Sam Kentland looked through machine sensors out into an obsidian black sea, sparsely dotted with dull brown motes resembling toffee pieces floating in molasses, each one a twinkling island separated by millions of miles of empty space, all scarcely lit by the distant sun.
Sam disconnected the squashed scale view from his head switching instead to a real time unaided view from the front of the bug.
Ahead he saw the man-machine made lights pinpointing Kobas-9 M-class Asteroid. A Goliath that hung silently in the void, almost entirely composed of metals, one hundred and sixty kilometres in diameter and ninety three kilometres deep.
Through his IntelSec Quantum-4 chip Sam initialised company access codes; the asteroid’s manifest filled his mind as he ran checks over the progress of the various groups of nano-factories within the great rock.
The factories had built an army of robots mostly made from the very metals contained within the rock. In turn the robots had dug a network of several huge chambers over the past five Earth Subjective Years.
The deepest and longest of these chambers was set forty kilometres from the ‘topside’, ten kilometres long with kilometre high ceilings.
The chamber housed most of the assembly pods and nano-factories it's capillary-like system of corridors allowing the chamber to act as an administrative hub where machines were given various tasks pertaining to other deeper parts of Kobus-9.
As a scraper Sam’s main duty was to feed the scan information from his bug to the AI that controlled the nano-factories, ensuring the robots went for the exotic metal ore sites first.
Another of his jobs was to make sure the nano-factories were fulfilling their duties and to initialise any reprograms they might require and to trash any of them who were reaching their third generation stage.
An AI had been installed on the asteroid fairly soon after it had been discovered and surveyed, which itself ran various checks on the nano-factories, however it was a job that was law bound to provide human management of the task.
Space dwelling nano-factories were not left to their own devices simply because the nature of their assignments meant they could be left alone for very long periods of time, and the fear that they might evolve beyond their original programming had already been proven by medichines in humans.
Sam sensed through his I-SecQ4 chip that his bug; a huge floating lab, had started up a firing sequence of its nine thrusters, in order to bring it to a relative stop, around two kilometres above the asteroid.
As Sam got closer he could see the huge bulbous engines that would eventually steer the asteroid to its final destination jutting out at angles seemingly fused to the great metal-rock.
Soon they would be brought online and Kobas-9 would be coaxed out of a four and a half billion year orbit and steered to its final destinations, its final fate to be stripped to nothing and recycled into human culture.
Fuel saving requirements meant that Sam would have to leave the bug to inspect the asteroid, once landed he would run a diagnostic that would make sure the engines were functional and that the AI had the right navigational algorithm in place.
Sam also had to inspect the bore chambers the nano-factured machines had dug sometimes having to help identify the previously hidden exotic metals buried deep within the asteroid.
All in all his inspections and programming would see him on Kobas-9 for a little over sixty Mars Subjective Days before he could rotate back to the Red Planet.
He’d spoken to Fleur on the entanglement phone just over six Mars Subjective Weeks ago, he hadn’t told her how much he hated the place or how many lies had been told about the Martian terraforming; what was the point?
It would only make the agony of being apart more acute; he hadn’t seen his Fleur for eighteen Earth Subjective Months, which seemed a lot longer whilst breathing the faintly putrid atmosphere of Mars or floating in vacuum hopping from rock to rock in the Belt.
He wouldn’t see her for another six E-S months, she would have travelled to Mars by that time and he would be returning from a two month stint in the belt.
Sam thought back to the time when he’d last been on Earth, it seemed more like a fading childhood memory than just an E-S year and a half ago.
The solitude of space warped time, so that when you looked back at events that were only months ago, it was like looking back at ancient history.
**********
Sam had joined the Offworld Mining Corporation as a scraper after placing in the thirty fifth percentile on the induction course. His official title was Class Two, M-Class Asteroid Surveyor, but the name scraper had been coined at some point in the past and had stuck.
The enhanced medical insurance that anyone working for OMC was entitled to had been the reason that Sam had first been attracted to the job. He remembered the day of his medical upgrade in the company doctor’s office; a vague man that Sam had thought of as more programmer than doctor.
“Right Mr. Kenland, I understand you’re to join us as a level two scraper, is that correct?”
Sam didn't bother correcting the doctor on his mispronounciation of his surname, it was a common enough mistake for it to be too tiresome to engage in what turned out to be the same conversation over and over again - 'It's Kentland actually' 'Kenland? That's what I said...'
“Yes that’s correct sir.”
“Good, good, you’ll be bumped up from level two to three medi-insurance bracket which entitles you to a company level three upgrade to your existing medichines and a whole new suite of drug-balls.
We’ll also be inserting company medichines into you, to deal with space sickness, muscle and bone atrophy and other not so pleasant side effects of living at lighter than standard gee and of course in vacuum.”
Sam lay cocooned in the warm environment of the Virtual Doctor, from his position he was able to study the company doctor without having to turn his head. The doctor, dressed in a sharp suit and long white lab coat - which for some intangible reason didn’t seem to suit him, as if it was thrown on as an afterthought - sat hunched over a terminal which threw a cold grey-blue light onto his genetically perfected face.
The doctor’s fingers were a blur as they issued a string of commands into the terminal; from his look of concentration Sam could tell that instructions were also being issued to the ViDoc via the doctor's I-SecQi9 chip. Sam had hoped that his own IntelSec Quantum chip might be upgraded from 4 to the new i9, but ultimately he knew he’d need at least a level 5 insurance bracket.
For that he would have had to have finished in the top fifth percentile at the induction and secured an executive job; an impossibility without the sufficient brain augmentations.
As it happened though Sam would get upgraded medichines and a mild genetic upgrade and although the enhanced genetics wouldn’t be much use to him apart from in his work with OMC, the medichines definitely would.
As the doctor turned from his console and approached him, Kendal noticed that he didn’t have a name tag and hadn’t bothered to introduce himself; he tended to notice such details when he was nervous.
Though why he was nervous he didn’t know, the procedure he was about to face was completely painless and the chance of errant programming getting to his medichines was slim to none, still though he felt his palms clamming up.
**********
Six hundred metres out from the bug’s rendezvous point with Kobas-9 Sam slid out of his seat and made his way to the back of the cramped bug, where he suited up and coiled himself into the cramped airlock.
In less than a minute the bug told him it was now in place above the asteroid and had come to a relative stop. He sent a thought controlled signal to the bug computer, the airlock depressurised a slight mist came and went on his suit visor as the airlock door shushed open into the hard solitude of vacuum.
Micro thrusters on the back of Sam’s suit propelled him feet first towards his target two thousand metres below. Mars was as a twinkling red-green disc high to his left, how long he wondered, would it take the terraformers to make the planet habitable to the unaltered human?
Lower down to his right he saw the sun almost half a billion miles away a fraction of its brightness when viewed from anywhere near the Earth. The suit’s micro thrusters accelerated Sam smoothly up to fifty metres per second; he craned his neck upwards to watch the bug getting smaller as he descended towards the night side of Kobas-9.
Just over half way down collision alarms trilled in his ear, before he had a chance to register where the danger was coming from, a micrometeorite the size of his thumbnail ripped through his shoulder.
The fragment went through his flesh like it wasn’t there, smashing his collarbone as it exited, leaving a mini jet of frozen blood and suit gasses in its wake.
In the next ten seconds he was hit by three more tiny pieces of very hot fast moving rock and metal, each one leaving a hole in him and his suit, one of them damaging a micro-thruster as it passed through him, causing him to spin and tumble erratically about his own axis.
THANK YOU FOR READING PART ONE OF MY SCIENCE FICTION SHORT STORY THE SCRAPER. STAY TUNED FOR PART TWO AND PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK OF THE STORY AND YOUR OWN THOUGHTS ON OUR FUTURE BOTH IN SPACE AND ON THIS PLANET.