The orientation continued for another hour.

Nova moved through the remaining sections methodically — the volunteer intake process, the consent confirmation framework, the communication protocols between departments, the escalation chain when a situation required more than one person’s judgment.

Each section built on the previous one, and the staff followed with the focused attention of people who understood that what they were learning was not abstract.

The observer framework came last, and Nova spent more time on it than anything else.

"Ninety five national delegations," she said, the display showing a map of the facility with observer zones highlighted in a distinct color. "They will arrive in rotating groups over the first two weeks of the trial. Their access is defined and does not overlap with volunteer treatment space unless explicit consent has been provided by the individual volunteer. You will encounter them in the common areas, the dining area, and the designated observation zones on the medical floor. They are here to observe and verify. They are not here to direct, advise, or participate in clinical decisions."

She looked across the room.

"If an observer asks you a clinical question, you answer within your role. If an observer asks you something outside your role or attempts to access something beyond their designated scope, you redirect them to me. You do not manage that situation alone. That is not a judgment about your capability. It is a protocol that protects you and protects the trial."

Several heads nodded.

The orientation moved on, and twenty minutes later Nova brought it to a pause.

"Now, the agricultural section," she said.

She brought up a new holographic image and the display that appeared stopped the room.

It was a cross-section of a part of the base they hadn’t seen yet — a vast enclosed space that resolved, as the image rotated slowly, into something that none of them had a ready framework for.

"The base’s agricultural section," Nova said. "Ground-level land area of twenty-five acres. Five levels of vertical farming above that." She let the image speak for a moment. "Effective cultivated area — one hundred and twenty-five acres."

The room was very quiet when that information dropped.

The head chef had straightened in his chair. He was looking at the image with an expression that was no longer professionally neutral. His eyes moved across the cross-section in the slowly and deliberately, as he did a quick calculation in his head.

One of the kitchen assistants, a young man who had said almost nothing since boarding at Lagos, leaned forward and said quietly to no one in particular: "That’s why the food tastes like that."

The head chef heard it. He didn’t respond, but something in his posture shifted. He had gotten the confirmation of an answer he had arrived at independently, sitting alongside the question of what twenty-two years of cooking experience meant in a facility that had already solved the problems he had spent those years learning to work around.

He looked at the image for another moment, then set his pen down on his notebook and folded his hands.

A kitchen assistant from Seoul raised her hand. "Are we working in that section? As part of our role?"

"The agricultural section has its own operational staff," Nova said. "Your role is in the kitchen and dining operations. But you will have access to the agricultural section during your orientation, and you are free to walk it during your time here." She paused. "What you saw in the food wall is what comes from that section. It is grown here."

The head chef looked at the image one more time. Then he picked his pen back up and wrote a single line in his notebook that he did not show to anyone.

Nova held the image for a few more seconds, then moved to close the session. "Everything covered in this orientation is confidential until the conclusion of the clinical trial. That applies to the agricultural section, to the facility layout, to the monitoring systems, to the observer framework. The confidentiality agreement you signed before departure covers all of it. If you have questions about what you can and cannot share, ask me directly. The default position is: not yet."

She looked across the room one final time.

"That’s all for today."

***

The walk back to the residential level was quieter than the walk down had been.

The staff quietly moved through the corridors behind the Synths.

Several conversations started and paused. Most people walked without talking.

They were halfway down the main corridor when one of the nurses, a man from Nairobi named Thomas, spoke up without directing the question at anyone in particular.

"The announcement said we’d be able to communicate with our families from here. How does that work?"

The lead Synth turned its head slightly as it walked. "Each quarter has a personal internet connection. You connect your personal device through the console in your room. The connection is unrestricted and direct."

"What’s the console?" the occupational therapist from Cape Town asked.

"Inside your quaters, you will see a panel set into the wall beside your door," the lead Synth said. "Tap it to activate. The interface is holographic."

A small ripple of recognition moved through the group and a few glances were exchanged, with all of them having the expression of people who had been told about something and were now being told they would experience it for themselves within the next few minutes.

The elevator opened onto the residential hallway and they dispersed toward their own doors.

The data analyst walked into his quarters and tapped the screen beside the door.

The response was immediate.

A holographic display materialized in front of him, at eye height, following the natural position of his gaze with a fluidity that no screen could replicate.

He stood there for a moment, as he observed the holographic screen.

The interface was clean and organized, sectioned into areas whose purpose was immediately readable without instruction. Room controls along the top — lighting, temperature, the opacity of the transparent wall. A communications panel in the center, with contacts listed and a live signal indicator showing connection status. A separate section for internal base messaging, showing the names of every staff member already populating as available contacts. A meal delivery option at the bottom, with a tap-through to the full contents of the food wall.

He looked at the communications panel and saw what he had hoped to see: a full internet connection, active, the signal indicator showing strength that made the word unrestricted feel accurate rather than aspirational.

He stood in the doorway for one more second.

Then he stepped inside, sat at his desk, and opened a video call to his mother in Johannesburg.

She answered on the third ring. She had clearly been waiting, her phone already in her hand. When his face appeared on her screen she pressed her palm flat over her mouth and her eyes went bright.

He looked at her face and felt something release in his chest that he hadn’t realized had been held there.

"I’m here," he said.

She took her hand away from her mouth. "You’re there," she said. "You’re really there."

"I’m really here."

She looked at him for a moment, checking that what had come back was what she had sent. Whatever she found satisfied her. Her shoulders came down.

"Show me," she said. "Show me something."

He turned his phone slowly, letting the camera sweep across the room. The desk with the holographic interface still active beside him. The transparent wall with the common space visible below, the green running along the base level. The sourceless light. The ceiling higher than any room she had ever been in.

She was quiet while he showed her. Then he turned the camera back to his face.

"That green," she said finally. "What is that?"

"Plants," he said. "They grow food here."

She looked at him for a moment. "On the moon."

"On the moon."

His mother’s mouth went wide in surprise.

***

Down the corridor, the physical therapist from Toronto was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her laptop open, a video call running to her sister in Vancouver.

Her sister had been awake since three in the morning following the JFK footage and had seen the shuttle land in real time and had sent seventeen messages since, none of which the physical therapist had been able to read until now.

She was reading them while her sister talked, the two activities running simultaneously the way they always had with them.

Her sister had stopped mid-sentence. "You’re not listening."

"I’m reading your messages and listening," the physical therapist said without looking up. "You said ’I can’t believe you actually went’ eight times in different ways."

"That’s because I can’t believe you actually went."

***

At the far end of the residential hallway, the head chef was not on a call.

He was sitting at his desk with his notebook open, the holographic interface still active beside him, thinking of the agricultural section.

One hundred and twenty-five effective acres.

He had been cooking for twenty-two years. He had worked in kitchens that prided themselves on sourcing — restaurants that maintained relationships with specific farms, chefs who drove hours for particular ingredients, entire menus built around what was available that week from suppliers they had cultivated across decades.

He had always understood those choices as the best available version of proximity between food and kitchen. The closest you could realistically get within the constraints of how food systems worked.

What he was looking at was something different. The farm was in the building. The farm was not a supplier — it was a department of the same institution he was now employed by, one floor removed from the kitchen he would be working in, producing food that traveled no distance at all between growth and preparation.

He thought about the jollof rice the data analyst had taken from the wall. The dal tadka. The injera with three separate stews. The ingredients for all of it grown here. Selected, cultivated, harvested, and prepared within the same structure that currently housed thirty-six people who had arrived from sixteen countries that morning.

He opened his notebook to a clean page.

He began writing, slowly.

The question he had asked at dinner —why did they hire us— sat at the top of the page, unanswered in the literal sense.

He thought about the physical therapist’s response. Maybe the point is the people eating it.

He wrote that down beneath the question.

Then he sat back and looked at both lines for a long time, and eventually closed the notebook, and connected his phone to the base internet, and called his daughter in São Paulo.

She picked up immediately.