It's Been a While
Artemis II
The far side of the Moon filled three of Orion’s four windows.
Reid Wiseman had trained for this view for years. He’d studied lunar maps and surface photographs, memorized crater names and geological features, rehearsed the observation protocols until they were muscle memory. He’d believed, sincerely, that preparation would blunt the impact of the real thing. He was wrong.
The terrain below was nothing like the Moon they knew from Earth. No smooth grey seas, no familiar face staring back. Instead, battered highlands rolled beneath them in every direction, scarred by impacts so ancient they predated the formation of Earth’s oceans. The craters overlapped and intersected like the rings of a cut log, each one a record of some catastrophe that had no witness. The surface was bone-white where sunlight struck it and coal-black in the shadows, and the contrast was so severe that Reid’s eyes ached trying to resolve the boundary.
“Houston, Integrity,” he said. “We are approaching loss of signal. All systems nominal. Beginning far-side observation protocol.” He paused. “The view is something else.”
A burst of static answered, then the clipped voice of CAPCOM, already breaking apart. “Copy, Integrity. You are... forty seconds... LOS. See you on... other side. Enjoy the view.”
The static swallowed the rest.
Victor Glover, strapped into the pilot’s seat beside Reid, exhaled slowly. “And there it goes.”
Christina Koch floated near the windows on the far side of the cabin, Nikon already raised. Jeremy Hansen drifted beside her, a checklist Velcroed to his thigh, stylus in hand. For a moment, all four of them were still. The silence inside the capsule had a different quality now. The hum of the environmental systems, the clicks of the cooling loops, the faint whirr of the air circulation fans; all of it was the same as it had been for five days. But without the invisible thread of radio tying them to Houston, the sounds felt closer. More personal. The capsule shrank.
“Forty-one minutes,” Jeremy said quietly. “Let’s make them count.”
Christina began shooting. The shutter sound was absurdly domestic in context, like someone taking pictures at a birthday party held inside a coffin. She worked methodically, moving from window to window, capturing the planned targets: the South Pole-Aitken Basin, the far-side highlands, the dark patches where future landing sites were being evaluated for Artemis IV and beyond.
Reid turned back to his instruments.
That was when the first anomaly appeared.
The primary navigation display flickered. It was subtle, barely a stutter, the kind of thing you might attribute to a momentary power fluctuation if you were feeling generous. Reid watched it for ten seconds. It did not repeat. He logged it on his tablet and continued his sweep of the panel.
Thirty seconds later, the cabin pressure readout ticked up by 0.3 psi, held for four seconds, then returned to nominal. Victor caught it too.
“You see that?” Victor said.
“Yeah.”
“Glitch?”
“Logging it.”
They ran the standard diagnostic, the one they’d rehearsed a hundred times in the simulator at Johnson. Everything came back clean. Cabin pressure was stable. The nav display was tracking correctly. Reid stared at the numbers and tried to feel reassured.
He did not feel reassured.
Over the next ten minutes, the anomalies multiplied. The temperature readout for the service module oscillated by half a degree, up and down, in a rhythm that was almost metronomic. The O2 partial pressure gauge displayed a value that was correct but arrived at the display three seconds before the sensor should have been able to produce it, as if the system were anticipating its own output. The star tracker, which should have been useless this close to the lunar surface, briefly reported a fix on a constellation that was geometrically impossible given their orientation.
Christina lowered her camera. “Reid.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t in any of the failure mode documentation.”
“I know.”
Jeremy pulled up the onboard fault log. It was empty. Every system reported green. The anomalies were real, visible on the displays in front of them, but the spacecraft’s own diagnostic architecture could not see them. It was like watching a person smile while their shadow did something else entirely.
“Thirteen minutes left,” Victor said. He said it the way a person states the time remaining on a parking meter: flat, factual, a thing to be endured.
They followed protocol. Reid read through the LOS contingency checklist aloud, each crew member confirming their responsibilities. Victor maintained attitude control. Christina documented everything she could photograph. Jeremy took handwritten notes on a kneeboard, old-school redundancy in case the digital logs were compromised.
The instruments continued their quiet theater. The anomalies were never dangerous, never dramatic enough to trigger an alarm or demand an abort decision. They were, Reid thought, almost polite. As if something were tapping on the glass of their instruments just firmly enough to be noticed.
“Five minutes,” Victor said.
Reid unstrapped from his seat and floated to the window nearest the docking hatch, the one that offered the most direct view of the surface below. The Moon was closer here than it had been at any other point in the mission. He could see individual boulders casting long shadows across the regolith. He could see the texture of the dust, the way it draped over the underlying rock like a grey sheet over furniture in an abandoned house.
He could see something else.
It was in the center of a small, unnamed crater, a formation roughly twelve miles across that sat in the transition zone between two larger impact basins. At first, Reid thought it was a shadow. Then he thought it was a trick of the light, a pareidolia effect, the same impulse that makes people see faces in clouds and electrical outlets. But it held its shape as Orion moved across the sky above it. It tracked them. Whatever it was, it was oriented toward the capsule, and it had the unmistakable geometry of attention.
“Victor,” Reid said. His voice was calm. He noted this with a kind of detached professional pride. “Come look at this.”
Victor unstrapped. Christina and Jeremy were already moving. It took them eight seconds to reach the window.
The crater below was empty. Grey dust. Long shadows. Boulders. Nothing.
Reid stared at the surface where it had been. His reflection stared back at him from the acrylic pane, superimposed on the ancient regolith, and for a moment he could not tell which face belonged to which world.
“Integrity, Houston.” The voice arrived like a hand on a shoulder in a dark room. “We have reacquired signal. Welcome back. How copy?”
Victor reached for the comm panel. “Houston, Integrity. Copy you loud and clear.” He glanced at Reid. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
Reid floated at the window a moment longer. The instruments had gone quiet. Every display read nominal. The temperature held steady, the O2 gauge reported on schedule, the star tracker found exactly the constellations it should.
He pulled himself back to his seat and strapped in.
“Commander confirms all systems nominal,” he said into the mic.
Below them, the far side of the Moon turned slowly into shadow.