(G1) Chapter 8

Lola was finally able to relax around Kaidan now that everything was out in the open between them, not to mention the gossip circuit of Lunar Lakes. Things felt right, they felt…normal. He would often find her watching him and smiling when she thought that he wasn’t looking.

The house was renovated. The old bedroom and bathroom were taken out and moved upstairs, expanding the living room to where they could add a small office area. Kaidan discovered a wild lunar rodent, closely resembling an Earth guinea pig, named it Joker and added it to the family.

The house seemed less a government issued housing assignment and more like a home.  Life was good and they were happy. Lola’s singing career was taking off and every time she performed half the colony would turn out to see her. Kaidan was an exemplary soldier and was progressing quickly through the ranks.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t bad days. Everyone has bad days. The most notable was the day that Lola came home after performing in the park and found Kaidan fixing  the sink. Water was flying everywhere and the kitchen was starting to flood. To complicate the situation Joker had learned how to escape his cage and was running through the puddles. Fortunately the military had taught Kaidan the basic skills needed to fix a sink and it didn’t take him long. It was going to take longer to clean up the mess and catch Joker.

Lola grabbed the mop and started cleaning up, picking up a water damaged book in the process, while Kaidan chased down Joker and got him back in his cage. Had Kaidan been thinking, he would have had the plumbing and appliances upgraded when the renovations were done.  As Kaidan watched the rodent run his wheel, he had an idea. It would take some careful planning and a level of secrecy unknown to anyone in Lunar Lakes. He would probably end up having to use military channels to ensure that nothing was let out of the bag before he was ready. He smiled to himself and went downstairs. “Hey you, get changed. There’s dinner and a moonlit walk on the beach planned on your calendar for this evening.”

The day was certainly full of surprises, both good and bad. Lola smiled and Kaidan and retreated upstairs to change out of her performance clothes. Kaidan took her out to dinner quite frequently to prevent eating autumn salad since she still didn’t learned to cook. She kept meaning to sign up for cooking classes but just hadn’t gotten around to it.

Dinner turned out to be peaceful, with no sign of the paparazzi showing up to take pictures and report on their relationship. It was nice to think that maybe, just maybe, there were things going on in the colony that provided more excitement than the two of them.

The beach was one of Kaidan’s favorite places on the moon. He had spent many hours over the course of the last couple months hanging out there thinking. It was the one place that a person could go that wasn’t crowded and you were almost guaranteed solitude. Now he wanted to share it with Lola, who had admitted just a few days earlier she had never been there. Everything about the beach was yellow, from the mountains in the distance and the trees to the sand. This particular evening they found Stevan Bayless, a somewhat popular street musician, performing to an invisible audience for tips. The soulful melody he played added to the romantic atmosphere of the beach that evening.

Even though they were the same stars, they looked different depending on where you were on the moon. Stargazing was something that never got old and Lola cherished every moment that she spent looking to the stars with Kaidan. She felt like she was looking to a future filled with dreams and possibilities, that together there was nothing that the two of them couldn’t face. Their life hadn’t started out the best, but they had made the most out of it. Kaidan was following his dreams, Lola had found a place for herself and most importantly, they had found each other.

In the weeks that followed they made more and more time for each other despite the growing demands of their chosen careers. Lola no longer had to perform singing telegrams, something she would be forever grateful for, and was becoming somewhat of a local celebrity. Kaidan was a single promotion away from being an astronaut. The dream wasn’t living up to the reality and he was horribly disappointed. Reaching the top of the military food chain and becoming an astronaut meant that he would an astronaut in title only. He current position was already foreshadowing this. There was no traveling to other stars. They had yet to build any spacecraft that could leave the moon. For him being an astronaut meant a lot of paperwork, research and running computer simulations to figure out how to get a ship off the planet. It was looking more and more like the native crystal to the planet was non-conductive to space flight. With the lack of traditional materials to build spacecraft, unless someone discovered the colony, the population was destined to never leave.

These findings were sent over to the Perigee where research was underway to ensure that Sim life would continue. The two biggest obstacles were  increasing mortality rate, as the Sim race wasn’t adapting as quickly as hoped to the alien atmosphere, and deepening the gene pool. It should not be taking so many generations for adaptation to happen. Theoretically, each generation the population should have doubled. Originally just over two hundred twenty people ended up colonizing the moon. The population was now at one hundred fifty despite a steady number of births. It was high time to start researching the long term effects of the crystals on Sims. A research co-op was set in motion with the military. It was just one of many projects that Kaidan was put in charge of.

In the meantime, he used his military channels to finally set his personal plans into motion and keep everything under lock and key until just the right time.