DOCUMENT REF: LFA-051-S
ARCHIVE STATUS: STASIS PRESERVATION / HARD COPY ONLY
ORIGIN: Samuel Lombardhy
LOCATION: [REDACTED], Alabama
DATE: September 12, 2051
[HANDWRITTEN ENTRY]
The penmanship is shaky, ink smudged in places.
My hip is acting up again. Always knows when the rain is coming before the weatherman does.
The TV has been on since breakfast. I can’t turn it off. It’s on every channel—CNN, BBC, the Asian feeds. They’re all showing the same thing: They call it “Day One.” The beginning of the Lunar Colonies.
My son Thomas called me from the staging area in Houston an hour ago. He sounded… drunk. Not on liquor, but on the hype. He was talking a mile a minute about the benefits package, the signing bonus, the square footage of the hab-unit he and Martha are gonna get.
“It’s a new life, Pop,” he said. “We’re gonna be the first ones to see the grass grow on the Moon.”
I just told him to make sure he packed extra socks.
I’m sitting here looking at the screen, at those Weyland-Yutani executives shaking hands with the UN delegates. The suits look sharp. The smiles look bright. Everyone is clapping. It’s the “Golden Age,” they say. No more wars for resources. We’re expanding. We’re evolving.
God, I wish Nicholas was here.
Or maybe I’m glad he ain’t.
I remember back in '95, a few years before he passed, he was having a bad day. The dementia was chewing on him. He was sitting right there in that recliner, staring at a moth buzzing around the porch light.
He grabbed my arm—grip like a vice, even then—and he whispered, “Sammy, the Lioness told me the garden is beautiful. She told me the fruit is sweet. But she didn’t tell me about the fences. She didn’t tell me who owns the dirt.” He then said the Lioness showed him a future of “ships burning in the void.” He said it started with “builders paving the way.”
I told him to hush, that it was just a dream. But then he’d get that look in his eye—the thousand-yard stare—and he’d whisper the other part.
“Sam,” he’d say. “A garden draws pests. You plant the corn, you get the rats. You build the engine, you get the heat.”
So here I am … looking at that W-Y logo on the side of the ship… that yellow and black… that doesn’t look like a flag of peace to me. It looks like a brand. Like something you sear onto cattle.
I didn’t tell Thomas about the Lioness. What am I supposed to say? “Don’t go take that high-paying job that will secure your children’s future because your crazy grandfather saw a Goddess in Vietnam?”
He’d laugh. He’d put me in a home.
We’re engineers. We go where the work is. That’s the Lombardhy way. If the devil needs a HVAC system installed in hell, we’ll bid on the contract.
But I feel sick. I feel like I’m watching a fish swim into a net, and I’m the one who drove him to the water.
Martha is pregnant again. My grandchild is going to be born on a rock 240,000 miles away. They say the gravity is fine for babies. They say the air is cleaner.
Maybe it is.
I just hope the Old Man was wrong about the rest of it. I hope the “Tree” he talked about is just a tree. I hope the “Hounds” were just VC shadows in the jungle.
I’m gonna go turn off the TV. The clapping is giving me a headache.
[Entry Ends]
HISTORIAN’S NOTE: Samuel never visited the Moon. He died in his sleep three years later. He left the house and the land to Thomas, but Thomas never came back to claim it.
- E. Lombardhy