The Moon would never be the same again.
Sure, nothing important in its construction had changed. It was still the same old mass of rock hanging on an ever-decaying orbit around the larger mass of rock that we call home. But it was different.
Maybe the giant structure unfolding on its surface had something to do with it.
This mission had taken years to even green-light, never mind anything else. But now, we were here. Standing on the moon, with a base. It wasn't anything special, though. We were heading to Mars with a similar base the next week.
But...
The moon would never be the same again.
It was three years ago, and she had just gotten off work. She worked late back then, and she stared up at the black sky and pondered herself.
"Who am I?" she whispered aloud, to nobody in particular.
She realized that over the years, she'd put herself into a box. Everything about her, from her work habits, to her social life, even down to her gender identity, were in effort to be normal.
As she stared at the bright circle that stood out against the sky, she realized that being different from...
The moon would never be the same again.
NASA, in a fit of proctological madness popped a cap in it's ass. It was no longer the benign pie in the sky of sappy Italian love songs.
The man, the one in the moon, was pissed.
The changes were slow to come. Not many people noticed at first that the tides were stronger and higher. The Bay of Fundy was virtually empty during low tide, and Nova Scotia completely submerged during high before anybody thought to ask what was up.
Lunacy was on the rise.
Werewolf sightings peaked.
Lunar eclipses now...
The Moon would never be the same again. Not after the things I saw, the things I knew that were hiding there. I could never again look up at night without a shudder, without averting my eyes from the horror of it.
The Moon's sickly light, reflected sunlight turned mocking and wrong, crept in through my shuttered windows. I had taken to taping them up, afraid to go out at night, afraid of what might be there.
They walked down on moonbeams, those horrible things with too many angles, walked down and fed. I remember the first time I saw...
"It's simple," he said. "A simple plan for world domination. The Moon is the key. People need the Moon. So if we threaten to destroy the Moon, everyone in the world will have to do what we say."
This guy was ranting and raving. I sighed, and continued to humor him. "How the hell are you going to destroy the Moon? It's massive. Do you have any idea how massive it is?"
He waved his hands dismissively. "We don't even need all that much destructive power, just enough to produce a credible threat."
"Even if you had a credible threat,...
My father and I were lying on the beach wondering why the moon looked larger than usual. My father argued idly--something about the flat terrain and the empty skyline. "If we could see a house, or a tree, or a traffic light, it wouldn't look so big."
It was a stupid explanation, but we are not the kind of people who carry iPhones, and whip them out to settle any debate. We hate those people. They ruin everything.
We'd been drinking wine from the motel's paper cups. We'd run out of wine a long time ago, but occasionally we still...
The Moon would never be the same again. No more bands, no more over priced beer. No more after prom parties.
But that really isn't any concern of mine. I always hated the place. It was where the worst times of my life went down.
The one that stuck in my mind the most happened because of a girl named Erin. I'd just moved to town and for some reason she caught my eye. I spent a while trying to get her to go out with me, but I couldn't ever get anywhere with it.
Then one day I got...
," chuckled Doctor Disaster. Twenty years of supervillainy was finally starting to pay off. He adjusted the dials on his cheese-ray to provide maximum transmutation output, then settled in to wait.
When the Moon was fully transformed into a large ball of cheese, the change in tidal forces would wreak havoc on the coastal cities and infrastructure of the modern world. Billions would suffer; unless, or course, they acknowledged Dr. Disaster as their overlord.
There was only one small obstacle for him to overcome.
His archnemesis, Improbable Man, would be here soon. There was no way Disaster could think of...
The Moon would never be the same again.