Daily Life
Life in Moon Town is nothing if not fluid. Most people do their work with software or remotely. The interfaces for that are highly portable and also exist as a public service at stations scattered all through the habitats. There are many companies and institutions with a presence in Moon Town, but only a few of the largest have large permanent offices specifically for their staff to work there, and those are usually labs or test facilities, where work is necessarily hands on. Most people gather to work most of the time, but they do so in an ad hoc manner, choosing whatever space is most convenient and pleasant for whatever is being worked on at the time. The patterns in where and when work is done together exist to serve human habit and association. Doing work away from their co-workers is something most people do at least part of the time.
Exercise is crucial to health on the moon, far more so even than on Earth. People do it at least every other day, usually daily. It’s woven into the fabric of life. Not only is it necessary to do it enough that people preserve the superhuman feeling of an Earthling on the moon, the fact of having that strength creates a real desire to use it.
The other main things shaping daily routines to be different than on Earth are the constant presence of robots and shared neighborhood facilities. Here is what a typical day might be like.
- Wake up. Put on a robe, put some clothes and toiletries in a bag and pad over to the neighborhood baths
- Put your stuff in the anteroom of a shower and close the door. Get in the shower. Set the heat for the infrared lamps inside it and the water. The shower has a bunch of motorized heads that you can direct using gestures to spray water on you when, where, and how you want. It is designed to conserve water by spraying only when needed and using pressure instead of volume to clean effectively. You also conserve your soap because it comes from Earth and it’s expensive. There is a constant high flow of air through the shower because humidity and odors both have to be carefully controlled inside the habs. The luxurious common baths pipe the air to the main filter hub almost silently. Not like the hum and vibration of home showers.
- After receiving an air-dry of warm blowing air in the shower after you turn the water off, towel off remaining moisture. Get dressed and spruce yourself up in the spacious and comfy anteroom. Have news and events displayed on the wall as you get yourself ready. Monitors, projectors, and speakers are everywhere in the habs.
- Tell a robot to bring you breakfast at home. It prepares potato-onion latkes, fried tomatoes, and a toasted cricket-flour muffin with blueberry jam, all from local produce. The cricket flour is made by roasting crickets, removing the crunchy bits, drying the rest and grinding it into flour. It has a nutty flavor. The robot also brings you a coffee it made for you using imported coffee and cream from your personal supplies.
- Do some video conferencing from home before deciding to meet up with a few work mates to hash out some details.
- Reserve a space for the meeting in an area where people with similar projects tend to gather: design of small farming robots.
- Run to the meeting spot a kilometer away, in an area on the bottom level of South Farm Atrium. Not to exercise, just because running is easy.
- Bump into one of the other team members on the way. She is on a call with Earth and needs to concentrate on it, but if she doesn’t get going she’ll be late for the meeting. You agree to give her a lift – by literally carrying her on your shoulders the rest of the way. You continue to run, with her on your shoulders.
- A robot has set up your meeting area appropriately by the time you arrive – with augmented reality headsets for each person, a small test bed with appropriate media, your previous prototypes, testing equipment, cameras, and a computerized monitor the size of a picture window that you can interact with by gesture, voice, and virtual controls.
- The team decides there are some things to discuss privately so it has a robot construct a temporary enclosure around the meeting space by snapping together panels into walls, a roof, and a sliding door. complete with lighting. The panels are thick enough to block the sound of normal conversation.
- Everyone stands for the duration of the meeting. That is easier than sitting up straight on Earth.
- At the end of it, a modified design is ordered. The plans are sent from there to a fabrication service. The new prototype will be delivered in 72 hours.
- An AI that monitored the meeting sends an extensively annotated transcript of the meeting to all participants, together with all the material that was sketched or pulled up on the monitor during it, various video clips, and the modified plans.
- Hobnob with various other robot designers and engineers, looking at their work and discussing ideas and industry stuff.
- You want to make some notes, so you call a scooter and have it drive you home while you do so using your own AR headset, which will only take input from you.
- Have a late lunch in the dining hall, choosing a few things the kitchen bots had prepared for casual meals or can quickly make – a salad of greens and roasted veggies, refried beans, and imitation meat nuggets with a variety of dipping sauces. The fake meat is made with a mix of artificial gelatin created in vats by genetically modified bacteria, a few strains of moon-bred algae that has been dried and processed, some soybean products, and a little corn meal. Again the whole meal is local produce
- Hang out a bit with a few neighbors and friends who pass through. Discuss recent concerts and games by local sports teams and bands.
- Get one of the neighborhood portable tanning beds from the baths, grab a few dumbbells from the exercise equipment racks outside the neighborhood carousel, and climb down into the carousel hub. These things are light for you to carry into the hub, but you have to attach them to rails that assist you to pass them to the carousel rim, where they feel far heavier. As you walk towards the rim, down becomes sideways, and forwards becomes downwards. The floor becomes a ladder going down, and you make use of the handholds to reach the rim floor.
- Set up the tanning bed and get an hour of light equivalent to about 20 minutes of good tanning sun on Earth. At the same time, do a bunch of exercises. You favor floor techniques, so that the strength of the imitation gravity doesn’t vary much as your whole body stays pretty close to the floor. When you have to stand up, you favor static techniques like yoga postures to avoid dizziness, even though you’ve done this for years.
- Call in a robot to give you a haircut, manicure, and pedicure while you watch a show and finish up your time in the carousel for the day.
- Go to the rec hab (recreation habitat) set up in a quiet corner on the top floor, and work for a few hours on some ideas you have for your robot designs. Use a public computer interface, in this case a large monitor equipped to read your voice and hand movements, and uses the town’s computers to do processing in the local cloud.
- Before you go home, go to the change rooms and put on your bathing suit. Do some laps and practice a few fancy dives from the high board with some friends who are there.
- Tonight is pizza night. A bunch of neighbors have contributed various imported ingredients to the batch of different pizzas the robots prepare, enough for everyone to have a few slices. Even friends from other neighborhoods can come – within reason, as it’s a free event. You contributed olives. There’s going to be real pepperoni, and there’s three kinds of cheese. The crust is made with local wheat flour, of which there isn’t a lot, and so it comes out of the neighborhood’s ration.
- Go home to bed, by yourself tonight. You climb into the bunk near the ceiling of your dwelling, which is equipped with curved, high-resolution screen that shows the live feed of your choice overhead as you lie in bed. You usually pick a feed of the sky outside, sometimes you zoom in on the Earth, being filmed by a telescope.