial to the company's reputation. After hearing this announcement from the human resources manager, lounge chairs, sun shades and tropical burns comes to Victor's mind. These prospects can be realizable, Victor told himself, as long as he still keeps his employment.

Coincidently, there was a company providing volunteer jobs of living in their new base on the moon -- "Moon Frontier". Free rent, free spacecraft tickets, sounds nice. Maybe they would offer free peanut butter in their restaurants.

"...but now?" Victor looks at his bright orange jumpsuit, thinks, "If I weren't a prisoner, then I must be a crazy chicken nugget tied to the sauce box!"

The spaceship goes insane for certain, because it starts to shiver. Victor's inevitable thoughts about peanut butter are terminated. The spaceship is so close to the moon that Victor can catch a glimpse of the moon in the corner of the porthole. Part of the moon is covered in the shadow of the earth, which is too dark to see through.

Victor remembered today is the most special day among more than 100 years for people who care about the moon -- people on the earth can witness a super lunar eclipse today, at some places. This conclusion depends on one assumption: people on the earth do care about the appearence of the moon, at least some of them.

Who cares about some overcooked sports of a piece of beef on the grill when you are about to have it though? The reuseable space travelling technique keeps underground rappers from writing tracks about the moon. Now it is the exclusive metaphor used by poets.

Although he tried to distract himself, Victor still fails because the vibration of spaceship goes stronger.

Calm down. Victor is trying to telepathize himself again and again. This maybe just the proper phenomenon of spacecraft landing, or the post-symptom of Swimming across all the anxiety he goes through, Victor finds something unique of the burned point on the moon beef. There are some smaller, darker points in the shadow of earth.

Are they impact craters? he estimates, maybe. All the moon bases are underground.

Soon Victor drowns into another panic, because "impact craters" are moving.

Maybe they are lunar rovers that pick him up? But"Lunar rovers" can't be twisty.Oh, maybe Victor is going to faint...