Without pausing to admire the view, my father crossed to the other side of the observation deck, to another elevator door. Unlike the other doors on the base, this one failed to open automatically when he approached it. Instead he flipped open a panel beside it to reveal a numeric keypad and punched in a long code from memory. The doors swished opened and we stepped inside. There was a single button, with a down arrow on it that lit up when my father pressed it. The elevator carried us downward, dropping us so fast I thought my feet might lift up off the floor for a moment. When the car opened, we stepped out into a narrow service tunnel lined with wires and metal tubing. I followed my father down its length, nearly sprinting to keep up. It was a very long tunnel, with a steep downward grade.
When we finally reached the other end, my father opened a circular hatch in the ceiling with yet another security code. After a short climb up a metal ladder, we emerged into a large, circular room with a clear domed ceiling. It provided a stunning view of the surrounding crater and of the armored sphere that was Moon Base Alpha, visible off to our right—a giant armored orb nestled into the adjacent goblet-shaped crater high above us, just beyond the lip of the larger bowl-shaped Daedalus crater in which we now stood.
“Welcome to Daedalus Observatory,” my father said. “Sorry about all the dust and trash—the cleaning drones never come down here, obviously. They closed the observatory down over two decades ago and made the whole place off limits.”
I spent a moment gazing out at the barren lunar surface, which stretched to the black horizon in all directions. The sight suddenly drove home the fantastic isolation of the place. It was no wonder my father and his friends behaved a bit strangely. The years of solitude they’d had to endure up here probably would have driven a lot of people nuts.
“You said this place was off limits?”
“It was,” he said. “It is. But I figured out how to get the power and life-support systems in here back online without alerting anyone back on Earth. And I left all of the hidden microphones and cameras in here disabled, so this is one of the few places in the entire base where the EDA can’t monitor or record me.”
He leaned toward a small microphone stalk protruding from a nearby security console and then spoke loudly into it.
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” he recited. “I said, please open the pod bay doors, HAL.” He grinned at me. “See? Sweet, sweet privacy.”
“Right, we wouldn’t want the Cigarette Smoking Man to eavesdrop on us,” I muttered. But he ignored the remark.
“Here,” he said, reaching over to flip a bank of switches, flooding the dim space with flickering fluorescent light. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
The other side of the control room was a chaotic, cluttered mess. Handwritten notes, diagrams, drawings, and computer printouts were taped up everywhere and stacked on every available surface. It looked like the lair of a homicide detective on some TV show—one who had spent decades tracking a serial killer no one else believed existed.
I crossed the room and walked through the paper jungle my father had created, studying his notes and printouts.
“I know how all this stuff must look,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “Like Russell Crowe’s garage in A Beautiful Mind, right?”
“I was thinking it looked more like a supervillain’s lair,” I said. I started punching random buttons on the console in front of me. “Which one of these is the self-destruct?”
“The first one you pressed, actually,” he said, pointing to an unlabeled red button.
I believed him for a split second—long enough for my eyes to widen in panic.
“Yes!” he said, grinning. “Got you, kid.”
“Fine, you got me,” I said. “You did all this yourself?”
He nodded. “I’ve never shared any of this with either Shin or Graham,” he said. “Shin wouldn’t take any of it seriously,” he said. “And Graham—well, Graham doesn’t have a very skeptical way of thinking, and I wanted to approach this scientifically.” He locked eyes with me. “But from what you said up in the mess hall before, I was sure you didn’t want to hear any of this?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been asking myself the same questions you and Graham mentioned. I just … didn’t think learning the answers could make any difference now.” I locked eyes with him. “Tell me,” I said.
He nodded and took a deep breath.
“You know who Finn Arbogast is,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but I nodded.
“The fake founder of Chaos Terrain?” I said, recalling my brief meeting with the man that morning at Crystal Palace—a lifetime ago. “What about him?”
“I was his primary military consultant when he and the Chaos Terrain team were developing Terra Firma and Armada, as well as all of the early mission packs,” he said, and I thought I detected a tinge of pride in his voice. “I always dreamed of making videogames for a living when I grew up, so you can imagine how I felt when I got the chance to help design the videogames that might help save the world.
“Arbogast and I collaborated for several months. Not in person, but we video-conferenced several times a week. It was his job to create the videogames that would train the world’s population how to fight off the Europans. So his training simulations had to be able to simulate their ships, weapons, maneuvers, and tactics—all with a very high degree of accuracy. To accomplish that, they gave Arbogast unrestricted access to all of the EDA’s data on the Europans—everything we’d learned about them since we made first contact.”