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Huxleyville, South Pole, Moon
Hendrix Alexander
November 27th, 2062

I

t was a little chilly in Room 691. Not for a reason out of anyone's control mind you. The Huxleyville city council decided to crank up the environmental cooling on the residential blocks this "winter" to mimick the holiday feel back on Earth. Everyone's space heaters would be going, giving off a familiar heat profile and leaving smells of roasting (burning) dust wofting as the blocks woke up. Inefficient? Very, but this Christmas everyone was feeling nostalgic.

Hendrix clacked "6-0" seconds into the cream enamel keys on his microwave. He liked his milk—or the powder the block mart passed off as milk—warm for his breakfast cereal. Slumped over his counter, he craned his neck over to take stock of his space. The space heater glowed a deep red in the corner and his lamp was still sheathed by a red light filter to ease him into a day of nothing but cold, flickered fluorescent lighting. Hendrix swore he could see the individual cycles of his school's lights—all 120 flicks a second—for which he wore sunglasses indoors. No one believed him. His room was basically furnished, as was tradition for a college boy. Turquoise enamel-coated steel walls hung some posters of bands he maybe only listened to a few songs from, he had one rug so his tootsies wouldn't freeze immediately upon getting out of bed, and a second-hand couch he got off of a sketchy uninet marketplace. He also had one luxury most Huxleyville Tech students did not have: a LUREK VPC-450 personal computer. The glow of its green phosphors, clack of its keys, and its cracklish hum would persist well into the night. He was definitely a power user of the library's cassettes.

The tinny rattle of the microwave's bell clamored. Warm peanut buttery corn puffs, a fitting dessert-for-breakfast on the cheap.

Hendrix took his bowl over to the couch and began munching as he surveyed his agenda. Clicking through tabs on his handheld phosphor computer display—connected to his main computer by a cable, essentially acting as a terminal—he groaned as a full day greeted him. Physics labs from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., a 30 minute lunch, followed by materials science lectures from 12:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. It was the first day back from the Thanksgiving 4-day weekend, so this was the last week of major work before dead week, finals, and Christmas break. Congruent to Hendrix's late night cassette crawler lifestyle, he only woke up 1 hour before his first class. It normally only took 15 minutes to get to class on the trolleyway, provided it was on time.

With the cereal dusted off, Hendrix swapped his sleep-grade gym shorts for jeans, slippers for Docs, bunged a stick of gum, and was "ready" for the day. He'd get a vending machine coffee outside of class so no use brushing his teeth then, so his logic went. With a lever pull, his door slid open with a pneumatic hiss.

He was immersed in a dim copper glow, barely bright enough to glint off the edges of the floor paneling, shone in both directions ad infinitum. The ceiling of the corridor was lined with the best technology of 80 years ago, screen after screen simulating the outside world in an amber edging fed by exterior cameras—just vector lines, no fill. The automatic projection refresh to make it seem like the walking viewer was actually looking out into the sky was headache inducing. Huxleyville was one of the launch sites for this tech alongside Chicago O'Hare International back on Earth, although instead of stimulating scenes of planes taking off from a belly-perspective the residents of Huxleyville only got the Ravern L1 Elevator's tether station, the distant Shackleton Crater ridge where the tether terminated, occassional military flights on approach to Henson, and stars (far more visible than in reality). The city decided to project Santa's sleigh flying about for the Christmas season though; meager scraps of homely comfort in such a sterile place. A simple glass skylight might have been more economical and indeed common in the more aspirational neighborhoods, but the eminently subsidized residence halls of HX Buena Vista Block 600 were—ironically—underground and 10 floors deep. The territorial government wanted a place to put the installation without too much public-private headache.

The corridor went on for give or take 300 yards, flanked by endless studio apartment modules. Buena Vista had been his home ever since he started college at Huxleyville Tech 3 years ago. He'd grown skinny over the years, his muscles atrophied from living the Moon life at 25 effective pounds, dodging the territory-mandated resistance training course designed to those health impacts at bay. Buena Vista as a primarily low-income and student accomodation neighborhood was so under-resourced though that no one bothered to enforce the regimen. Although, with Hendrix's mandatory health screening coming up in February, he feared he'd be ordered to attend with threats of deportation back to Earth after graduation lest he strain the Huxleyville's healthcare system with a voluntary case of osteopenia and kidney stones.

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