Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel by Julian K. Jarboe

Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel by Julian K. Jarboe

Author:Julian K. Jarboe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Lethe Books
Published: 2020-02-29T16:00:00+00:00


Sebastian takes a deep breath and leaps up the steps two at a time. The walls on either side of him are plastered in posters, bulletins, motion papers.

EXCITING AND REWARDING OPPORTUNITIES!

JOIN THE __________ FAMILY!

A montage: deepfake simulated crowds of happy, space-suited workers hiking through the shadows of craters, frolicking with rovers, serenading beside satellites, pressing their awed faces to the porthole windows of shuttle rockets burning their way down to the regolith like supertankers on enormous blow torches.

HIRING FOR ALL POSITIONS, LOCAL AND LUNAR! ENTHUSIASTIC CANDIDATES ONLY!

Whoever or whatever compiled the stock images and footage for the ads had selected for maximal variety at the shallowest level: there was one of every stereotype. Matronly cleaning woman, but in space. Jolly, mustached handyman, but in space. Demure old valet, but in space. All of them at once racialized with signifiers of brownness and blackness, yet maintaining ambiguity, the sort of light complexion that may or may not result from low contrast and low saturation filters, plausible deniability from both outright accusations of profiling and outright accusations of exclusion.

SERVE A GLOBAL COMMUNITY THROUGH ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME TRAVEL TO THE EXOTIC SURFACE OF THE EARTH’S OWN MOON! HANDS-ON TRAINING! NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY! ENJOY FULLY DE-REGULATED FREEDOM TO WORK! GREAT HOURS, FLEXIBLE PAY!

Three youths in fashionable but logo-less clothing, floating across a dome-enclosed squash court. One has cyborg implants and dances on prosthetic legs within the gravity-free gym, as if fulfilling every able-bodied fantasy of freedom “from” impairment; another wears a single streak of purple in her hair like she has just arrived from a composite “young Asian female intended for a white audience” character sketch; the one in the center is poised as though he is completely naive to how spectacularly, generically blond he is. All of them have chalk-white teeth, chiseled jaw-lines, skin that has never known a blemish or a drop of sweat that didn’t make them glow, radiant.

MAKE NEW FRIENDS IN OUR FUN AND SUPPORTIVE RESIDENTIAL AND RECREATIONAL FACILITIES! ON THE SPOT INTERVIEWS! LEAVE BEHIND THE GULF OF SEVEN SORROWS FOR THE SEA OF TRANQUILITY!

It wasn’t that there was no one in existence who looked like any of them that made them so repellent—the cleaning woman indeed looked quite a bit like a polished approximation of Sebastian’s mother, Donna—it was how the images were somehow flatter than the screens on which they appeared. His mother’s body tugged and bulged in her uniform. The fabric showed wear and sweat and stains. Sebastian was sure that if he peeled back the costumes from these personas, he would reveal not any kind of body, not even a wire frame, but instead, a shapeless void, the vacuum of space itself, the plane with no visible end.

The moon, the moon, the moon. Too deep, too far. Past a distance he can manage, past a depth he can tread.

STELLA MARIANS, BE A PART OF THE FUTURE!

Every advertisement is speculative fiction. The ever-blank future. The myth of forward momentum. The cipher where the present gets stolen and sold off in pieces.



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