MOONBASE OMICRON VS. THE GRAVITY DEMONS
Moonbase Omicron is an important point in the history of Negative Brain. A event that showed the strength and resolve of Doctor Mark Feld's commitment to the future. Negative Brain faced impossible odds against unknowably destructive forces, risking the past and present for a chance at true omniscience. The story of how Negative Brain's 15th Moonbase is one that begins in 1972, as Apollo 17 returned to Earth. This archivist recently sat down with Doctor Feld to get a first-hand account of the beginning—and nearly the end—of Negative Astronautics.

ARCHIVIST: What can you tell us about the start of Negative Astronautics?

FELD: Shit. Well, I was in Yorkshire on holiday, coming down off some pretty heavy horse tranquilizers in a suite I'd been hiding out in for two weeks, and the program on the telly, this show about a family that wouldn't let the little boy have a dog, you know? a good one, the show blinked off and the BBC dicks came on to announce to the world Apollo 17 was floating back to earth.

ARCHIVIST: This was 1972?

FELD: I guess. And they went on and on about this stupid parachuting junk heap. Meanwhile I'm trying to relax and wanted the little boy to get his dog and didn't give a fuck about the American science fair project. Then I saw the refraction in the lense flair and everything changed.

ARCHIVIST: Can you explain that a little bit for the non-technical readers?

FELD: Jesus. I saw some sparkly light coming off the side of the Apollo 17 capsule. A very specific sparkly light that until that point I had thought to be purely theoretical.
A few years previous, I had devised an algorithm for obtaining all knowable knowledge. I called it the "Omniscience Protocol", designed systems for containment and delivery, and then put it all way in a box because the knowledge collector ran on a fuel that was thought to exist but had never been found—Absolutium.
The sparkly light I saw in the flare caused by the BBC Camera's lense carried the signature of Absolutium. All I had to do was go to the moon to get it.

ARCHIVIST: No small feat. Up until that point only the Americans had succeeded in setting foot on the lunar surface. And Apollo 17 was set to be their final mission.

FELD: Who fucking knew that 1972 would be the last time a government accomplished a significant scientific achievement. We live in bizarre times, my friend. I suppose I should thank their ignorance. It left a void that would be filled by the engorgement of Negative Brain.
I started Negative Astronautics as a subsidiary in 1979 with the goal to establish permanent settlements on the moon within three years. We had seventeen thousand engineers working on various stages of the project—real vertical development across all goal points.
Shortly into development we realized that relying on solid rocket boosters to break through the Earth's atmosphere was tantamount to trying to fuck through blue jeans and we needed to tame our planet's forces and demand its respect if we were to ever truly inherit the space beyond.
One morning I was standing in front of the mirror after a nucleonic soda bath, investigating a lump in the fleshy part of my face just below my right eye. I obtained a jewelers loupe and forceps from my pantry and began teasing the lump to learn its secrets.
After growing tired of the deformation’s histrionics, I squeezed from both sides once, twice, and on the third a forceful explosion erupted out of my skin and a small hard stone shot straight into the mirror, leaving hairline cracks spidering out from the impact.

ARCHIVIST: Did you ever find out what the stone was?

FELD: Oh, just a little bastard hunk of phosphourous. Forgot I had been transmuting plasmas the week before. A piece had flown up into my face and lodged itself in there and turned abscessed. And then it hit me. Negative Astronautics could use the Earth against itself just like that piece of phosphourous used me. The pressure exerted on the planet's mantle is 1.4 million atmopsheres. [editor's note: 1.4 million atmospheres = 1.4 million x 14.7 = 20.58 million lbs per square inch] The force created by the Earth itself could propel us out of its reach, and there was nothing the big bitch could do about it.
We immediately began working on the Terra Abscessive Injectional Nuclear Traveller. Within six months we were ready to test it with a pod full of felines.

ARCHIVIST: The TAINT was first tested by Cats?

FELD: We expected failure on that first test. For us, testing that early was a win-win: we could learn our major weak points as the device fed our control station in Boise data, and we we able to test the life support systems (and g-force loads) on biological entities whilst also ridding the planet of 7,400 felines.

ARCHIVIST: Why so many?

FELD: We had projected a weight need of 35 tons. It would have been inefficient to use less cats.
The first test was scheduled for the afternoon of May 18th 1980, at a previously selected site in the US State of Washington known as Mount St. Helens. The program had gotten a green light from Jimmy Carter's administration in hopes that success could lead to a reelection in 1980. I knew that Carter was fucked (I'd never met an actually religious world leader until Carter) but was willing to take advantage of the government's good will in order to reach the Moon on schedule.

ARCHIVIST: Can you tell us how the TAINT works?

FELD: Like you're all idiots? Sure, I can do that. The Terra Abscessive Injectional Nuclear Traveller works in a few stages. First, we use a special chemical foam process developed in house to one-way dematerialize the peak of a primed supervolcano. This  creates a corridor of rock down through to the molten mantle in which which things can go in, but not come out. An enormous tire valve, if you will.
We built our TAINT pod out of a hemp-mercury alloy one of our headier scientists accidentally created one day while doing extensive research. Thinking he had ruined his current samples, he disposed of them in the incinerator shoot. Minutes later the entire building shook from a massive explosion in the second basement.
The "hercury" had run down into the incinerator hopper and solidified over the vents. When the quantum lasers began attempting to dematerialize the hardened alloy, the air inside the device superheated before the metal had budged a degree. The system attempted to compensate, and instead turned the entire chamber to plasma. The explosion caused forty five deaths and billions in repairs. The original hercury is still molded to the old basement substructure. We've yet to be able to move it.

ARCHIVIST: And someone just invented this stuff in a fluke? Amazing.

FELD: Honestly I think he was smoking a bunch of dope and swirling mercury around with magnetic lasers, but the results don't argue. We learned to control the substance and were even able to mold it into complex structures. The first TAINT was built in three weeks, designed to be aerodynamic and capture the thrust created by the explosion beneath it [Editor's note: After design was locked, it dawned on Negative Brain that they were building a giant metal butt plug. the "50' Woman" project was immediately fast tracked.]
Once the "tire valve" has stabilized, we strap a 60-megaton specially designed hydrogen bomb to the bottom of the TAINT pod (in this case full of felines of various breeds) and lower it into the volcanic chamber. The angle of inclination is extremely important at this point, as the pod must escape into space at an extremely exact angle to hit the moon's orbit.

ARCHIVIST: What happened that afternoon in Washington?

FELD: The pod was certified and the directional bomb was fitted without any problems. The cat wranglers had sedated the payload and it was loaded unceremoniously. We'd employed nearly three thousand local men and women to assist the project, mostly digging ditches and carrying things, and we invited them to the observation tower we'd constructed miles away.
The TAINT was lowered into Mount St. Helens exactly as planned. We started the 10 minute countdown and I eased into my chair in the center of the control room, content with the quality of the LSD I'd ingested earlier that day and ready to blast some fuckin' cats to the moon.
With four minutes to go, a yell came from the corner where we had ostracized the cat wranglers. Toby Wilson, the biomonitoring agent, was yelling about movement in the chamber. The cats were waking up.

ARCHIVIST: Why was he so concerned?

FELD: Listen. Cats are monstrous little animals. They don't give a shit about anything or anyone. Do you know how dangerous that is? How powerful that can be in seemingly inconsequential ways? The cats began waking up and start climbing the structure inside the pod, heading for the tuna stores no doubt.

ARCHIVIST: Tuna stores?

FELD: We stocked the pantry to more accurately portray a future mission. The tuna, along with the rest of the consumables, were in the nose of the pod, directly north of the heaving mass of felines.
They climbed and crawled their way over equipment and harness, until the combined weight of all the cats began to affect the center of gravity of the pod. It began to list slowly to the side, spinning in the magma.
By the time we were down to less than a minute, the TAINT had tilted almost 15 degrees. The fucking cats. Jesus man. There was nothing we could do at that point but watch in horror as the clock ticked down. There was no kill switch on the device. Wasn't in the budget. We don't budget failure out of principal.
With thirty seconds left, it the pod was nearly horizontal. I poured four fingers of cognac and collapsed into my chair just in time to see the side of the mountain collapse down onto the ground through the striations in the glass.

ARCHIVIST: A monumental failure.

FELD: The pod fired toward the Pacific Ocean at less than ten percent efficiency, due the gaping hole in the side of Mount St. Helens. We recovered it from the bottom of the ocean three days later. The god damn cats were still alive. They'd shit everywhere inside the thing. The smell was so nauseating I made the snap decision to slam the door shut and sever the lines of the crane. Back from whence it came, that foul fucking mess.

ARCHIVIST: What lessons did you learn from the Mount St. Helens?

FELD: We immediately expelled felines from our campuses worldwide, for one. Incorrectly classified rodents as far as I'm concerned.
We also learned not to use volcanos near such populated (and public) arenas. We've since moved our operation to the Pacific Rim with outstanding results. Since 1980, we've launched 21 TAINTs to successful missions on the moon, Mars, and Jupiter. It's become a superbly reliable platform for us, once we eliminated cats from the equation.

ARCHIVIST: And you finally made it to the Moon?

FELD: We finally fucking made it, dude. But that's only the beginning of the story.