⌚ Approximately 8 minutes to read

⚠ Content warnings: death of family members, injury, brief mention of animal consumption, brief mention of electrocution, dark and claustrophobic environments, mining accidents

---

Previous Chapter | All Chapters | Next Chapter

“Did you finish that AR game I asked you for, yet?” Morgan asked between bites of his breakfast. If he didn’t think too hard about it, the rat meat wasn’t half bad.

“I’m still working on it,” Sam replied. “But I should be done sometime this afternoon.”

“I guess I should check on the plants and head into the mine then.” Morgan finished his food and put his dishes in the sink for later. Before he walked outside, he turned around, hoping to thank Sam again for working on his game. Instead, he found her staring blankly at nothing in particular.

“Are you okay?” he asked, after a moment.

The sparkle returned to her eyes and she nodded, her lips parting into a smile. It occurred to Morgan that, even though she had modeled herself after Stella Blake, she was somehow much more beautiful.

“I’m fine,” she said, “Just excited to get to work on this game.”

Morgan nodded and walked toward the garden, shouting, “See you later,” as the door closed behind him.

After tending to the plants, vacuuming up all the rat feces from the previous day, and gearing up, Morgan stepped into the elevator and headed down into the mineshaft.

“What are your plans in the mine, today?” Sam’s voice came over the headset.

“I think I’ll send a few mining drill probes into the deepest areas of the mine to make sure we aren’t missing any deposits.” He suspected that he would find exactly that. Then it would be time to abandon this mine and moving the ecodome.

As the elevator passed the mineshaft where his parents died, the heads up display in his goggles notified him of his increased heartrate. Luckily, Sam had long since stopped checking in on him about it. He hadn’t been able to return to it. After dragging their bodies from the mine, he had sealed the passage completely, telling himself and Sam that the cave-in had likely made the entire area too dangerous. In reality, though, the mining equipment they used created as much stability as possible, molding pillars and crossbeams from the stone itself. The chance of a cave-in while using the equipment correctly was astronomical. With some time, Morgan could have easily made the area with the cave-in safe, but in truth, he wanted to seal it away and forget it.

As if reading his mind, Sam asked, “Do you think you might be in a hurry to declare this place mined out and move the ecodome, as a reaction to your parents’ death?”

The door to the elevator opened, revealing a dark mineshaft, the deepest and newest portion of the mine and his personal project. This was the area he had been clearing alone.

“Maybe,” Morgan said, taking a couple of steps into the passage. Fortunately for him, though, he didn’t have to think about Sam’s question for very long. Something was wrong. Instead of the sharp sound of his boots on the ground, there was a soft, moist one.

Looking down, his headlamp illuminated a puddle beneath his feet. Surveying the rest of the passage in front of him made it clear that this was far from an isolated incident. The floor was more puddle than not. He recalled that the last time he had come down into the mine there had been water dripping from the ceiling, but Sam had been unable to find any leak.

Morgan tried to call Sam on his headset but only got muffled static as a reply. It wasn’t too surprising, though. The signal from this far down was spotty at best. He felt a surge of adrenaline, feeling the darkness and loneliness press in around him. Clearly, there was a leak that Sam hadn’t found in her diagnostics.

He took a deep breath and walked toward the end of the passage. He still had some mining to do before he headed back to the surface. He could figure out where all the water was coming from after that.

He let out a shout as his foot slipped on the wet stone floor. He fell forward, his right hand sliding against the rock wall, trying and failing to find purchase. In a split second, the glass helmet of his suit struck the ground.

Morgan held his breath, looking frantically at the glass, searching for any sign of a crack. In the low gravity of the asteroid, the only real danger was damage to his suit. Even in the cave-in which took the life of his parents, it wasn’t the rocks themselves which killed them. It was the damage they did to their suits.

He spotted a small fracture where the helmet had met rock. If he died down here, no one would ever know. Sam would be completely alone on the surface and his body would be left deep underground. Likely no one would ever find him, the ecodome, or Sam before Asteroid #23749 collided with another, starting a chain reaction that would lead to his home and body’s eventual destruction.

His heads up display warned him that his pulse ox was falling into the low 90s and he finally let out his breath. The fracture seemed stable. There were no warnings of suit depressurization.

Morgan sat up slowly, unzipping the pack on his waist and fishing inside with one hand. His fingers found what they were searching for, a tube of sealing glue. As he unscrewed the cap, he noted that the glue had expired several years previously. “Such is the life of a poor asteroid miner,” he whispered the familiar phrase, his mother’s mantra, to himself.

With a few careful strokes of the tip of the tube against his helmet, he squeezed out a string of bubbly, blue gel onto the crack. As the substance dried, it became transparent. If it hadn’t been expired, Morgan would have taken this as a sign that it had worked, but he found he was still skeptical.

After monitoring the readouts of his suit’s pressure and oxygen levels for a few minutes, he finally stood. He continued down the passage more carefully now, until he reached the end.

Morgan slipped a cylinder, roughly the size of his pinky finger, from his belt pouch. With his other hand, he unhooked a hammer from his toolbelt. Depressing a button on the end of the cylinder caused a conical, pointed tip to emerge from the opposite side. He held it, tip first, to the rock wall and hammered it like a nail. Once the tip of the object was buried into the wall, it began to spin, drilling its way through the stone, sensors ready to detect any of a dozen precious metals and gems. Though Morgan’s family had never found significant amounts of anything but gold on the asteroid, he always liked to keep his options open.

“Five more,” he mumbled to himself as he prepared the rest of the mining probes.

An hour later and the little drill drones started to report in. Other than a diamond, which had likely already been drilled through to the point it was worthless, the probes came back with no find in the area.

“That settles it then.”

Morgan retrieved the drones, placed them back in their case, and cautiously made his way back to the surface.

“Sam,” he said as his connection to the ecodome was restored. “We’ve got a problem.” He explained the water situation down below as he got out of his mining suit.

“I’ll run another diagnostic,” Sam said.

“I’m just going to go down and look,” Morgan said. He wasn’t sure if that would come off a bit harsh, so he added, “Since the last diagnostic came back fine, I think it might be best to get eyes on the plumbing.”

Morgan walked around the back of the house and opened the padlock on the sublevel doors. They were styled after wooden basement doors from Earth, a fact that Morgan learned watching vids with his father.

Beneath the house was a labyrinth of pipes and wires, set up to power the homestead and water the crops automatically, as well as route solid human waste to be used as fertilizer. It seemed likely that one of the irrigation lines was the source of the leak. To his surprise, however, Morgan didn’t find the culprit beneath the crops. Instead, after about an hour of inspecting the plumbing, he discovered the leak wasn’t coming from a pipe at all.

“I found the leak,” he told Sam. “It’s the water purifier.”

Morgan was prying open the outer casing to see what was going on inside to cause the puddle beneath it when Sam’s frightened voice came over his headset. “Get away from it!”

Knowing that Sam wouldn’t use such a tone if it weren’t urgent, Morgan immediately complied.

“Sorry,” she said, her voice still shaking. “You could have been electrocuted.” She seemed to catch her breath before continuing, “The purifier has power going to it and water is an excellent conductor. If there’s a short…”

Morgan finished her thought, “Then I’d be fried faster than mom’s okra on Sunday nights…”

Sam chuckled nervously. “Well, at any rate, I’ve cut the power to the purifier. It should be safe for you to examine, now.”

Inside, Morgan found water spraying from a faulty valve. As he worked on the leak, he asked Sam about the diagnostic she had run.

“Actually,” she said, “I think I did figure out what was wrong with it. It seems the program was working under the assumption that there had always been only one person in the ecodome, in which case, there was no water shortage, and therefore, no leak. Once I corrected this programming error, however, I learned that we are about 36 gallons short.”

“So, it isn’t an issue yet, but it would have become one… I’m glad you figured out why the diagnostic wasn’t working.”

After spending the rest of the day tinkering and with heavy use of plumber’s tape, he finally got the leak to stop. Sam returned power to the purifier, and everything was back in working order.

“It’s not going to last forever,” he told Sam, “But it will do for now.”

“I’ll put a new valve on the list for the next time we have money for parts,” Sam said.

“That list must be getting pretty long,” Morgan said.

“Such,” Sam began, and Morgan joined in the refrain with her, “Is the life of a poor asteroid farmer.”

The two laughed as Morgan made his way back aboveground.