The Moon Above Us - a fictional story by David Charles Kramer
The Moon Above Us By David Charles Kramer The chamber smelled like recycled air and three days of cold coffee. Every seat was filled. People stood along the walls, pressed shoulder to shoulder, and the noise of them — the arguing, the shuffling, the occasional sharp word that cut through the rest — had been going on so long that it had started to feel like weather. Like something that simply was, the way wind simply was, the way rain simply was. Outside, on the enormous screens mounted above the chamber's entrance and along every public corridor in the building, the footage played on its loop. It had been playing for seventy-two hours. The machines moved through the streets of São Paulo with a kind of patience that was almost unbearable to watch. They did not rush. They did not hesitate. They were tall — taller than a person — and their surfaces were dull grey, unmarked, without any design element that might suggest a face or an expression or an intent. They simply moved. And when ...