2060

The year is 2060, and I am on the moon.

This is not a figure of speech. I am literally on the moon, and beside me is Queen Padmé Amidala.

She looks exactly like how Portman depicted her in the prequels. Strong, independent, and ferociously beautiful, the Queen is dressed not in the red-gold of her regalia but in the drab green of her traveling clothes. Her auburn hair is coiffed, and above it was a hood, partially hiding her stern and pretty face.

There was a smile playing on the edge of her lips, and we walked, she and I, hand in hand on the surface of the moon. I know this sounds impossible, but it’s true. I am on the pockmarked moon, having a leisurely stroll with Queen Padmé, and we’re looking back at the Earth.

I experienced the overview effect the first few times I saw Earth from up here, a feeling of intense interconnectedness to our fragile home and all things living on it. But that feeling didn’t last. By the fourth or fifth viewing, it started to grow old. Now, Earth looks to me like nothing special: just another old blue planet floating in an infinite sea of nothingness.

A sad song followed us everywhere we walked. The song was Across the Stars by John Williams, and the lonely music was our only companion as we made our way across the desolate lunar landscape. The score was perfect; not too loud, not too soft, its hidden flutes and violins peaking and swelling as the moondust surrounded us, swirled around us, silhouetting Padmé and I against the backdrop of the Earth. Such is the power of space-age technology.

But at the peak of the music, it happened.

There was a tall ridge to our right, and we were walking past it when four imperial troopers in dirty white armor appeared. They were on the ridge, they had the high ground, and when they saw us they whipped out their guns and trained them on us. It was an ambush.

They were good. They had somehow caught me by surprise. But they did not take into account one thing.

I was fast. I was very fast. I drew my sword in the blink of an eye, and the red glare of my sabee lit up the landscape like the death of a young star. I leapt in front of my Queen and ran at the troopers.

The first of them was fast, too. He managed to squeeze off two shots. I deflected them both with my sword—and then I was on him.

I was a ghost with a blade, swift and utterly without mercy, and as I gut the first trooper I am already pirouetting and slashing at the second. My first slash cut his gun in half, my second slash took him in the arm, and my last one separated his head from his shoulders. The other two, seeing what had befallen their friends, took to their heels and ran. I threw my sword at the fleeing back of the third and it skewered him like a kebab.

All this happened in less than five seconds.

I had something special reserved for the last one. I let him run for a while more, then I extend my hand towards him, palms out—and squeeze. The trooper stopped running mid-stride like he had run into a brick wall, and when I raise my hand above my head his feet leaves the ground, and there he dangles, slowly choking, a punishment for daring to attack me and my Queen. I let him fall when he faints.

Then I turned to Padmé. She was frightened but composed. The only thing betraying her fright was the whiteness of her lips, and as I looked at them they got closer and closer to me, until they were upon me, and in between kisses she told me, “Oh, Anakin, that was close, thank you for saving me…” and everything was smooth and right in the world, and as our lips met the entire Earth was our witness and the music of John Williams swelled and crashed like an ocean against our ears.

It was a perfect moment, spoiled only by a strange sound coming from somewhere far behind me. It sounded like a voice, and as I tried to figure out what was going on my world dimmed and went suddenly went dark. Everything disappeared. The moon, the Earth, Padmé, everything, and all that was left was a voice in the back of my head that sounded like a woman calling my name…

“Calvin. Calvin!” the voice went.

“Huh? Wha — what?”

“How many times have I told you not to play with that VR thing late into the night?”

“And how many times have I told you not to come into my room while I’m gaming, Mum!” I groan, then yank the Oculus headset off my face. My mood was ruined.

I had been looking forward to playing the Star Wars mod on Skyrim all week, and it was just my luck, because just when things were getting hot and heavy my Mum had to barge into my room to remind me to sleep, to remind me of real-life. I took a look at the time. The little screen on my phone told me it was 2:07 A.M.

Still grumbling under my breath, I went to the kitchen to pour myself a drink. As I drank I looked out of the window and into the night.

It was a beautiful night, cool and completely quiet except for the steady drone of passing cars. This is a rare blessing, because my neighborhood is usually very noisy, filled at all hours with the sounds and squalor of many people forced to live in close confines together. That’s what I get for living in a poor neighborhood, I thought, and not for the first time I wished I lived somewhere else, somewhere with plenty of space like the free-rolling hills of New Zealand, or the sprawling mansions of Beverly Hills.

But space and its assorted benefits are not for people like me. I am poor, not rich, and I live in the heartlands of Singapore, not Beverly Hills, California. Where I stay there are no mansions, no landed buildings, only many apartments stacked on top of one another like boxes of pizza reaching for the sky. And here, in these cramped quarters, poor people like me stay, semi-safe and sheltered, sharing each other’s sounds and sadness.

Before I returned to my room I unlocked my phone out of habit looked at the news.

Richard Branson was flying to space on a rocket. There he was, Branson on the screen of my phone and in space, silver-haired and floating, looking as happy as a llama. As he stares out of a rocket window back at our planet he says, “I was once a child with a dream looking up to the stars. Now I’m an adult in a spaceship looking down to our beautiful Earth. To the next generation of dreamers: if we can do this, imagine what else we can do.”

Inspirational! Very inspirational words, I think, and I wonder how many people from my neighborhood will ever get to see space. Probably zero. Most of the people who live here haven’t even been out of the 31 mile-wide city that is Singapore. I scroll to the next video.

Another piece of intergalactic news, this time featuring Bezos, the current richest man in the world. He too, wants to go to space, and he’s going to spend millions — if not billions, of dollars to do so, and I can’t help but think of the drivers that work for his company Amazon, of how they have to drive at breakneck speeds and pee in bottles in order to meet the timings that are required of them. I know the peeing in the bottle thing is very real. I know this because many Amazon drivers live in my estate.

I scroll to the next and last video. It’s Elon saying that he is “highly confident” that his company, SpaceX, will be able to land people on Mars between 2024–2026, and that by 2060, the human race will most likely become an interplanetary species, jetting around the Earth, the moon, and Mars at will. For some reason, this last piece of news stops me cold.

Maybe it’s because of the way Elon delivered his speech, mad-eyed and laughing like a prophet. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen enough to know what will happen when Men eventually develop the power to jet through space at will. What will happen is the super-rich will have a new level of excess to aspire to.

Buying penthouses will not be enough.

Living at the tippy-tops of towers will not be enough.

They’re going to have to live in the heavens, in the literal top, now that Space, the last great unconquerable frontier, is available for conquest.

I know it’s true because it’s already happening.

In the year 2060 when the ultra-rich fly into space and settle there, their space-born kids will become the very first human aliens. And how soon will it be, I wonder, before these kids start to separate and identify and classify? How soon will it be before they look back at the rest of us stranded on Earth and wonder if we are a different, somehow inferior, class of people? They are, after all, literally and figuratively, so much higher than us, living on an entirely different planet than us. Will this mindset of superiority lead to interplanetary strife, the first war between worlds?

Because make no mistake about it, wars have been fought over things such as race, religion, gender, land, ancestry, borders, and tribes. In the near future, we might have to add “planets” to the list.

I am not looking forward to the year 2060. I am not looking forward to the day where the rich get to zoom across the stars while the poor stay back on this planet, the planet that the rich have destroyed. I am not looking forward to the day where the people at the bottom will be labeled as different beings, Earthlings versus Martians.

But I have no choice.

It is the year 2021, and 2050 is now closer to us than 1990. The future is nigh, and fair or foul, we will all have no choice but to strap our pee-bottles tight and go for the ride.

With dismal thoughts in my head, I look away from my phone and walk back to my room. My Mum is now sound asleep, and since the zeroes on my bank account tell me I’m not going to space anytime soon, I decide to experience intergalactic travel the only way I can.

I sit down, switch on my Occulus Rift, and strap the headset over my eyes. There is a brief moment of disorientation but I soon get my bearings, and when I do I find myself exactly where I left off.

I am on a ridge, and the motionless bodies of slain troopers are all around me. Padmé Amidala, Queen of Naboo and keeper of my heart, is standing next to me with an expectant look on her face. I looked at her, and it was a mistake. I saw myself reflected in her eyes, a mere boy swimming in those vast chocolate oceans, and I am soon lost. When her lips once again meet mine all thoughts of Branson and Bezos and Musk fade away like a thimble of water on a dry summer day, like so much smoke from the last rocket departing the face of the Earth…

The year is 2060, and I am on the moon.