Kzztt! <Error, error, module damaged. Please evacuate containment area before proceeding as planned. This is your fourth attempt!> The voice repeated, clipped and emotionless, until Ravid slammed the mute control. "Stick it where the sun don't shine," he growled, peppering the air with curses more colorful than the warning flashing red glyphs. The stale reek of coolant and scorched insulation hung in the cramped rig cabin. Somewhere behind him, the hum of a damaged thermal converter wavered like a dying insect.
"Damn! AMP—do something useful for once and check the slurry pH. See if we've got an acid leak in the mess. I'm not getting blamed for this!"
Outside, the MEERS unit—Mechanized Extreme Environment Reclamation Service, nicknamed Meerkats by the crew—dragged its heavy limbs across Europa's icy crust. AMP, his synthetic quantum intelligence partner, had full control over the unit now. Forty other kats crawled the same crater: Site 37-B. Gold Hill. It earned the name by staying "wet"—actively yielding—longer than any other mine on the moon. Nearly four years of harvesting, and it still hadn't run dry. Gold Hill's ice wasn't just ice. It was layered, compressed, and veined with methanite, the volatile mineral at the heart of every mid-rim fuel system. Highly reactive, high-yield, and worth its weight in bodies. Ravid was three days into a seven-day shift, and the deeper they drilled, the worse it got. Every quota was slipping out of reach, every bit snapping under pressure. Ninety kilometers down, past methane frost and frozen voids, where Europa's buried core met Jupiter's relentless pull, the methanite compressed into black veins of impossibility. No bit should fail here—methane ice was easy. But this… this was different.
A hologram flickered. "Yeah, yeah… you break another one?" Astra's voice chirped, sarcastic as ever. She manifested through the PM—the programmable matter fabricator—rising from a slab of nanomaterial on the surface like a specter wrapped in tech. Her synthetic frame, hulking and precise, moved across the crater floor, unfazed by the moon's weak gravity thanks to a battery of relativity generators humming just below threshold locking it to the surface as solidly as possible. Without them, the unit would've been flung into deep space like a scrap of tinfoil. Astra reached the edge of the derrick as the broken drill bit emerged, steaming from the friction. She pulled it from the motivator housing. Bits of dense tungsten-carbide techgel crumbled between her reinforced fingers—material that wasn't supposed to do that. Not ever.
"I think you had it right… damn," she muttered.
She pivoted, scanned the other two derricks—both dormant—and gave Ravid a long look across the HUD.
"You're not mounting another one of those today. And I don't think Bobby or Mel-C is gonna let you slide with another 'equipment error' waiver. We figure this out, or we go home, Rav."
With a flicker, the PM body disengaged. Astra reappeared on the rig's internal monitor, her synthetic expression tightening.
"I ran a pH check—normal. So nothing's eating the bit chemically. And it's supposed to be immune to corrosion anyway. The degradation's happening outside the crystal-cutting process." She paused, her voice lower now.
"It's like… something's eating it from the outside. But it's negative seventy down there. Nothing could possibly be alive. Could it?"
"XenoBio! That's how I unscrew this!" he barked, slapping the nearest console.
"Astra, get the Calypso on the line. Tell 'em something's alive down here—eating the bits. Even if I'm wrong, someone'll get sent to poke around, and I'll squeeze an extra week's pay while their budget eats the fallout." He grinned at his own brilliance.
Astra's avatar on the monitor didn't look impressed. "And if you're wrong, you get fucked at your next proreview, and your retirement village in Austin-Rim goes Milhouse," she shot back, folding her arms.
"Well how else d'you explain this?" Ravid gestured at the holodisplay, still rotating the fragmenting image of the chewed-up bit.
Astra stared at it for a moment longer, her synthetic jaw tightening. "I hate admitting you have a better idea than I do… but this doesn't look like geology did it."
The silence stretched. The two of them locked in a staring match, half doubt, half uneasy alliance. Time crawled. Then… still nothing. No ping. No response from Calypso. They waited. Quantum comms could've connected them instantly to anywhere from the mid-rim to the inner colonies. The damn relay station was even visible from their rig—hovering in synchronous orbit like a smug, blinking eye. But the line was dead. Finally, the holodisplay bloomed to life. A figure leaned into view: Bexi. Bored, smug, and clearly enjoying herself.
"Ravi?" Her voice purred with mock familiarity as her eyes roamed him up and down like he was a slab of half-thawed meat.
"How's it goin'? You, uh… got that rec quota you were supposed to turn in last week?" Ravid's gut twisted. Of course it was her. "Sorry, Bexi, I'll get it to you—I promise—but I got a bit of a problem down here. My rig ran into something real strange, and I need Xeno—"
"You broke another bit!?" she shrieked, voice hitting a pitch that could rattle the alloy panels.
"That's the fourth one this week! I am so done with you joy-r—"
"This one isn't his fault," Astra cut in smoothly, her face calm on the screen.
"We were collecting the pressurized slurry as normal and encountered resistance not attributable to geology or operator error." She pushed the data feed into the comm stream.
Bexi's mouth snapped shut. Her eyes darted across the incomprehensible readouts. "Oh…" she muttered, the fire draining out of her voice.
"Well, uh… this'll have to go through XenoBio for validation before you get your waiver, Ravi. And your kat's gonna be impounded while they do." She rattled off the protocol like he hadn't heard it a hundred times before.
"Yeah, I get it. Just make sure I'm on the record as the one who discovered the anomaly." His tone was curt, firm.
"Uh-huh…" she droned, the disinterest creeping back in. "But hey—now you won't have any distractions getting me that rec quota!" Her laugh cracked out like a glitchy audio file—high, sharp, and grating. Ravid winced but forced a thin smile.
"Yeah… can't wait to get to it." A green confirmation glyph lit up on his holodisplay. Quota request validated. Clearance to return to the garage granted.
"Thanks, Bexi. You're a doll," he said, dry as Europa's night.
"Uh-huh…" she echoed again, voice fading out, but not before she threw in one final warning:
"You just wait 'til I see you up here during decon." The line snapped off. Ravid sighed, muttered something foul under his breath, and began retracting the derrick line into the Meerkat. The relativity generators spun to life, humming with purpose, ready to crawl him back toward the garage. And still, in the back of his mind, Bexi's laugh wouldn't stop echoing.
Two weeks later, the quantum comms lit up again. This time, no Bexi. Just a clean corporate line, direct from XenoBio—Dr. Kazan herself.
"Mr. Jahta?" Her voice was crisp, professional, but something else lurked beneath. Excitement, maybe. "We need to discuss your discovery."
The holodisplay flickered to life in the hab module where Ravid waited. Dr. Kazan's face appeared, flanked by two other researchers—one human, one AI projection. Behind them, Ravid caught glimpses of something else: containment protocols, bio-security warnings, and the unmistakable blue glow of a quantum imaging chamber.
"Your broken drill bit," Kazan began, "isn't broken at all. Or rather, it was deconstructed. Systematically. By a previously unknown form of extremophile collective consciousness."
She pulled up the analysis. Ravid saw his ruined bit in molecular detail—each tungsten-carbide bond carefully separated, assessed, and cataloged by something that shouldn't exist.
"The tidal flexing from Jupiter creates thermal vents in Europa's subsurface ice," Kazan continued. "We theorized microbial life could exist there, but this..." She shook her head. "This is organized. Intelligent. A distributed network living in the pressure boundaries where water ice becomes metallic hydrogen."
The implications settled on Ravid like Europa's gravity—heavy and inescapable.
"They're studying our technology," Kazan said. "Learning from it. The degradation patterns show clear evidence of systematic analysis. Each bit they... consume... teaches them more about human engineering."
"So I was right," Ravid managed.
"You were right." Kazan's smile was genuine now. "And under corporate policy section 37-D-14, the first identification of an intelligent alien species carries a discovery bonus of..." She glanced at something off-screen. "Seventy-three million credits, adjusted for inflation."
The number hit Ravid like solar radiation—burning through all his expectations.
"Plus royalties on any technological developments derived from contact," the AI researcher added helpfully. "Conservative estimates put that at another two to three hundred million over the next decade."
Ravid slumped back in his chair. His mind raced through the possibilities: Freedom from the mining contracts. Enough for the best genetic repair treatments. Enough to retire anywhere in the system.
"Where will you go?" Kazan asked, as if reading his thoughts.
"RimAustin," he said without hesitation. It was the last place anyone would expect him—a semi-orbital ring on the less glamorous side of the moon, but at least it was off-planet. No more depending on the luck of the draw. No more twelve-hour shifts in Meerkats. No more Bexi.
"Smart choice," Kazan nodded. "Low-g, good radiation shielding, and close enough to the inner system for easy transport. You'll have quite the view of Earth from there."
The contract appeared in his neural display—standard discovery protocol, but the numbers made his head spin. He thumbed the bio-seal without hesitation.
"Welcome to the one percent, Mr. Jahta," Kazan said as the transaction processed. "Try not to spend it all at once."
Three months later, Ravid sat in his new hab on RimAustin, watching Earth turn slowly beneath him. The blue-white marble hung in space like a promise fulfilled. His neural account showed balances he'd never dreamed possible. The radiation monitors on his walls stayed comfortably green—no more daily dose worries, no more prayer sessions before EVA.
Astra's avatar lounged beside him in the virtual space, her quantum processing now upgraded to military-grade specs—a perk of his discovery bonus.
"Not bad for a dumb jockey who kept breaking drill bits," she observed.
"Not bad at all," Ravid agreed. Below them, RimAustin hummed with the quiet prosperity of the successful. No sirens, no emergency drills, no quota boards flashing red warnings. Just the gentle hum of climate control and the occasional ping of a message from old colleagues still trapped in the mid-rim grind.
He wouldn't miss them. Not really. His golden ticket had been there all along, buried ninety kilometers deep in Europa's ice, disguised as a series of equipment failures. All it took was one lucky break—and the sense to realize when geology wasn't geology anymore.
Sometimes, late at night, he'd pull up the XenoBio reports and watch footage of the creature they'd found. The distributed network of silicon-hydrogen chains, existing at pressures that would crush steel, studying humanity through their abandoned drill bits. Learning.
It made him wonder: when they finally figured out how human technology worked, what would they build? And would humanity be ready when they did?
But those were problems for someone else. Some other miner, some other shift on some other moon. Ravid was done with shifts that could kill you. Done with quotas and radiation shields and the constant fear of your next certification review.
He was done with everything except the view, and maybe, just maybe, that was exactly where he was meant to be all along.
Enjoyable. Thank you.
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