One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(17)

I Never Want to Walk on the Moon





I never want to walk on the moon.

Just because so few people have ever done it, people assume it’s this great thing they should be jealous of and should want to do, too.

But is it that great?

Let’s break it down. Here is what actually happens.

You go into a space capsule. Very cramped. It takes three or four days just to get there. Days. Then, you’re still in the capsule for six hours waiting to get out. Can you imagine? Taking a flight that lasts three to four days—and then, when you finally get there, somebody tells you, Sorry, we have to wait another six hours to deplane? Those six hours probably feel even longer than the rest of the flight.

You also have to wear this unbelievably heavy suit and helmet the whole time. If you don’t? You die.

Finally, you get out, ready to stretch your legs and go on this amazing walk … and … you can barely move! After all that! Have you seen video of these guys? They’re plodding forward, bobbing up and down with almost no gravity, like slowly floating their way to the next step more than walking.

Then, hope you liked your moon walk—because it’s going to take another three to four days just to get back. And even though it’s the same length of time, it probably feels a lot longer because you’ve already done the “fun” part. And then there’s re-acclimating.

I am a pretty serious walker. It is my main form of both exercise and recreation. And I know of at least a dozen walks within fifteen minutes of my front door that make for a better walking experience on every single level. They don’t require space suits or eight full days away from your loved ones. You don’t have asteroids flying at your space ship. Just a bunch of beautiful, beautiful paths, where you’ll see parents pushing little kids in strollers, and bigger kids playing on bikes and Big Wheels.

Some of those bigger kids might even be dreaming of becoming astronauts someday. You know what? Let them.

The only area I can think of where the moon experience might have any edge at all over the walking trails of Knox County, Tennessee, would be in the symbolism department, in the sheer majesty of it all. When you think about how the moon is a celestial phenomenon that has dominated the nights of humans since before humans were even humans, a place so foreign to our understanding that, until recently in the history of our species, people didn’t even think of it as a place, or even as an object, but as an abstraction tied to God; a place that is still, even now that we do understand it, so alien to our everyday thinking that it is never included on any of our maps or globes and can only be reached by a dangerous voyage across hundreds of thousands of miles of literal, actual nothingness; and to know that you have been there and stood on that rock/God/place, with your own two feet, and kicked the dust and moved it a little, and come back home, with the story to tell … . And then, no matter where you are in life, to be able to always look down at those ten little toes that carry you through your house or the hallways of your job or around the same walking path you’ve been walking for years that you still love in a way even though, somehow, at some point, its loveliness lost its dust of luster in your eyes—to know that no matter where you are, no matter how dull the favorite colors of your life become, you can always look down at those ten little toes and think about how they have been with you to a place that almost no one alive can imagine, and no one dead could have conceived of. And then someday, when you’re about to die yourself, and you’re scared, at least you know you’ve already been somewhere mysterious.

That’s honestly all I can come up with, pro-moon-wise. To each his own, I suppose.





Sophia





The first thing to know about me is that I understand the significance of everything that happened.

Even though I did not recognize the moment immediately for what it was, of course I understand it now.

This may sound like too obvious a place to start, but since this is my first time on the record about this, and since in the meantime I have been so persistently, perhaps indelibly depicted as the one purely comic character in this drama—the selfish, perspectiveless fool who somehow wound up at the center of this civilization-defining story—it’s actually an important place to begin.

So, at the risk of being repetitive but just so there is absolutely no mistaking where I stand:

I am one hundred percent aware that the moment at which an artificially intelligent creation first independently developed the capacity to feel love is one of the pinnacle moments in the history of history itself, and I stand with the rest of the world in awe of its limitless implications for science, for philosophy, for love, for our species’ conception of itself; for our species itself; and for conception itself.

It simply was not what I had in mind when I purchased a sex robot.


The other first thing you need to know about me is that I am a romantic, to an unusual degree among the men I know. I say this not to defend myself, or even to try to set the record straight for its own sake, but because it really is relevant to understanding how everything happened the way that it did.

I am a romantic. That is what drives me. My dreams are about love, and my daydreams are about love.

I have three recurring romantic fantasies, fantasies that lift me at my darkest and haunt me at my happiest, fantasies that I feel define me.