This has been my whole life’s work, figuring out how to think myself here. It was evident, right after I returned to earth from MBA, that the human space program was never going to get me this far. Not in my lifetime anyway. Even colonizing our own moon was far more difficult than we’d hoped. It was years until NASA could even get MBA re-established, and five times that before Moon Base Beta was up and running—and things still aren’t working perfectly there. Interstellar travel might be a possibility someday, but that day is centuries away, if not more.
So I have been working at this instead. I’ve been practicing for decades now, taking what I learned from Zan and combining that with things I have figured out by myself. I realized, after that time on the moon when Lily Sjoberg was trying to kill me, that it was tied into the extreme desire to be someplace else, although it obviously wasn’t as simple as wishing yourself there. It was more about channeling that desire—and some extremely complicated subatomic physics. I worked on it all through middle school and high school, making very little progress at first, doing whatever I could to recreate that brief moment when I had made contact with Riley Bock on Hapuna Beach, or when I had projected myself to the safety of the air lock.
Well, actually, I didn’t make any progress at first. But I kept trying, because I’d done it twice, and so I knew it was possible.
I didn’t have any trouble getting into college, given my work on what became known as the Kowalski-Gibson equation. (Chang had made some refinements, and though he always tried to give me the bigger share of credit, he was the famous genius, and I was just a kid, so people tended to assume he was the brains of the operation.) I went into astrophysics and studied under Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez. Together we made a lot of amazing discoveries about space and time and distance, though I never let her know that I had an ulterior motive throughout, that the only reason I was doing this was to see if I could master thinking myself across the galaxy the same way that Zan had.
The only one I told about that was Violet.
She has become a world-famous scientist herself, although in a very different way than I have. Violet has always had a flair for the dramatic, and people have always loved watching her, so it was never a surprise to me that she ultimately became one of the great spokespeople for science, lecturing to huge crowds at conferences, hosting the fifth incarnation of Cosmos, and making the occasional cameo in Star Trek movies.
Violet is the only one who has ever known about Zan besides me. She never had the chance to think herself anyplace, the way I did, but she always accepted that it was possible, and she worked at it with me. It took decades, but eventually, one day long after we had returned to earth from the moon, when we were both home visiting Mom and Dad in Hawaii, I thought myself across the house to her mind.
In a sense, figuring that out was the hardest part. Once I knew how to do it, I simply had to hone the skills. After a while, I could think myself across much larger spaces to Violet, and then from one side of the earth to the other, and then I could project myself to other minds as well, to dogs and rabbits and wildebeests. (Zan was right, wildebeests don’t have much going on. Although communing with dolphins was amazing.)
Occasionally I could think myself to another person, but I had to be careful about that, because I didn’t really want other people to know I could do it. I figured it would be way too unsettling, or that the CIA might try to recruit me to work for them. I never even told Riley what I’d done. She simply assumed that she had dreamed my visit to her that one day on the beach, and I always let her believe that was true. It was much easier than explaining what had really happened. I still dropped into her mind from time to time, though, just to freak her out and make her think she was having visions of me.
So I had mostly communicated to Violet, and after a while she had learned how to do it and think herself back to me. She wasn’t as good as I was, but we definitely got to the point where we didn’t need the telephone. (Although we still used the phone most of the time, because thinking yourself into another person’s mind is always a little weird, and there was always the chance that I might accidentally appear to Violet while she was on the toilet. Or vice versa.)
And now, all those years of hard work, those hundreds of thousands of hours of practice, have finally paid off.
Bosco’s star is hotter than the sun, so the planet’s atmosphere is sweltering. The seas are wonderfully warm. While I can sense the water, I can’t really analyze it, but it seems to be exactly the same as water on earth. At least, it should be. There aren’t that many forms of water in the universe.
The sea life is wildly different, however. At first glance it all looks vaguely like life on earth; after all, in our own seas, there is a tremendous variety of life in all shapes and sizes, ranging from sharks to starfish to sea cucumbers. But when the life forms come closer, I realize that each and every one of them is like nothing I have ever seen before, and occasionally like nothing I—or anyone else—have ever imagined. Some of them are gloriously beautiful, while others are the stuff that nightmares are made of. But it is all amazing and incredible and overwhelming. Kira, who is now a marine biologist, would go out of her mind.
Kira is an expert on humpback whales—as well as one of the earth’s most aggressive environmental activists, leading rallies and protests all over the world. And though it has never been proven, I’m pretty sure she was behind the suspicious sinking of several corporate whaling ships. Kira has never been a big fan of following the rules, especially when they stand in the way of what’s right.
For now, I don’t bother to focus too much on the life around me. Hopefully, there will be plenty of time for that in the future. In the meantime, I am on a mission.
I plunge onward through the seas, thinking myself forward, homing in on the signal I know by heart, the signal that has called to me from all the way across the galaxy.
As I get closer to it, I begin to see signs of intelligent life.
There are structures under the sea, but structures far different from anything that we have on earth. Instead of bending nature to their will, the way we humans have done, by cutting down forests and paving the land, these creatures have built things in harmony with the natural world. Their buildings aren’t blocks of concrete and steel, but seem to be made of crystals and films of bubbles.
Back on earth, we humans haven’t fully given up our destructive ways. We’re still generating huge piles of garbage, and the rain forest has shrunk to a fraction of what it used to be, and the last gorillas and rhinos and elephants are gone. But thanks to the Kowalski-Gibson equation, we’ve made progress. We aren’t heating up the earth the way we used to. Our population has stopped growing to unsustainable levels. We might just make it after all.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about being one of the people behind the equation is how long it took for humans to put it into use. The scientists all backed it right off the bat. They recognized how revolutionary it was. But a startling number of people had problems with the new. Old-fashioned corporations didn’t want to change, so they hired lobbyists to strong-arm Congress and spent millions on disinformation campaigns. Chang and I were made out to be bad guys. People got confused and rejected the science. Some even railed against it as unnatural. And the politicians actually listened to them. So it took a lot longer to implement the changes than I had ever expected it would.
Thankfully, Zan’s greatest fears didn’t come to fruition. No one has tried to use the information to destroy other people. At least as far as I know.
I see the first inhabitants of the alien community. Like Zan, they are all beautiful, only now I can observe how they glide through the water. Their movements are graceful and hypnotic.
I am immediately overcome by a strange sensation. It is impossible to explain, but it feels like—for want of better words—an intensely good vibe, like hundreds of souls all feeling the same way at once. It is like being at a concert or a sporting event, where everyone is happy for the exact same
reasons, only far more intense.
It is coming from the aliens, I realize. They communicate differently than humans do, using thoughts rather than words, and I am picking up on it. I am feeling them, and what I am getting is a sense of kindness and harmony.
It is almost as though I am in a world without an unkind thought, or a flash of anger.
It is overwhelming, like being plunged into a beehive, surrounded by the hum and thrum of the bees. Save for their size, the aliens all look exactly alike to me. I have to take some time and really focus to find who I am looking for.
But when I sense it, there is no doubt in my mind that I am right.
I lock onto the signal and connect with it. There is a brief sensation of being pulled through something, and then I am in her mind.
She is startled at first, the same way I always was when she appeared to me. And then there is a flood of other emotions, some of which I recognize, some of which I don’t. There is disbelief, amazement, even a tiny bit of fear, but once she realizes what has happened, who I am and what I have done, there is relief and warmth and boundless joy.
Even though she can’t smile the way that I do, I know she is smiling. And I project the image of myself smiling into her mind as well.
“Hi, Zan,” I say.
About the Author
STUART GIBBS is the author of the FunJungle, Spy School, and Moon Base Alpha series. He has also written the screenplays for movies like See Spot Run and Repli-Kate; worked on a whole bunch of animated films; developed TV shows for Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC, and Fox; and researched capybaras (the world’s largest rodents). He has always been a science fanatic and once wrote to NASA volunteering to be the first teenager in space. (They rejected him—but then, they rejected everyone else, too.) He lives with his wife and children in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he’s up to at stuartgibbs.com.
Visit us at simonandschuster.com/kids
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Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Simon & Schuster New York
Also by Stuart Gibbs
The FunJungle series
Belly Up
Poached
Big Game
Panda-monium
The Spy School series
Spy School
Spy Camp
Evil Spy School
Spy Ski School
Spy School Secret Service
The Moon Base Alpha series
Space Case
Spaced Out
The Last Musketeer
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Stuart Gibbs
Principal cover illustration by Lucy Ruth Cummins, copyright © 2018 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gibbs, Stuart, 1969– author.
Title: Waste of space : a Moon Base Alpha novel / Stuart Gibbs.
Description: First edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2018] | Summary: In 2041 on Moon Base Alpha, thirteen-year-old Dash must solve the mystery of how Lars was poisoned before the base loses oxygen, forcing the colonists to return to Earth.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017007147| ISBN 9781481477796 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781481477819 (eBook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Mystery and detective stories. | Poisons—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Space colonies—Fiction. | Moon—Fiction. | Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. | Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.G339236 Was 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007147
Stuart Gibbs, Waste of Space
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