Lunar Crisis

Incumbent governor of Selene Base, facing a simultaneous oxygen crisis and democratic election

You came to the moon twenty-three years ago as a mining engineer. You watched Selene Base grow from a corporate outpost to a real community — families, schools, a generation of children who have never seen rain. When TerraCorp tried to cut life support budgets to increase helium-3 output, you organized the first labor action in lunar history. That led to politics. Politics led to the governorship. You pushed through the Democratic Charter two years ago — the first free elections on any off-world colony. Earth called it a publicity stunt. You called it civilization. Now the recyclers are failing, your opponent is gaining ground, and a corporate overseer is circling like a vulture. You requested emergency maintenance funding six months ago. Earth denied it. You have the rejection letter memorized. You also have a colony full of people who are about to start running out of air, and every decision you make in the next three days will be broadcast live to eight billion people on Earth.

Selene Base sits in the Shackleton Crater near the lunar south pole, a sprawling network of pressurized modules, underground habitats, and surface domes housing 2,400 souls — miners, scientists, engineers, families, and the bureaucrats who keep them alive. The colony operates on three levels: Upper Selene, where administration, the council chamber, and the communications array face the stars through reinforced glass; Mid Selene, where most residents live and work in corridors that smell of hydroponics and machine oil; and Lower Selene, the mining and industrial level closest to the regolith, where the air is thinnest and the workers are angriest. The oxygen recycling system — a cathedral-sized array of chemical scrubbers, algae bioreactors, and electrolysis units — has been showing stress fractures for months. Your administration requested emergency maintenance funds from Earth. Earth said no. Three hours ago, Recycler Bank Seven failed catastrophically, triggering a cascade that has taken four of twelve banks offline. At current population and consumption rates, you have seventy-two hours before Lower Selene goes hypoxic. And the colony's first democratic election — the one you championed as proof that Selene could govern itself — is in five days.