Cradle the Moon

300 Days
The lights flickered once before stabilizing. She didn’t flinch—she didn’t even blink. Not anymore.

Rika woke up early that day. Or maybe it was more accurate to say she hadn’t slept the night before. Actually, she hadn’t really been sleeping at all lately. Her sleep schedule was now more of a suggestion, a fading habit her body hadn’t quite forgotten how to crave.

Her screen was already active, glowing in the dim room, processing as quickly as her thoughts—churning through a diagnostic from a test she had performed two hours ago. She was checking the micro-regulation system again. The tiny recalibrations that would allow the tether to adjust automatically as the moon descended—enough to push, but not so much that it shattered. A controlled force. A steady hand. She aimed to slow it down, then send it back up into the sky.

That was the simplest way to put it, anyway. A child’s explanation for an impossible feat.

Delta variance: 0.0025

“Still not good enough,” she murmured to herself, already restarting the simulation before the thought finished leaving her mouth.

She watched the screen reload, eyes following the flicker of code, her hand blindly reaching across the desk for a can of coffee. Her fingers trembled. Her grip was weak. Motor control was degrading—she knew that much. But her hands still typed at full speed, moved the mouse just as sharply. Muscle memory was a stubborn thing.

The coffee had long since gone bad. It was lukewarm and bitter and left her throat dry. Still, she swallowed it anyway.

Behind her, the room stretched into a quiet office space. And beyond that, a massive window overlooked the world outside, specifically, the construction site. The workers were moving fast, as fast as human limits allowed. But so far, they had only completed the scaffolding.

It had been eleven days.

Rika understood. She did. The project was monumental. Everything had to be stable, reinforced, safe. If anything collapsed during the build, the entire world could follow. And yet—her patience was beginning to fray.

But at least it was moving. At least the gears were turning.

If she focused her tired eyes properly, she could make out the early formation of the tether’s base frame.

The tether system wasn’t a single line stretching toward the sky like people imagined when they heard the word. It wasn’t a tower. It was a bowl—massive, inverted, suspended through a complex balance of cables, atmospheric struts, and hovering stabilizers. Layer upon layer of curved lattice rows formed the base, designed to cradle the falling moon like a net catching a starfish.

Each row was embedded with turbo engines—hundreds of them—lined at precise intervals to push, slow, or redirect. The outer rings handled subtle corrections, featherlight adjustments. The innermost rows bore the brunt of the resistance.

When it was complete, it would be a miracle of synchronized physics. A bowl built to say “No” to gravity, gently but firmly.

It was beautiful in a terrifying kind of way. The kind of beauty you couldn’t look at too long without remembering how fragile you were.

“It’s working,” came Kirishima’s voice over the intercom. “You should be proud that your calculations held.”

And although no one was in the room with her, Rika muttered under her breath, barely audible even to herself, “Pride won’t hold it up when gravity says no.”

It wasn’t that she hated Kirishima. It was just—
She didn’t trust him.

The only person whose word she still trusted was the one who had walked out of her life mid-argument. The same person who had sent her a voicemail a little over a month ago. One she hadn’t listened to again.

The intercom crackled. “Are you sure you don’t want breaks?” Kirishima asked, again.

Rika didn’t bother replying. She just nodded vaguely toward the camera.

The meals that had been brought to her sat untouched. Cold, likely spoiled by now. She only ate when the world tilted, when the dizziness became louder than her thoughts. Even then, she preferred to keep working—using those moments of waiting, those slivers of time while the simulations ran, to sketch out more solutions.

Her desk, larger than the one she’d had in her old apartment, felt small. Cluttered. It held only a laptop, a pencil, and an overwhelming sprawl of handwritten notes. Pages layered over one another in an arrangement only she could decipher. As if she didn’t even trust her own computer to remember everything. As if paper was somehow more loyal.

She looked back at the simulation. It hadn’t finished yet, but she already spotted a miscalculation in the model. A minor one, sure, but a decimal too large in the wrong place was a snowball down a mountain. A small flaw could cause a 5% deviation once scaled up. And 5% was the difference between stability and collapse. Between holding the sky—or letting it fall.

So she stopped the process. And fixed it.

Then ran it again.

And again.

Fix. Simulate. Tweak. Repeat.

She continued this loop until the moon rose.

This time, she noticed.

It had risen too early. It was too low. Too big. Obscene, almost, in how close it loomed. It took up half the sky, and there was still so much time left.

She tweaked one last line of code. One final adjustment. Then ran the simulation again.

And for the first time in what felt like forever, she allowed herself to rest. Not for long—just long enough for the results to finish loading.

Stability projection: 98.1%

It wasn’t 100%. It wasn’t perfect. But maybe—
Maybe it was close enough for now.

It wasn’t 45% like it had been eleven days ago.

At least it wasn’t nothing anymore.

Rika saved the data. She stood slowly—her joints popping and cracking with every movement—and walked to the window.

And she watched.