There’s a base on the moon now, and Ellis doesn’t care. What is the moon to a baby? All lights are equal in their infinite distance, all lights are united in their inscrutability. What does it matter if one of them has buildings, people, a scattered handful of oxygenated bubbles? Ellis is hungry, and cold, and trapped here on Earth; he opens his mouth and screams his fury at the injustice of it all.

Pleasure comes intermittently, but disappears beyond the horizon, and the large soft hands that struggle ineffectually to soothe his primordial rage falter and fall away in the face of his implacability. There is a life dribbling away in other rooms as Ellis screams himself sick in a darkened room, humans wringing a meager, desperate, impossible life out of moon rock, stabbing light and life into what had been eternally dark, eternally calm. Ellis cannot forget what he has lost, cannot forgive the unending fact of his existence.