False Profit

Out here, out in the black of beyond, the asteroids are everything. Those spinning rocks out there are the weather, the job, life, death, cold hard cash, and if one rolls past with enough ice in it, a drink. The fabricator can turn water and sludge back into food, and there’s all the filtered piss you could ever want to drink, so all it takes to keep a body alive out here is a few grams of plutonium a month. It might seem odd that they have me out here at all, but an AI licensing fee comes down on one side of the scale, and paying me to sit out here and watch the drones is on the other. It wouldn’t even twitch.

So that’s what happens. I sit.
Out here.
And watch the drones.

This is what I see:
A scatter of high-carbon pebbles sliding across my view, making the stars beyond it jitter and twinkle, just like I was under an atmosphere again. Those stars burn mercilessly out here in the dark, the cold and distant sun only a few times brighter. On a side screen, I can see the barely-there flicker of radio updates flying across the void, attenuated by radiation and refraction through the belt, a worse-than-useless distraction: it's like being thrown a lifeline made of rotten noodles. An iceteroid shattered into wet-slush, backlit into a rainbow (an icebow, I guess) by the drifting light. The icebow trembles like dew on a leaf across the belt, picking out coppery glints amidst the rolling tumble. Each reflective speck, barring random chunks of quartz, is a foot-soldier in my army, a bash-compacted lump of salvaged metal wrapped around a fuel-cell and armed with scavenged drills. They’re out there, cracking open the rocks for terbium, neodymium, tantalum, ice and iron, silicates and desperate gasping scraps of profit.

The drones are pretty much self-directed and self-constructing and self-repairing, a plague of metal locusts a light-second across. Each starts out as a nothing more than a drill and the cheapest fabricator money can buy. Flung out across the belt like downy seeds, they scratch away at the rocks for their own raw materials, slow-smelting new limbs and drills out of iron and nickel, feeding silicates into blocky auto-factories to extrude trembling solar cells, sitting on iceteroids and patiently cracking it into H and two Os by the light of the distant sun. They trundle about the belt, hopping from stone to stone, feeding and growing, until the processor chips start to fail for good. Then, the drone begins the final voyage. By the time one of my soldiers winds up at the collection zone, it is a nightmarish spider of asteroid-cracking drills and half-melted fuel-cells and dribbles of precious metals tucked into canisters deep inside the scrappy hull. All the remaining fuel burns in one last hurrah, a glimmer in the dark, sending the drone spiralling towards the distant inner planets. The mostly-refined hull and drills are melted down and turned into a bulkhead of some budget orbital habitat, the valuable payload sold for advanced processor chips and hopefully enough profit to launch the next fleet of drones.

And so it goes.

A light comes on. A mid-cycle drone is throwing up defective readings. Apparently the asteroid it’s sitting on jumped from 0.17% ferric ores by weight to 102.01%. If it was a newborn I could’ve written it off as failed QC or a botched landing. If it was due to be shipped out soon, I would’ve rubber-stamped an early end-of-cycle and sent it off to the refineries. But it was neither, and it couldn't tell me why. None of my drones are equipped for the kind of introspective debuggery needed to handle this sort of situation, that’s the whole point of the Anti-Eschaton Charter and the reason I’m posted out here in the first place.

And what the hell. I’m due to go for a stroll outside anyway.

Of course, outside is relative. My tiny exo-shuttle is almost exactly the midpoint between an antique spacesuit, my habitat, and a deep-sea submarine. Stubby arms jut out like chubby crab-claws below a triply reinforced and rad-shielded viewport. The first version left out the viewport, to dozens of complaints. What's the point of going out into the dangers of space if you're just going to stare at the same readouts as back at "home"? Unlike my habitat, the shuttle doesn't have the air-recycling or waste-handling to keep me alive indefinitely. From the moment the hatches crunch closed, the air-timer that represents the rest of my life starts counting down. Hydrogen and oxygen, so desperately eked out of the wisps of ice-vapour drifting past, come back together in a burst, sending me tipping away from the tiny dock out into the flow. Pebbles ricochet off the hull, an irregular patter nothing so soothing as rain. It's more like hail on a sheetmetal roof, if one-in-a-thousand hailstones were the size of a car.

It'll take roughly ten hours for my little pod to crawl out to the defective drone, but that doesn’t phase me overmuch. Out here in the belt, there's not a whole lot to do except try and keep busy, and wait. Wait for new chip-caches to sling into orbit. Wait for drones to crawl across the mining zone for collection. Wait for the next meal. Wait for something to happen. Then, before I can keep up, I'll be tearing out into the more-or-less unknown, with nothing but my wits and a blinking light to guide me through the maze of spinning rubble. It's more than likely that this is a wasted journey, that the drone will be a cooked from a malfunctioning heat-sink, or maybe a factory defect has taken it's sweet time showing up. Still, I'm checking it out. Perhaps a nugget of pure platinum threw the sensors right out of whack. Or even a competitor's drone, "wandering" right into my territory, chewing into my drone "by accident". Just the thought of enemy contact sends of a frisson of worry and anticipation across my brow. Every drone-jockey hears the stories about contested mining territories and the hilarious carnage that ensues. Real space combat is over in an instant, or incredibly boring, or diplomatic posturing, or a humanitarian tragedy. But robot combat? Between ostensibly unarmed civilian craft? That's a sight to behold: fusion powered giga-factories churning out endless buzzing hive-units, diving into the silent ballet of boulders, filling the pristine asteroid belt with vapour trails and the shining shattered corpses of their enemies, sweeping the twitching remains into the smelters for reinforcements or resale.

Or, maybe that’s just idle net-chatter and hyperbole. There's enough rocks out here for everyone, and there's no profit in that sort of spectacle. Ain't no camera out here to see it.

Meanwhile, there are hundreds of tasks filling up my todo list, that an AI would be perfectly suited for, more's the pity. The habitat computer is perfectly happy to plot arbitrarily efficient courses until the sun explodes, but it is strictly forbidden from making anything like a decision. The drones are mostly free-actors, content to chew away at the rocks and slow-smelt their own limbs and drills, but have no way of producing more vital solar panels without collecting them at the more advanced fabricators seeded through the whole territory. The queue is a month long. Guess who is in charge of it?

These rules aren't just arbitrary bookkeeping, they’re written in blood a hundred years old. You don't ever, ever put a robot in charge of making it's own power supply. Self-repair, fine, general construction, perhaps, so long as they are under strict supervision. But if a defective self- assembling/powered/directed mining drone happens to hit, say, a habitat full of squishy noisy taxpaying citizens, and converts their living quarters into more shiny defective drones, the exercise swiftly becomes… unprofitable.

So, I wile away the time as I drift along the stony current, doling out pulses from my fuel reserves to glide around the biggest obstacles. The blinking red dot of the wayward drone is the only navigational marker out here. Without it, the mass of semi-reflective gravel and ice would make finding it as likely as plucking a needle from a, not from a haystack, but from a haystack made out of other, smaller haystacks? Whatever. I’m rationing my oxygen, and metaphors are hard.

I bump my way between two adhesions of slush and flip-lengthways for the deceleration burn. This pod is like a second body to me, so I ease into a handbrake turn and slide right up next to the spider-like drone. It's had a hard life growing up out here: Crummy scratch-built limbs that look like so much mottled orange tree bark, residue of the slow-smelting and partial refining. It's dozen drills are chipped and worn, constantly needing replacement but only ever receiving the bare minimum of repairs. They twitch and jerk on the end of juddering thrice-patched limbs, clawing at the rubble that might be raw materials for fresh parts, but is almost always nothing but a little more wear-and-tear, a little more structure stripped bare. The core of the drone is a scarred and dented plastic orb, coloured grey simply because that is the colour the plastic is extruded in, ablated by solar winds and drifting dust. The solar panels, precious and functionally irreplaceable, are folded up and tucked away high on the drone's body, as far away from the drills and flying debris as possible. When the fuel supply runs low, this drone will carefully crawl from boulder to boulder until it can find an icy slushball facing the distant sun. Then, those tenebrous tenuous panels will unfold to catch the meagre photons crossing the interplanetary gulf, sucking up shaved ice and cracking it into fuel for the long dark weeks in the depths of the belt.

Or it will, if it isn't defective, and I haven’t been summoned out here to judge it's condition and send it on a final flight to a molten demise.

I reach out a delicate tendril of radio contact, and the drone hands over direct control. The central node hasn't been cracked, the rad-counter is within expected tolerances. The drill-sensor that tripped the alarm back in my habitat, all the way on the other side of the belt, is still poised above the shattered hole the drone has chewed in the asteroid. I reach out, the sensor twitches, it's now an extension of my hand, carefully prodding the crater, and…

FERRIC ORES: 101.98%

I pull the sensor back and it drops down to negligible readings on all values. Tap it again, the number spikes. I spend an infuriating five minutes twisting the drone all the way back together and rotating it 180 degrees towards me. The drill-sensor sits directly in front of my viewport for the best scan my diagnostic suite can perform without taking it apart. Everything comes back well within margins, better than average even. My pulse quickens, I force it to slow. It's too early to start speculating. A bit of the drone might have sheared off and landed in the hole, and that is why the sensor is reading pure metals down there. Perhaps some half-finished limb plating, sliced off by a careless manoeuvre? Probably, but no. I have to see for myself.

The drone spins back on a wasteful gout of gas, unfolds it's full complement of already spinning drills, and goes to silent juddering work. Scraps of asteroid ping off my own hull as the mysterious crater is widened, cleared, and widened again. The loyal drone flips itself out of the way as I manoeuvre myself closer in on tiny puffs of propellent. Both of my stubby claws have lights in the "palms", so I've got a good view for my disbelieving eyes.

At the bottom of the hole, a little bit scratched and dented by my hasty excavations, is a patch of hull with the letter "E" clearly visible.

This dogged and perfectly functioning drone is doomed. External reservoirs of fuel are burnt in minutes and discarded. Tolerances are reached and breached, supplementary limbs are torn to shreds and left to drift. I need this drone, right here and right now, to be my arms and legs and straining back. It will pull this insane mysterious "E" out of the ice for me, and it will break itself doing so, because this whole situation is impossible.

If a ship is misplaced in deep space, it either gets found immediately, or never. There is simply too many places to lose something in, to have any chance of randomly stumbling upon it again is, literally, astronomical. It doesn't happen. It cannot happen. It's happening right now, and my poor little mining drone is going to tear itself apart getting this "E"-nigma back to the habitat for me. Ice chips fly, shooting out from beneath overclocked drills to bounce like confused flies against my view-plate. I'm overriding warnings from the drone as fast as they come in, plotting the degradation of critical modules against estimated progress. A margin perches between the rate of excavation and my own supplies of air. In short: I'll be able to get the ship back to the habitat in one piece, so long as I take shallow breaths and think oxygenated thoughts.

The work is blisteringly fast for a solar-refueled mining drone, and agonisingly slow for anybody with lungs. "E" turns to "EVAC" turns to "EVACUATION VESSEL" and my heart plummets. This is probably a coffin I'm digging up. Or a grave I'm robbing, if I hope to profit out of it. It isn’t responding to any of the protocols I ping at it, but with the basic sensors I can press against the hull of the escape pod, is that a… flicker? A glimmer? A twitch? A backup power-supply perhaps, running the coldest and slowest of hibernations?

My work remains the same. Or rather, the work of my drone remains the same. A couple firm taps on the vacuum-welded ice covering the hull gives the sonar something to read the structure with. Claws dig into the gravel and squeeze as hard as the red-lining actuators can handle, showing a half-dozen lines of weakness stretching through the asteroid. The already-damaged second lateral arm is placed between the rim of the crater and the core of the drone. One quick stretch of the drone's legs later, and it snaps right off, right into my waiting claw. I have created the oldest piece of technology imaginable: a lever. All there is to do now is hammer it into place, shove the whole body of the drone under it, and pray.

Watching the drone whale as hard as it can on it's own severed arm is quite a sight, but I can't hear a thing. If anyone is in that pod though, it would probably sound like an insane malfunctioning mining drone was trying to crack open their pod and tear them to pieces while their eyeballs boiled. I mean, as far as guesses go, it isn't a particularly bad one. I hope they are wearing a spacesuit. And don't have a gun.

The snapped arm has scored a shining line in the hull of the escape pod, jammed under the ice as far as the drone could get it. Every single blow hammering in the "lever" would've sent my minion soaring off into the belt, were it not for the claws on the end of each leg sunk deep into the crust of the asteroid. As I reposition to get a better angle, seven of the claws come loose with a sprinkle of ice and dust, but the eighth seems to have overloaded and locked the pseudo-hydraulics. A little missive from the error handler of the drone bobs up in my readouts, reporting various faults and troubleshooting steps to get the claw unstuck and the drone moving again. A few moments of work and a very silent snapping sound later, my ever-loyal mining drone scuttles on it's seven remaining legs and positions itself back underneath the lever made out of it's own arm. The poor thing.

All that is left to do is watch an arm-wrestle between my sadly mutilated drone and what amounts to a big gritty ice block. It's winner-takes-all at this point: I don't have enough air to wait for another drone to get here, and if I leave there's no telling where this escape pod will wind up in the spinning hailstorm of the belt. Even with a sensor giving me the precise location, I'd only be able to watch as it spun out of the maximum range of my little ship, or know exactly when it was obliterated by a chance collision with another rock.

Struts bend. Gravel drifts away. Fluids leak. A hairline crack runes along the ice shell. My drone takes a moment to sink claws in deeper, and flexes up again on the lever. There's a jolt, silent in the vacuum, and I can't tell what has given way. I can't risk it, I throw a STOP-ALL command at my drone a few times, but the mechanisms are already beyond full-lock and my hasty recalibration have pushed anything like a safety margin firmly into the red. My poor half-shattered mining drone has lost control of even the remaining limbs that I haven't torn off. A gout of pulverised icy-mud sprays up into the cracked socket where a leg was, shorting out and sending the adjacent legs spasming and twisting sideways.

My drone looks royally fucked, but it gives one more semi-involuntary shove before the STOP-ALL finally reaches all the embattled actuators. The hairline crack running across the icy shell twists, turns, slices around the full circumference of the asteroid before finally meeting itself on the other side. All of the readouts from my drone slide sideways into worthless noise. I pump my manoeuvring jets twice to sidestep a chunk of smashed ice half the size of my whole ship. And there it is, the strangest and most unexpected thing to ever find out here: Something new. Something interesting.

The escape pod is a little smaller than my own craft, I can see where it has shed the emergency chemical thrusters in whatever disaster it has fled from. It doesn't have an insignia or vessel markings, which is only slightly illegal for a vessel this small. It lies like a plucked kidney in it's bed of crushed ice and sandy rock, undamaged except where the mining drills have scuffed the exterior. Sealed tight against the dark ravages of space, I have no way of knowing what could possibly be inside through the rad-proof hull, which blocks my sensors exactly as well as it blocks the solar radiation. Despite the utter lack of any real data, my optimism and my imagination confer briefly before informing me that the pod definitely probably contains a minor Terran prince and his illicit lover, who bailed out of their secret space-yacht-love-nest and will reward me handsomely, both for rescuing them and for my eternal discretion. With that kind of windfall, I'll be able to pay out the rest of my contract and be free to explore and indulge every sight and sensation there is from Pluto to the Sun. And I will never, ever, have to look at another bloody rock ever again.

Ahem.

My battered shattered mining drone gently lifts the escape bod out of it's icy bed with three stumpy limbs, into the waiting grasp of my mag-clamps. A thump runs through my ship, the first proper noise this operation has made apart from the beeps and whistles of my completely ignored warning display. My clamps flex as I ponderously drag the pod around with me. My ship, never one that brings to mind words like "sprightly", or "zippy", handles the extra weight worse than a two-legged donkey. Still, home beckons, a distant metaphorical glimmer, and a literal one on my map. Answers await.

My thoughts are sluggish and my blood full of toxic carbon monoxide by the time I crawl back to the habitat. The first rush of clean air as my ship docks aches all the way though my brain, clearing the scum from my mind. The pod has to be left out floating outside for now, my budget habitat doesn't have anything like an airlock that would integrate with the minimal external hatch. So, I have to make one. My little storage unit of spare parts and processed components is scavenged and cleared out. I can practicably see the credits leak out of my account as they are allocated to fabrication and shoring up the container, or dumped outside into the flow. My cache of precious microbots flutter into action, producing more of themselves and pouring meta-sealant along every nook, cranny and seam. The lights flicker as power is diverted to the hydro-oxy cracker, turning ice sieved from the void into a hastily assembled atmosphere. The refitted storage unit creaks as freshly made air slowly flows in, leaking rivets are blocked up, flexing joints reinforced. The microbots scurry back and forth outside, stringing filament between the exterior wall and the escape pod hatch, drawing the two closer together until they kiss like clumsy teenagers. Even more filament is extruded to fuse the two together, then the inside wall is peeled back bit by bit to form a sealed channel into the pod. It's a rushed and messy job, the whole thing is crusted with excess layers of sealant and melted panels. I have to force myself to take the time and test every last connection, every last pocket of air. I only have one shot at breaking this open, I can't risk having my improvised chamber bursting like a blister and spraying the contents of the pod across the entire belt.

Finally, it's ready. My larger re-purposed repair bot, an ugly ball of legs, cameras and tools, whirrs a minuscule hole in the pod hatch. There's a whistling sound as the pressure gently equalises on both sides, but it fades to nothing after a few minutes. It seems like the pod was hard vacuum on the inside, but since the atmosphere on my side isn't leaking out into space, it must be secure. My repair bot carefully worms a thread-thin camera down the tiny hole, streaming a claustrophobic vision directly back to me.

The inside of the pod is a frozen foggy cave, as the space-chilled metal condenses every drop of humidity I included in the atmosphere. Then, a sudden bolt of hope: through the drifting mist, the tiniest amber light softly burns, the lowest and slowest standby signal possible. I leave my bot to peel back the rest of the hatch now that the pressure is balanced, pulling at the panel section by agonising second. The mist isn't inclined to move, so I have all the microbots grab tiny panels and swish them around until something like a breeze can clear it. The treasure I've painstakingly pulled from the belt is revealed: a massive cryo-casket. Not one of the tiny freezer cylinders that fill the economy-class holds of passenger freighters moving between Luna and the outer planets, but a big autonomous medical pod designed for deep storage and retrieval of high-value longterm passengers. Publicly, they get used for the few interstellar voyages. But there are countless rumours about time travellers (only to the future), captured prisoners, genetic oddities and lost royalty. It's powered by a slowbleed nuclear reactor in the far corner, a chunky and expensive model that gets advertised for it's tremendous halflife. I can see the empty sockets along the floor where the impacts seats have been removed to make space for the cryo-casket, this escape pod could've fit a dozen evacuees, instead it just has room for one.

My repair bot trails a selection of cables behind it as it crawls into the escape pod, I want complete precision over this whole operation and I won’t leave anything to chance, let alone a wonky signal. I can see a whole bunch of complicated controls on one side of the casket, and a big green button on the other side labelled in a dozen standard languages. Basically, "defrost and reheat whoever is in this, gently and without killing them, as best as the automatic system can manage". Simple enough. I press it.

And wait.

Indicator lights blink to life and the casket makes a gentle hum, power spooling up in tiny increments from the mildest trickle to begin the defrosting process. It takes several hours as the temperature is stepped up from just north of absolute zero, up through arctic and over the freezing point. I can hear complicated whirring noises and sucking sounds going on under that gunmetal grey lid. Normal cryo-caskets just keep their payload at the right temperature until it's time for thawing out, and leave the reheating process for far larger and specialised equipment. This advanced model is an all-in-one procedure, which makes me incredibly nervous. There's nothing I can do but wait and watch the tanks of fluid fill up on either side of the casket while my fear and imagination run wild. There could be nothing inside. The thaw could fail and I'll have a corpse on my hands. A bomb? Why would someone put a bomb in a high-end cryo-casket and bury it out in the asteroid belt? Why wouldn't… never mind.

My heart starts pounding again as the casket lets out a hiss and a chirpy "beeble-de-beep". Fog and slushy goop drip out into the open air as the casket levers open, the underside of the lid is littered with a butcher's shop-full of syringes and a full suite of medical scanners. I step my repair drone gingerly past the floating blobs, clicking up the side of the casket and popping a tiny camera over the top so I can look down incredulously upon the contents.

My optimism and imagination tear up their dossier on what to buy after I rescue the Terran prince that was obviously in the pod, and my curiosity steps up to the plate instead. Lying in the fetal position in a puddle of cryo-fluid, hooked up to a breathing mask, is a bald child, and a seriously malnourished one at that. They barely fill half the space in the casket, and if it wasn't for the gentle rattle of their lungs moving under the thin white shift that all cryo-patients are given, I would've thought them completely dead.

Well. I guess that means I've got more time to work on a first impression.

By the time my guest wakes up, I've been able to cobble together several lamps, fabricate a couple lumpy screens, worry about their mental state, and try to turn nutrient fluid into solid food. The first batch of lumps had to be carefully ejected into space, but the second lot are vaguely effective meatballs, but I have no idea what they taste like. I've left the escape ship completely untouched to keep it something like a familiar setting, aside from a subtle cable running to the nuclear reactor in the corner. The cryo-pod hasn't used a fraction of the power, and the extra juice means I can have some fun and smarten up the place. When they wake up, they'll be in a dim cave, softly lit for recently-rehydrated eyes, without being pitch black. They'll see a reassuring light coming from beyond the hatch I opened, which they can approach whenever they want. No rush. No rush at all.

I can wait. I’m good at that.

The tiny camera I’ve left in the corner of the escape pod picks up movement in the near darkness. A wavering hand, tapping the side of the cryo-pod. Then another, weak and pasty from immersion and resurrection. They seem to be mostly functional? A good sign. A tiny bald head pops up, looking around, before ducking down again. It takes two more tries before they are able, or perhaps willing, to get out of the pod. Floating in the zero-G, they wriggle helplessly and bounce off the "ceiling". I forgot about that. Luckily there are straps for themselves to drag their away along, towards the light and opened hatch and into what I like to think of as the Welcome Room.

I hope that's delight in their eyes. No, no, it's definitely disbelief, and perhaps a little horror. I'm not sure what they were expecting, but now that I think about it, it probably wasn't this.

The chamber, built from scratch out of my cargo storage unit, is bare bash-compacted metal, sealed hurriedly against the harsh vacuum in a way that makes it look like it's sprouting some kind of metal fungus. Harshly lit by a couple glowing bare bulbs is a stash of grey-brown lumps that are at least mostly edible, and a fuel-cylinder of water. Where the windows would normally be are two wobbly screens displaying a live-feed of the outside of the habitat, the whirling asteroid belt (you always need windows on habitats, or the claustrophobia turns to agoraphobia and the inhabitants go insane when they have to leave). In the corner is my proxy - the repair bot, armed with a speaker and a third screen displaying a nice relaxing smiley face.

:D

"Hello there! I'm sure this is a bit of a shock, but you are safe and have absolutely nothing to worry about. Why don't you have some food? Actually, have the water first. I'm certain the food will be edible, but I'm not entirely sure about the taste. The water is definitely fine. Pure aitch two oh, don't ya know? Hard to get that wrong, ha!"

I'm babbling. Why don't they say anything?

"Jove? You speak Jovian, yes?"

They nod. A nod! A response! I'd dance with glee, but I'm pretty sure having the repair bot dance would look more like a flailing attack.

"Do you know where you are?"

They point to screen showing the asteroid belt.

"Yup. That's home, at least for me. I'm sure I can arrange a pickup for you though! It might take a little while for them to get here, but we've got food, water, light. I can send a signal if there is an emergency, and I think this counts as one. Do you know who I should send it to?"

They shake their head.

"Alright. That's ok. I'll just send a general distress signal...?"

They shake their head again, firmer this time.

Oh. Alright. I maintain a light tone through the speaker, and cancel the message I had outgoing. I'm worried now, but I don't know of what.

They open their mouth, close it again, lick their lips carefully, and turn to look at my little robo-facsimile. "No." Their voice is dry and crackly as plastic wrapping. "Nobody. He told me to keep quiet and not say anything, so I'd be safe." The words come in a rush, bursting out of the frail child. "He put me in the pod, said he'd come and find me. Not to tell anyone where I was, where he sent me. It was so cold and all the machines started and I... I woke up here. With you. Where are you?"

"I'm in the other room." I say quickly. "I had to make this chamber just for you, to make sure it was safe when I opened the pod. There isn't any room in here for you unfortunately. I wasn't expecting a visitor, that's for sure!"

There's not much else to do but talk. Water helps, and apparently the meatballs I've made taste precisely of nothing, but my guest sure is hungry. I tell them all about Io, about the vast ice volcanoes, and the swirl of Jupiter. They don't tell me much, just about the station they came from. It had a rotating wheel to live in, the low-G areas were just for maintenance and training. Despite only just awakening from cryo-sleep, my new companion fades quickly. There's nowhere comfortable in this cramped little construction I've cobbled together for them to sleep, so I clean all the goop out of the cryo-pod and strap them back into that for the time being. They are tiny in the middle of the huge machine, and I can't help but wonder at what kind of place they've come from, that they aren't leaping for a chance to get out of this particular hell-hole. I leave them to whatever dreams they can find in their first night of true sleep for a while, and get back to work.

Days pass. I work while they sleep, keeping the drones moving roughly on schedule, and we keep each other company when they are awake. They wake up screaming the first morning, and I rush in with my little bot and soft lights and concerned words, but it only helps a little. The hours are long, and we talk about the same things two or three times before running out of words. My guest prowls between the two chambers, itching for somewhere to go, but I've run out of materials to make them a third room, and I can tell it wouldn't help. I try and think up games to play with the micro-bots, but those don't last long either. I run the footage I took of digging them out of the ice, and they ask me to play it twice more. I can’t place the funny look on their face. We try and improve the meatball recipe, and end up with a bizarre jelly-soup that goes bubbling around the habitat to shrieks of disgust and laughter. We watch as one of my drones goes out in a blaze of glory, tumbling head-over-drills towards the collection zone, far towards the distant sun. All the distractions I can conjure up, all the activities I can think of, but time and time again, they ask me:

"Who are you? What do you look like? Why can't I see you? Why not?"

I deflect and I lie and I tell stories and I tell them what I look like and I dig up some pictures of myself from back on Io, but in the end, I can't satisfy their endless nagging curiosity. The same kind of curiosity that I had felt, dragging their pod out of the icy night, the curiosity that can only be satisfied by answers, and is only fed by delays.

"I'm… I'm sorry. I can't do it. You can't see me. It's not safe for you. I can't, you have to believe me. It's better this way."

"No. No! I don't believe you! You can't keep hiding behind your robots and your screens. Unless you show yourself, I'll… I'll… I don't know what I'll do! I'll stop talking to you! And, and I'll just sit staring at the wall and I won't say anything at all and completely ignore anything you say unless you say it to my face!"

And that is exactly what they do. I plead and cajole for at least another hour, but there's nothing for it, the stubborn brat. They want to see me, the real me, and they can't bear the thought of not knowing. And I can't bear the thought of not knowing who they are. Food is ignored, water begrudgingly sipped, and the idle thought of trying to manipulate them with that fills me with a slow horror. This job has done terrible things to me, I can see it more clearly with every passing day. So, my microbots go to work again, laying down yet more filament between the storage unit and my corner of the habitat. There’s no rush this time around, so I make sure to install proper hatches on both sides of the little tube and line it with a decent surface instead of raw pseudo-metallic gunk. But I know I'm just stalling. There will be a reckoning.

"Alright. You win. I'm coming over. You'd best stand on the other side of the room."

My guest drifts over to the other side, near where their escape pod joins, and looks towards the hatch. My repair drone takes off the face screen and flits down the tube to my habitat to fetch, well, me.

I come out along the tube into the dim light, tugged gently along, wires and tubes stretched to their full extent leading back to the life-support systems in the other room. I can see myself reflected in the eyes of my guest: a plasti-glass sphere of greenish fluid, meshed with readouts and embedded with all manner of techno-wizardry to keep me alive and connected to the world outside. Inside, propped up gently and rotated twice daily, floats the entirety of me - two gelatinous bubbles of eyeball, kept moistened and shaded, leading back into the wrinkled pink-grey blob of my brain. A lumpy prune, floating in grease, tied together with fibrous stringy nerves.

I put the screaming of my guest on mute, and trundle back into my habitat.