‘Why’d you come here?’ I asked, trying to shift my attention.
‘That a question?’ she asked.
‘I know, of course, the Treatise of Our Divine Debts. I mean, did you ever think about where that debt came from in the first place?’
‘Is that important? We are all born into wearying debt, right? We’re just a bit more fortunate than others…’
‘Fortunate?’
‘It’s not fortunate to catch a fat fish worth more than one-hundred-billion credits? That’s a platinum mine alone, not counting nickel and cobalt. Enough to pay off all debts and make me a billionaire.’
‘That’s a fairytale!’
‘No, it’s a probability.’
‘The probability is you get hung out to dry in space…’
‘This isn’t much more dangerous than commercial crabbing in Peru or the Bering Sea. Of course, if you insist, the probability of getting hit by asteroid debris is higher than on Earth. Problem is—’
‘Another hopeless optimist…’ I glimpsed something familiar in her expression.
‘Problem is…’ She shook her head, showing no intention of slowing down. ‘You got a hundred trillion in gold deposits on Earth, but nobody can get at it. Why? Because it’s in the sea. Cost of extracting gold dissolved in seawater far exceeds the value of the gold itself. So the value of that huge deposit is zip. We’re here. Yes, it’s dangerous. But the desserts are real. They’re out here…’
When she talked about dessert, it was like I almost remembered something, something on the tip of my tongue. I didn’t bother trying to remember though. I didn’t want to argue anymore.
‘Magpie, I hope you react on mission as quickly as when you’re speaking.’
‘Mag— what? You wimp. Go cower in the cabin and do your arithmetic. I hope your debt gets paid as soon as possible.’
She looked like she was actually getting angry.
In theory, Magpie wasn’t wrong. An M-type asteroid was the absolute best dessert. A 16 Psyche M-type could carry enough iron and nickel to meet Earth’s demand for the next million years. A platinum-rich asteroid might carry as much as one hundred grams per ton, twenty times more than the highest-grade South African open-pit platinum mine. This meant a 500 meter M-type could produce 175 times the annual output of the planet.
That was our ultimate mission. C-type asteroids were for sustained replenishment. Mother Whale could not be overexploited. She wasn’t some giant rock. Rather, she was like loose rocks and gravel gathered together by their own gravity, utterly without structural integrity. Any rotation, impact or deep excavation could trigger her disintegration. Then everything we had built would be destroyed, including ourselves.
*
Magpie slowly came to accept her new name. She even came to accept my style.
I tried not to get too close. I feared gravity’s power of attraction, which caused things to haphazardly smack into each other. I always had this ominous feeling around her, like the superstition of a sailor on the sea too many years who believes doom follows a red tide with white waves.
I feared it was Magpie’s fate to someday be deleted.
She knew what I thought and mocked it. Holding her pickaxe or drill, she’d say, ‘We got just one road, and we gotta follow it to the end.’
To Magpie, life was an adventure with few real choices.
She was ordered to recycle an abandoned sheepdog. The order said the sheepdog’s memory module might contain data from previous contact with an M-type asteroid and could provide valuable tracking clues.
We never knew where the orders came from, from Earth 380,000 kilometers away or from some space station? From other humans or from AI? Still, in most cases, the orders were correct. In a few cases, human interpretation led to bad consequences, like misinterpreting the oracle in a Greek tragedy.
Magpie never doubted the orders, though I tried to undermine her blind belief any way I could.
For example, I told her, using a mathematical formula, that even if we identified and tracked an M-type asteroid, trying to change its orbit and capture it would be like a monkey typing out the collected works of Shakespeare. It was harder than winning any lottery. Mining an M-type would be like catching a whale with a fishing rod. The costs could swallow up any potential profit while sacrificing dozens of lives. Even if we succeeded, shipping the ore back to Earth might cause a full market collapse.
For example, I made her doubt her abilities. I told her, what a robot can’t do, a miner made of protein and water certainly can’t do.
‘Maintaining complex mining facilities, dealing with unpredictable equipment failures, analysing anomalous events, assessing their impacts on Mother Whale? If the AI can’t succeed, Magpie doesn’t stand a chance. So it’s not clear what value you really have, at least while you’re alive.’
‘So, what do you want me to do?’ she shot back. ‘Cower in the cabin like you, waiting for my muscles to atrophy? Overdose on cosmic radiation causing tumors to take over my body and kill me?’ She flashed the whites of her eyes.
‘That’s not what I mean… I just hope you get these dumb ideas out of your head so you stay alive a bit longer…’
‘But what does it mean to live when you live like that? We owe our lives to the God who made us…’
‘Tell that to all the people who’ve died doing our work…’
‘Then what are you here for? Didn’t like Earth?’
‘This wasn’t my choice! Just like it isn’t your choice! You woke up in this hell, unable to remember anything of the past other than what’s in your damn skill tree. We can never free ourselves of our debt, except in death. There’s no other way out!’
I turned my back, not wanting to let Magpie see how weak I was. A hand rested on my shoulder.
‘I
