God, I was blathering like a little girl.

“And?”

“And it’s top secret. Now you tell. Where are you from? Who taught you to hunt?”

“I’m part Seminole, and don’t change the subject. Tell me about Omega. And no bullshit about it being top secret. The world’s in the shitter because of assholes like your uncle.”

“My uncle wasn’t an asshole and Omega wasn’t a weapon. It was actually an initiative that could have averted the Die-Off. The Omega Project was a $750 billion energy program, seeded in secrecy by the Pentagon during the Obama years to replace fossil fuels with fusion energy.”

“Just what the world needs, more nuclear waste.”

“No, no, that’s fission. Fusion is clean energy that’s released when two hydrogen atoms are merged together. The technology’s biggest challenge was that the sunlike temperatures required to generate a chain reaction also released neutrino particles which destroyed the reactor’s vessel. The solution to the problem required fusing deuterium with helium-3, which stabilized the process.”

“English, Eisenbraun.”

“To stabilize fusion required helium-3, an element that originates from the sun. The problem was that only a few cups worth of helium-3 ever reaches our planet thanks to Earth’s dense atmosphere. The moon, however, possesses over a million metric tons of the stuff, enough to generate energy for the next thousand years.”

“So, Omega was a secret mission to mine helium-3 from the moon?”

“Exactly.”

“But you mentioned the Pentagon. Why involve those warmongers?”

“First, because the dysfunctional assholes in Congress would never have considered funding such a radical energy plan at a time when politics was focused on unemployment, even though the program created a lot of jobs. Second, because the Pentagon not only had access to the money, they also had the ability to operate the program in secrecy without congressional oversight. Still, the scientific challenges were considerable, requiring NASA to design new lunar shuttles to transport the helium-3, plus a habitat that could safely house a mining crew—don’t forget, each astronaut required large supplies of food, water, and oxygen.”

“I thought there’s water on the moon—scratch my butt.”

“There’s ice, so yes, there’s water. There’s also moon dust, which became a major challenge. Moon dust particles act like glass shards, making them a constant threat to the astronauts’ skin and eyes. There’s also limits on what the human body can endure, especially when it comes to long-term exposure to gravitational forces one-sixth that of Earth. Between the health concerns and the costs—about a million dollars per astronaut per day—my uncle decided to go in a different direction … drones.”

“Drones?” She rolled over, positioning her head on my chest—her right hand casually stroking my penis. “Keep talking.”