The orientation continued, running for three hours daily, while the world was reacting wildly to the images and videos that were posted by the staff.

Nova moved through the material methodically — monitoring protocols, volunteer communication frameworks, emergency escalation chains, consent procedures. Each session built on the previous one. Each session ended with scenarios: situations that might arise during the trial, worked through in the room before they became real.

The staff took notes. They asked questions. By the third day, the questions were sharper.

There were even holographic depictions of situations and virtual reality depictions to review the staff’s responsiveness.

When orientation ended each afternoon, the base was theirs.

They explored it deliberately, returning to areas they had passed through quickly, finding details they had missed, testing things, asking questions and discovering new things.

Naturally, the weightlessness question came up on the second day. Several of them had been thinking about it since the shuttle. There was low lunar gravity outside the base, which brought forth the possibility of floating, which was one of the particular experiences they had come this far and wanted to complete.

The base maintained Earth-equivalent gravity throughout. Every surface, every corridor, every room. It felt like home in the one way they hadn’t expected to miss. But they felt like not everywhere in the base would have gravity.

One of them directly asked a Synth where they might find weightlessness.

"The bay," the Synth said. "It is open to vacuum and maintains no artificial gravity."

"So we can float there?"

"With appropriate precautions, yes."

The daring ones organized it immediately the following afternoon. Vac suits on, magnetic boots active, they positioned themselves near the railings along the bay’s lower level. Other staff took contingency positions. The Synths watched from their stations without intervening, which the staff had learned to read as clearance.

One by one, they struck their heels together and deactivated the boots.

The sensation arrived immediately. It wasn’t the dramatic launch they had imagined but a slow, certain loosening from the floor and the feeling of the body lifting with a gentleness that had nothing casual about it.

The Lagos kitchen assistant rose half a meter before grabbing the railing and laughing. He was scared but the adrenaline rushing through him helped him overpower the fear.

The physical therapist from Toronto pushed off from the railing with both hands and drifted backward into the open bay, arms out, watching the ceiling rise above her. She held it for ten seconds before pulling herself back. She did it again immediately.

The head chef tried once, held the float for a careful moment, and returned to the railing. He stood there watching the others for a while, hands on the rail, the shuttle rows extending away from him in both directions, and his expression was that of someone finding something unexpectedly sufficient.

What none of them knew was that the bay had a ceiling. It was a series of massive panels that could seal the entire structure and flood it with atmosphere and restored gravity. The open configuration was simply the default. It had never needed to close.

But when the volunteers and observers began arriving, it would close automatically, and the bay would become something different. But that information hadn’t been offered and nobody had thought to ask the right question.

During their series of discovery and asking the Synths questions, they also found the observation platform.

It was a viewing area on the upper level with direct sightlines to the orbital structures. They found it the same afternoon, a wide platform enclosed in the same optically clear material as the room viewports, looking out at the massive skeleton in orbit and the Voyager turning slowly against the black.

From here, the construction drones were visible individually. Hundreds of them, moving in organized patterns across the superstructure, their paths overlapping and diverging with a coordination that was clearly not accidental.

Someone had also asked if they could go outside, onto the lunar surface itself, boots on the actual moon.

But the answer was no.

Nobody argued with it. What they had was sufficient, and they understood that the refusal was a boundary rather than a punishment.

To make things even better, they found the recreational section of the base. It had a full football pitch. Basketball courts. A standard golf course and a variation that used the low bay gravity to produce drives that nobody had a framework for. Every major sport represented in a playing field that felt too considered to be accidental.

There was also the cinema room and the arcade, stocked with Lucid devices available to borrow and return.

And the pool — enclosed under the recreational section’s glass dome that opened the ceiling to the void, the stars visible from the water.

The Seoul kitchen assistant floated on his back in the pool on the fourth evening, looking up through the dome at the star field, and said nothing for a long time.

***

Time flew by quickly and two weeks had passed faster than any of them had expected.

The orientation had concluded a few days ago. The days had settled into a rhythm of meals, recreational time, exploration, the slow accumulation of familiarity with the base.

Eight days remained before the trial commenced.

Nova called them to the orientation hall after breakfast.

They filed in and found their seats. They saw her standing on the slightly elevated platform as always.

Besides the Synths standing guard at different sections of the base, Nova was the only other person they ever encountered in the base. Whatever population the facility held beyond the staff, it existed elsewhere, in sections they had no access to and hadn’t been invited to ask about.

Nova looked across the room and began calling names.

She called out five names, then called out another five. Another team. She worked through the full roster methodically, each name receiving a nod from whoever it belonged to, each group forming in the room’s attention before she moved to the next. The last call was six names.

When she finished, she looked at the room.

"Each group is a coordination team," she said. "You will be traveling to Earth to coordinate directly with the designated pickup airports. The airports have been briefed. They are expecting you. Your role is to arrive, meet with the relevant airport personnel, physically confirm the lounge space and boarding zones, establish direct communication protocols with their air traffic control teams, confirm ground access arrangements, and finalize compensation for the facilities they are providing."

She paused.

"You will also answer any operational questions the airports have. Questions they have been holding since the coordination notice arrived."

"We will now begin the coordination orientation," she said.