How I Hacked the Moon

By R. A. Dines

At the first coding academy on the moon, constant surveillance doesn't stop the smartest misfits from plotting their escape—even if it costs them their freedom.

Life at the Lunar Coding Complex is boring, not that thirteen-year-old Moon Girl cares. She finds comfort in its predictability—her first real friend and her love of AI coding keep her anxiety in check. When a harmless prank with her charismatic bestie attracts the attention of rebel hackers led by Moon Girl's crush Dovrin, she's thrilled to join their crew. But as they uncover Big Smile Corp's dangerous secrets, Moon Girl faces impossible choices: her friendship, her crush, or everyone's safety. Even if they crack the system, do they want to escape back to Earth? And if they fail, what will the sinister corporation do to silence them?

Fans of The Last Cuentista and His Dark Materials will enjoy How I Hacked the Moon, a thrilling adventure for ages ten to adult.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. A. Dines
• Release date: Sep 5, 2025
• ISBN: 9798998625305

Book preview

A moon in the sky AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Copyright ©2025 by R. A. Dines

All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without the express written permission of the Author.

Cover art by Karl Stevens

Cover and interior design by Janet Smith Taylor

No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing or editing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of training AI technologies to generate text, including, without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to license use of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

This book is a work of fiction. Characters and events in this novel are the product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 979-8-9986253-0-5 (ebook)

ISBN: 979-8-9986253-1-2 (paperback)

ISBN: 979-8-9986253-2-9 (hardcover)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2025909797

For more information, or to book an event, visit: www.racheldines.com.

Contents

1.0 In the garden dome

2.0 Unterrible power supplies

3.0 Up To No Good

4.0 Powered by Cheezios

5.0 Weird with a capital W

6.0 The prank

7.0 French fries

8.0 Fall off the tread

9.0 How could I say no?

10.0 Moon Girl

11.0 Caught

12.0 Not in love with anyone

13.0 A dog named Lunie

14.0 Space walk

15.0 Middle children

16.0 Where we grew up

17.0 Capture the flag

18.0 Thunderstorm

19.0 B3

20.0 The hack

21.0 Sig

22.0 Rescue

23.0 Lights out

24.0 My bunk

25.0 Assembly

26.0 My name

About the Author

Acknowledgments

1.0

A moon with a face in the middle AI-generated content may be incorrect.

In the garden dome

Jo and I walked through the rows of corn in the garden dome, gently brushing our fingertips along the new leaves, the strong stalks, and the fluff at the top of the stems. I inhaled the earthy air deeply through my nose, so different from the staleness in the rest of the lunar base. I think it’s from plants throwing off the oxygen they’ve processed, instead of the air we get via compressors that tastes like a dentist visit. Overhead, the lazy half-Earth lolled, peaceful blues, greens, and whites. I sensed Jo waiting for me to say something, but I enjoyed the comfortable silence.

So how did it go? Jo asked with a crooked grin.

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye before ducking to carefully examine the footprints my boots made in the fine dust. Oh, fine, I guess. It’s going to be a tough class. I hope I can keep up. A flush building in my face, growing with my discomfort. I could tell Jo was jealous that I would be the sole fifth-standard Lunie in advanced AI class. I was going to learn to code in VONN! Jo was good at so many things, but AI coding was the one area I had the edge.

Jo nodded, trying to act the part of a supportive friend. The friend who was happy for my success. We kept walking, the whirs and hums and clicks of the air handlers filling the void in our conversation.

I gazed up at Earth again through the bubble of the dome. Living at the LCC—the Lunar Coding Complex—was like living in a bubble. The small community lent itself to swirling rumors, conspiracy theories, and short-lived fads. It was like living in an isolated country. We tried to keep up with the news from Earth, but it became more and more foreign and hard to understand. The memes didn’t make sense; the latest scandals were hard to relate to. It was almost like Earth was a distant country that spoke our language but slightly askew, somewhat warped.

When we first arrived, I wrote or sent vids daily to Mom and Dad. At first, I had so much to tell them—about the ride on the elevator and the LCC itself, built into the natural lava tubes on the moon and nearly all underground except for the dome. I wrote about the other kids in my standard, about the food (real astronaut ice cream!), about the AI models we were training. But after a few months, I found fewer and fewer things to tell them. And I found that the things they told me were less and less interesting and relevant to my life. Writing to them became a chore, and I got the sense that they felt the same about writing to me.

As if she could read my thoughts, Jo broke the silence by asking, Have you told your parents about the advanced VONN class?

I shook my head.

She blew out a breath. Yeah, I haven’t talked to mine in ages. Just not worth the creds. Am I terrible?

If you’re terrible, I’m terrible too. I spent all my creds on Cheezios last month.

Jo laughed. I’ll take a bag of Cheezios over a lecture from my mom every day.

I forced out a chuckle while quickly doing the math. Six months since I’d called my parents. They haven’t called me either. I remembered our last conversation, on my thirteenth birthday. The calls were always awkward, and the bad connection wasn’t the only reason. Mom had seemed distracted, glancing at her tab and robotically echoing back everything I said to her. Dad droned on about things I didn’t care about. I ended the call as quickly as I could.

I had lived half my life on the moon. So long that life on Earth felt alien. Don’t get me wrong, I couldn’t wait to turn sixteen and go back to Earth and start a fresh life. My LCC stipend would comfortably cover a large apartment in the city. And more importantly, the prestige of the program meant I could find a good-paying job in tech. Jo and I had plans to get an apartment together, maybe get a dog.

Some kids here were angry all the time, raging against the LCC, their parents, the work. But I remembered being invisible back on Earth. Invisible to my parents, my siblings, my classmates. At least at the LCC, I had a purpose. And a friend.

As Jo and I walked, we knew the cameras could see us. They never stopped seeing us. When the AI monitor noticed something amiss, it immediately called a teacher to return us to class. But we knew from years of experience that this took fifteen to twenty minutes, even on a good day. AIs and machines may be infinite and fast, but people are finite and slow.

At the end of the row, we stopped short. Standing just inside the doorway at the entrance to the gardens was a BB.

Grubs, I cursed in a whisper. They must have upgraded the anomaly detection.

What’s his name again? Jo asked under her breath.

BB Sig, the new agricultural sciences teacher. I anxiously picked at my cuticles. He was impossible to miss—over six feet tall and easily three hundred pounds. He had a kindly face that brought back hazy memories of my uncle back on Earth. Behind rimless glasses, his small dark eyes had a mischievous twinkle. I had never seen someone wearing glasses, outside of a vid. And for a BB, he was practically ancient. He couldn’t have been much younger than my parents.

BB Sig took a step out of the doorway and into the dome.

Jo turned on her famous Winning Smile. Hi!

Hi . . . said Sig, his voice softer than you would expect for a man that large.

We all stared at each other for a moment. Jo grinning like a trained monkey, Sig wary, me panicked. I didn’t mind breaking rules when Jo prodded me a bit, but I didn’t like getting caught, or worse, facing consequences.

I’m going to assume that you have a perfectly reasonable explanation for why a couple of . . . He squinted at our green badges, clearly trying to remember what standard that aligned with. Fifth standards are here, alone and unsupervised, when no classes are happening right now in the dome—

We— Jo tried to interrupt, but Sig held up a hand.

An explanation I don’t need to hear. In fact, since I just recently arrived with the latest group of teachers, I don’t really know the rules around here yet. Was that the hint of a smile? So, I’m just going to go on my way, collecting samples to use in my upcoming class.

And with that, Sig gave us a brief nod (and did I also see the hint of a wink?) and walked off toward a row of raised beds at end of the dome. With the back of my hand I swiped at the sweat gathering on my forehead.

Jo pulled me along to the pea and bean trellises, their tendrils reaching toward the faraway sun. It was so peaceful there, the rustling lettuce leaves as the air vents turned on, the occasional splash as an eel plopped a tail near the surface. I liked to watch the eels, their lithe bodies swimming so effortlessly, so playfully in the tanks. I tried not to think about how they would end up in our soup. If I never saw eel soup again, it wouldn’t be soon enough. And don’t get me started on seaweed.

Each plant served a purpose. Some helped with air purification, and others provided herbal remedies. My favorite was the pitcher plant, grown to catch the fruit flies that otherwise swarmed in clouds. Yes, we had bugs on the moon.

I could’ve visited the garden dome a thousand times and would still find it thrilling. The ceiling was at least a hundred feet high and made up of glass hexagons that fit together like a giant puzzle. You could look out and see one million stars blinking back at you, as well as the sun’s searing gaze and Earth’s gentle glow. If you looked straight out on the moon’s horizon, you could see the blinking lights of a different kind of farm—LC1-north and LC1-south. About five miles apart, the server farms were the whole reason we were up here.

My mind drifted back to the image of BB Sig standing with hunched shoulders in the doorway to the dome, caught between the industrial grays and reds of the standard hallways—cement floors, pipes overhead, and ultralow-powered red-hued lighting—at the brink of the lush greens and yellows and browns of the garden, all transposed against the stark black void. I’d seen this before: a new BB drawn to the organic matter in the garden that probably reminded them of Earth but terrified of stepping out under the dome, where the vast expanse of the endless night was impossible to ignore. I wondered about Sig, about the life he left behind on Earth. About why someone would choose to work at the LCC.

Jo and I enjoyed another ten minutes in the warm hug of the dome, not speaking, each thinking our own private thoughts. We were by the eel ponds watching our future dinner playfully splashing through the water when a different BB came to get us. They doled out our punishment: additional chores, loss of free time. We didn’t mind making this trade in exchange for extra free time. We just needed to keep our misdeeds below the threshold of winding up in B3’s office, or worse, in Sol.

2.0

A moon with a face in the middle AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Unterrible power supplies

​​It was Thursday, a day that rudely started with hardware class. I hated hardware so much that every time we set foot in the hardware lab I had a visceral reaction, like someone was giving me tiny electric shocks. Whenever I sat down in front of the circuit or the memory board we were supposed to diagnose, my mind went blank. I could never figure out where the wires were supposed to go. In the end, I was usually last to finish the assignment. I hated being last at anything. The humiliation of seeing my peers, one by one, finish their hardware assignment stung deeply.

At least I was good at one thing, and my advanced coding class was later that day. AI coding classes were like a fun puzzle, not the frustrating black box (literally) of hardware. If there was a tricky software function I needed to write, I might stay up all night thinking about it. It was like trying to untangle a knot in my mind, playing out all the different ways to solve it and what dead ends I might meet, then how I would resolve those issues. While my bunkmates went to sleep, streamed vids, or watched the socials from Earth, I’d stare at the underside of Jo’s bunk, mind racing.

Today as we entered the lab, I was determined not to be last at the practicum. What an accomplishment that would be, NOT LAST. Some people had a natural aptitude for hardware eng, like Ellsbeth, who was usually one of the first to troubleshoot, diagnose, and repair her work. Jo was also excellent at hardware class, but Jo was excellent at everything.

Bouncing my foot in anxious anticipation, I popped open a window to ping Jo. Clutching my tab under the table, I rapidly swiped my finger over the translucent tile without looking at it. I saw Jo two rows ahead of me pull her tab from her pocket, glance at it, then turn around and wink at me.

🐼💜 [Jo]: new call sign?

🌕💃 [Me]: ya changing it up. from song called moondance

🐼💜 [Jo]: u love oldies 💀💀

Suddenly a memory flooded into my brain. I was doing an old-fashioned dance—a waltz? no, a foxtrot—with my grandfather in our living room on Earth. He smelled like flannel and the cold air from outside. He clasped me tightly as we spun and glided around the room as the singer

[jfe16 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Review of Digital eBook

Moondance, thirteen years old and living in the first coding academy on the moon, pulls a harmless prank with her friend, Jo, and gets noticed by rebel hackers. Dovrin, the hackers’ leader, misreads her name icons and calls her Moon Girl.

When Moon Girl joins the hackers, she discovers that their claim of not being sent back to Earth at the end of their schooling is true. But there are other secrets held by the corporation running the academy.

How much danger are Moon Girl and her friends facing if they are discovered? Can they save the academy and its students?

=========

This clever middle grade science fiction thriller offers readers a strong sense of place and an intriguing premise. Well-drawn characters, who act just as middle school students are expected to act, populate the lunar academy creating an immersive tale that keeps readers involved.

With its fast pace, the unfolding story keeps the pages turning as this tale of friendship, budding romance, and drama plays out. There’s humor along with the adventure, emotions and vulnerabilities that perfectly fit the characters.

Readers who enjoy science fiction will find much to appreciate here, even if they are not middle school readers.

Highly recommended.

I received a free copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Readers program and am leaving this review voluntarily.