Artemis

by Andy Weir

I live in Artemis, the first (and so far, only) city on the moon.

I’m one of the little people. I live in Conrad Down 15, a grungy area fifteen floors underground in Conrad Bubble. If my neighborhood were wine, connoisseurs would describe it as “shitty, with overtones of failure and poor life decisions.”

You can’t gestate a baby in lunar gravity—it leads to birth defects. And you can’t raise a baby here, anyway. It’s terrible for bone and muscle development. When I moved here I was six years old—that was the minimum age for residency back then. Since then they’ve bumped it up to twelve. Should I be worried?

I spent the day doing deliveries as usual. I didn’t want some perceptive asshole to notice a break in my routine immediately before a huge crime got committed. Just a normal day.

It’s a simple idiot-proofing scheme that’s very effective. But no idiot-proofing can overcome a determined idiot. There’s a flaw in the system.

On the rare occasions when I heard someone coming, I skittered into my hutch like the cockroach I am. But mostly, I had the hall to myself.

Very few people get a chance to quantify how much their father loves them. But I did. The job should have taken forty-five minutes, but Dad spent three and a half hours on it. My father loves me 366 percent more than he loves anything else.

“It’s all part of the life-cycle of an economy. First it’s lawless capitalism until that starts to impede growth. Next comes regulation, law enforcement, and taxes. After that: public benefits and entitlements. Then, finally, overexpenditure and collapse.”

For their smart feedback in various arenas, but most especially for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator, Molly Stern (publisher), Angeline Rodriguez (Julian’s assistant), Gillian Green (my UK editor), Ashley (my girlfriend), Mahvash Siddiqui (friend, who also helped make sure the portrayal of Islam was accurate), and Janet Tuer (my mom).