Celeste 7: An Expanded History
2112, the moon, jewel of the night sky for billions on the planet Earth, has become a new home for millions. Yet for decades, almost a century after man first set foot on the moon, the idea of making a serious investment into a return was little more than a pipe dream. Used for political leverage, or a science fiction setting, few could imagine humans might make their living, even their homes, on the moon within their lifetimes. In the vacuum of opportunity, wealthy moguls used their money and influence to carve out their own paths to a lunar return. Making advancements in rocketry, orbital infrastructure, and tapping into the dreams of hundreds of bright minds who had looked up at the moon and wondered what if?, names like Carson Fredericks and Sir Ethan Arthur became known as lunar pioneers in the minds of a generation.
All that was needed for a permanent lunar base, it seems, was the indulgence of a few trillionaires.
By the 2050s, what had begun with a few outposts organized as “company towns,” who shared resources by necessity and contractual obligation only, began to realize their shared identity in more ways than one. Residents, who had once all been direct employees with shared objectives, could now claim their own lunar stake as extended family members, entrepreneurs, scientists, educators, traders, and more average settlers with personal goals to realize in the nascent lunar settlement. Helium-3 mines fueled the fusion plants that powered the buildings and the fledgling infrastructure linking them together, pumping out steam to slowly pressurize the sprawling lava tubes built up with new neighborhoods. Imported goods and services soon gave way to local shops, producers of small crafts, and whole industries built up with knowledge from Earth, with more local innovations. New traditions emerged, blending celebrations and customs brought from Earth with the rugged spirit of the harsh lunar reality. Meanwhile, decisions that were made by proxy from Earth-bound corporations needed a more local authority, and so with the formation of the Central Directorate and a written charter hammered out by months of leveraged negotiations, the founding corporations of the Celeste sites chose a name for their newly incorporated city on the moon: Celeste 7.
In Celeste 7, removed from their native homelands and laws of Earth, corporations found a deregulated haven. Science, too, flourished on the lunar surface, progressing in ways unsurpassed for a century. There was hardship in these successes; early deaths or mishaps that first went unreported, then blamed on freak accidents, soon became the noble sacrifice required to advance humanity’s vision on the moon. Some of the early initiatives believed in this, too, experimental medicine and pharmaceuticals soon aided people on Earth with new lunar findings, and new products developed in Celeste dazzled eager consumers on both worlds. Cybernetics, already in early forms on Earth, took advantage of its lunar footings to develop the key to neural control that had eluded its Earthbound counterparts for decades, and soon implants found both practical use in the early lunar frontier and a nascent status symbol as the city’s primary export. The moon became en vogue, giving fashion, philosophy, film, music, and culture a new renaissance as Celeste 7 became a 21st century mecca for unbound progress of the human spirit.
As the city grew in population and opportunity, expansion led to a closer connection between the original, disparate Celeste Sites, turning their looser confederation into one, contiguous city. The first tunnel efforts were painstaking, until the city efforts could breach reliably into lava tubes that ran below most of Celeste 7. Then the various corporate and industrial enclaves, government bunkers, and residential barracks could form real connections. Neighborhoods evolved and some were born, with others imported from Earth, until Celeste 7 could boast of old mining districts, new cybernetic parlor strips, mainstay Chinatown (and Little Europe) regions, and many others. These tightly-knit communities came together underneath the sprawling complex of the original Celeste 7 site, which claimed to be first and foremost among those founding settlements. True or not, each of the city’s seven corners could be reached within minutes by its growing mass transit infrastructure, enshrining its status as the geographic, and cultural, nexus of the megacity.
The moon remained largely untouched by the economic and political strife besetting the great powers of Earth in the decades after its inception. Its trillionaire pioneers used their wealth to move heaven and earth, metaphorically and otherwise, to keep the city’s supply lines open. An influx from Earth maintained a steady growth, uncertainy ceding more power and influence to the city’s local authority while remote influence weakened. The fledgling megacity, hosting several hundred thousand residents by the 2080s, wasted no time in flexing its lunar muscle to renegotiate favorable terms for itself. With their pick of fading and emerging terrestrial powers to choose from, Celeste 7 began to find the upper hand in more favorable contracts. Exports flowed back to Earth as more people came to settle, burgeoning the city’s population into the millions.
With growth comes opportunity, but also the risk of outpacing capacity. Celeste 7 found itself facing the realities of several million humans living within its bounds on the moon as its fiftieth year approached. Services stretched themselves to the limits, housing units subdivided to grow more crowded, and even the brightly-colored temptation of store shelves saw [TBD: Jordan finish this]
By the 22nd century, Celeste 7 had become a very different place than it was in the mid-21st century. Yet the core of its purpose, the pioneering spirit that led lunar aspirants to take off from Earth and make a home on regolith, not soil, never truly disappeared. MegaCorps took full advantage, branding themselves as frontier types while collecting the dividends of unshackled profiteering. Their Earthly counterparts, their insulated shareholders, none of them saw the effects of their greed firsthand. Festering unrest in the lava tubes, languishing despair in the mohole, the relentless grind of the common worker laboring daily for substandard wages, all while being told to consume, to buy, to keep up with the next new fashionwear, new cyberware, new collectibles, the breaking point for many came under the duress of forcible silence. Some chose to speak out anyway, forming illicit unions, working in underground dens of debauchery, fueling the patterns of distrust between worker and their corporate masters. The outbreak of true unrest is tempered by that common spirit of the frontier, notwithstanding a policing effort that could reach into the very homes of dissidents, and sometimes their own minds through cybernetic aids. Still, a seed of hope remains, the dream that something better could yet grow on this barren rock orbiting the Earth, a thriving new adventure for the human spirit.
If only it can survive its own hubris in the meantime.