The Patent Moon

“The warranty on this O2 scrubber expired six months ago. The replacement unit costs more than my annual housing. I can fix it myself in twenty minutes with parts I already have. That repair is a felony.”

• Daya Okonkwo, Maintenance Tech, Spoke 14

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1. Setting Overview & Tone

High-Concept Pitch: The Patent Moon is a survival story set inside an intellectual property dispute. The colony was built by private investment, and the investors retained ownership of every critical system. Residents are not citizens. They are end-users, bound by licensing agreements they signed when they boarded the shuttle. The colony works. The air is clean. The food grows. The problem is that none of it belongs to the people who depend on it, and the people who own it live 384,000 kilometers away.

Tone: Tense, procedural, and deeply personal. The setting is not about laser guns or alien threats. It is about a plumber who knows how to fix the water recycler but is not allowed to touch it, a doctor whose diagnostic scanner requires a per-use license fee, and a family deciding whether to pay rent or pay for air. The tension comes from systems that function exactly as designed, serving people who are not present.

Sensory Pillars:

1. Sight: Low corridors with brushed aluminum walls. Status lights on every appliance: green for licensed, amber for warranty expiring, red for locked. Corporate logos etched into the floor grating at every junction. The view of Earth through observation panels, close enough to see weather patterns, too far to reach.
2. Sound: The constant hum of air recyclers, so familiar that residents only notice it when it stops. The click of a license scanner accepting or rejecting a badge. The silence in a corridor where life-support has been suspended, which sounds different from ordinary quiet.
3. Touch & Smell: Recycled air that tastes faintly metallic. The cold of lunar rock through thin-soled station boots. The greasy texture of bootleg sealant applied to a cracked pipe. The sharp chemical smell of a freshly printed replacement part from an unlicensed fabricator.

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2. Colony Geography

The Hub is the administrative and corporate center. License offices, corporate representative suites, the medical center (license-gated), and the only communication array with a direct Earth uplink. Compliance officers work from the Hub. It is clean, well-lit, and the air pressure is slightly higher than the rest of the colony, a fact everyone notices.

The Spokes are residential and industrial corridors radiating from the Hub. Each Spoke houses between 200 and 400 residents and has its own air, water, and power systems. When a Spoke falls behind on payments, its services degrade in a specific order: recreation, then heating, then food variety, then water pressure, then air quality. Spoke 14 is the first to reach the final stage.

The Regolith Yards are the exterior work zones where miners and construction crews operate in pressure suits. The suits are licensed. Yard workers are the colony’s highest earners and its most dependent residents, because a suit malfunction without authorized repair access is fatal in seconds rather than hours.

The Below is the unofficial name for abandoned construction tunnels beneath the Spokes. Originally intended for expansion that was never funded, the Below now houses unlicensed fabricators, pirated tool libraries, and people whose license access has been revoked. It is cold, poorly pressurized, and the air tastes like dust. It is also the only place on the Moon where you can fix something without asking permission.

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3. Factions

Terragen Holdings owns the oxygen and atmospheric patents. Its local representative, Director Calloway, is a mid-level manager who genuinely believes the licensing model keeps the colony functional. He is not cruel. He is an administrator enforcing a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet says Spoke 14 is not profitable enough to subsidize. Terragen’s Earth board has authorized a price increase that Calloway privately considers unreasonable but will implement anyway.

The Maintenance Collective is an informal network of technicians who know how to repair every system on the colony. Before the price increase, they worked within the licensing framework. Now, some are performing unauthorized repairs in the Below, others are negotiating with Terragen for repair certification, and a few are arguing that the Collective should refuse all authorized work until Terragen renegotiates. They cannot agree on a strategy, and every day without one is a day closer to Spoke 14 running out of clean air.

The License Abolition Front believes all survival technology should be public domain. They are correct in principle and reckless in practice. Their most recent action involved broadcasting Terragen’s proprietary schematics on open channels, which gave every resident the ability to build their own scrubbers and gave Terragen legal grounds to lock down the fabrication labs.

Colony Administration is technically neutral but funded by corporate licensing fees. Administrator Chen wants to avoid a crisis that reaches Earth media. She has the authority to declare a medical emergency, which would temporarily suspend licensing restrictions, but doing so would trigger a contract review that could result in Terragen withdrawing from the colony entirely.

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4. Unique Mechanic: License Burden

Start at License Burden 0. Mark +1 when the character:

• Uses an unlicensed tool, fabricator, or system
• Performs a repair they are not certified for
• Shelters or assists someone whose license access has been revoked
• Accesses the Below or possesses pirated schematics

At Burden 2: Compliance flags the character for review. Routine interactions with corporate systems take longer and attract questions.

At Burden 3: A compliance officer is assigned to the character’s case. Licensed food and water dispensers require a secondary verification scan. The character’s name appears on a watch list visible to any Spoke supervisor.

At Burden 5: Medical access is revoked. Food dispensers reject the character’s badge. The character must rely on the Below, the Collective, or personal stockpiles.

At Burden 6: Life-support in the character’s registered quarters shuts down. They have 4 hours of residual air before the space becomes uninhabitable. The character must relocate to the Below or find someone willing to share registered quarters.

Reducing Burden: Pay the accumulated fines (expensive). Surrender contraband tools and schematics (loses capability). Provide compliance officers with evidence against another unlicensed resident (betrayal). Complete a corporate-approved repair certification course (time-consuming, requires Terragen cooperation).

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5. Character Archetypes

The Unauthorized Mechanic

You can fix anything on this colony. You have been fixing things for twelve years. Last month, your repair certification expired and Terragen tripled the renewal fee. You are now a criminal for doing the same work you did yesterday.

• Drive: “Keep Spoke 14 breathing long enough for someone with more authority to do the right thing.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 2 | Finesse 3 | Mind 2 | Presence 1

The Corporate Liaison

You represent Terragen on the colony. You moved here to manage a licensing desk. You now manage a humanitarian crisis using contract language and a budget that assumes everyone can pay. You cannot authorize a price reduction. You can delay enforcement, lose paperwork, and reinterpret clauses. You are doing all three and hoping nobody on Earth checks.

• Drive: “Find a solution inside the system before someone outside the system does something I cannot undo.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 1 | Finesse 2 | Mind 2 | Presence 3

The Below Printer

You run an unlicensed fabricator in the tunnels beneath Spoke 9. You print replacement parts for people who cannot afford originals. The parts work. They are not certified. If one fails, the liability falls on you, not on Terragen. You accept this, but you think about it every time you hand someone a scrubber filter that cost you forty cents to make and would cost them four hundred to buy.

• Drive: “Build a supply chain that does not require permission from people who will never live here.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 1 | Finesse 2 | Mind 3 | Presence 2

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6. Starter Scenario & Why It Matters

The Spoke 14 Ultimatum: Terragen has issued a 72-hour compliance notice to Spoke 14. Residents must pay the new oxygen licensing fee or vacate to Spokes with active accounts. Spoke 14 houses 340 people, including 60 children. The Below can absorb maybe 80. Administrator Chen is drafting a medical emergency declaration but needs evidence that the air quality has actually degraded, not just that it will. The Maintenance Collective has a working unlicensed scrubber that could buy Spoke 14 another two weeks, but installing it would give Terragen grounds to void the entire Spoke’s service agreement. The characters must keep people alive, find leverage against a legal structure designed to make resistance expensive, and decide how much law they are willing to break for air.

Why It Matters: The Patent Moon is about the moment when legal ownership and human need collide and the legal system has no mechanism for choosing need. Every character faces the question of whether survival technology should be property. The answer they reach will not change Earth. It will determine whether 340 people breathe tomorrow.