Miki Suzuki was the kind of person who filled up three stamp cards at the local shopping arcade. The third one came from eating ten skewers at the yakitori place in a single sitting.
She never imagined those three cards would punch her ticket to the lunar surface. The banner for the “Lunar Base Early Resident Lottery” had been hanging in the arcade for months, and she’d filed it somewhere between “joke” and “not my problem.” When the winning email arrived, the first thing she did was forward it to her husband with a message: Is this a scam?
It wasn’t. Six months later, Miki was holding the key to Unit 201, Block A, Lunar Residential District.
On her first morning, she went straight to the window.
The view hit her all at once — a grey plain stretching to a sharp, airless horizon, the sky an absolute black, and Earth hanging there, round and blue, exactly like the photograph in her old science textbook. Exactly like it, and yet undeniably, impossibly real. She cried a little. Just a little.
Then she started unpacking.
She reached for the microwave and noticed the plug didn’t fit the outlet.
The lunar district runs on 200 volts, 60 hertz. Most appliances she’d brought from home were designed for Japan’s 100-volt standard — plug them straight in and they’d fry. This was covered on page three of the Early Resident Welcome Guide, which she had received, stuck to the fridge with a magnet, and never once read.
With no microwave and no convenience store — obviously — she checked her phone out of habit, almost opening a delivery app. The signal icon showed nothing. Of course it did.
She ate dinner at the block cafeteria. Returned to her room. Decided to do laundry.
The Lunar Residential District Shared Laundry was on basement level one: six ultra-quiet dryers in a row, gleaming under fluorescent light. One load cost 800 yen — equivalent to about 2,400 yen back home, according to the sign on the wall. She thought briefly that someone should do something about that, then thought about the cost of shipping a dryer to the Moon, and let it go.
When she pulled her clothes from the machine, a young man from the residents’ association was waiting in the corridor, phone extended, pointed at her face.
“Um — we’d love to get a comment from you. Being the first day and all.”
He was recording.
“Just, you know — your impressions. Of being on the Moon.”
Miki thought about it. The view had been breathtaking. Earth was blue. She’d cried. But then the microwave, and the outlet, and no convenience store, and the dryer at triple price, and now she was shaking out her shirt to check—
“Did it shrink?” she said, holding the shirt up to the light.
The young man kept the camera aimed at her. He did not move. He did not speak.
Miki Suzuki, 239,000 miles from home, gave the shirt a second look.