A Hobby

THE MARGINS OF THE HIGH-G LOOP

There were three great lunar systems:

the American–European complex, the Chinese complex, and the Russian complex.

Each had its own high-G laboratory train — compact, powerful, expensive — and its own long .7-G production train.

My casks lived on the American–European high-G train.

Not in the labs themselves, but in the margins:

the buffer racks between experiment modules, the shock-absorption bays meant to isolate sensitive equipment, the volumes officially designated as “non-productive stabilization space.”

Space that normally did nothing.

I made it work.

The whiskey aged under extreme controlled acceleration, vibration, and micro-variation that no planetary cellar could reproduce.

The science teams tolerated it because the space was dead anyway — and I paid.

When the Chinese delegation learned of the arrangement, they were furious.

They called it a desecration of scientific purpose.

They said the American–European bloc would monetize vacuum itself if given the chance.

The Russians were colder.

They used Tomas in speeches.

“Observe,” their ministers said, “how the West sells even its margins.

Pure science is not for sale.”

On their own trains, no such thing was allowed.

Their high-G space remained inviolate.

The market, meanwhile, lost its mind.

After I released three casks, the remaining seven became the most desired physical objects in cislunar space.

Pressure mounted.

Then came the attempt.

During a scheduled experiment rotation on the American–European high-G loop, I noticed discrepancies:

a rack reseated a millimeter too deep,

a data tag rewritten in a cleaner format than station standard,

a vibration compensator adjusted by someone who understood both whiskey and quantum optics.

Someone had tried to extract one of the casks during a lab swap.

They failed.

So I let the rumor of the failure leak.

Then I announced that one of the seven would be auctioned in six months.

The Chinese formally protested.

The Russians denounced the sale as ideological rot.

The market went insane.

Late one cycle, during a maintenance pass, Tomas slipped into a narrow service spine that paralleled the high-G loop.

There, hidden behind radiation shielding and unused coolant trunks, he found a compact workshop.

Inside:

grav-clamps, thermal needles, quantum phase meters.

And on a floating bench, held steady by magnetic nodes:

A perfect replica of the rack-lock system I used for my casks.

I removed my gloves.

I leaned in and began my inspection of the thief’s work.

My Ten Casks: The Arc of Change

Last week, I was a working man, lugging heavy crates and moving equipment across the moon’s high-G train cars—hired muscle, essential but invisible. My days were measured in sweat and strain, my hands perpetually scarred from the unforgiving environment of lunar labor.

But something shifted. It started with a curiosity, a small indulgence—I took a detour in the margins of my routine, experimenting with the “ten casks” I’d found abandoned in a forgotten cargo hold. The casks weren’t ordinary—they held a whiskey unlike anything anyone had tasted, aged under the subtle gravitational quirks of the lunar rails.

I studied them, sampled them, and slowly realized their potential. Where others saw old barrels collecting dust, I saw a commodity—a product that could thrive in scarcity, in novelty, in the allure of forbidden luxury.

Within days, word spread. Fellow workers peeked over crates, supervisors whispered in corridors, and soon, I wasn’t just muscle. I was an entrepreneur. I’d claimed extra space on the high-G train, carefully curated the casks, and started trading the whiskey with those hungry for something rare, controversial, and undeniably worth a bit.

The transformation wasn’t just financial. People looked at me differently now—respect, curiosity, a touch of envy. They asked themselves: How could we have overlooked this? On the communist-leaning lunar trains, such opportunity would have been impossible. But here, on these semi-private lines with loose oversight, ingenuity mattered more than protocol. And I had it in spades.

By the end of the week, I wasn’t just a man who moved heavy objects. I was a man who moved markets, even if only in a tiny corner of the moon, turning forgotten barrels into a whispered legend and himself into a symbol of unexpected possibility.