Asteroid mining? Dangerous?
Aliens have always struck me an odd bunch. Not to generalise, of course, that would make me no better than those damned apes, but there was that one thing they all had in common that felt so strange: They all thought we were crazy, living up here, doing this work.
My entrance into adulthood wasn’t a smooth as I would’ve liked. It started off brilliantly, my girlfriend, Natalia, and I earned our degrees, we married, then we soon expected a child. A baby girl. I was terrified of screwing up, but every night I would lay there awake and think of teaching her how to talk and walk and read. Her first day at school, her first EVA, then a long time after that, her leaving for college and getting ready to live her own life.
Then, the Dracus Hierarchy threatened to destroy the human race.
My degree was in Civil Engineering, so I got drafted into the Sappers. Not the most dangerous job, laying down bridges and clearing minefields, but I would still be gone for a very long time.
I had to promise Natalia I would stay safe, that I would come back. She would be drafted with me, if it wasn’t for the baby. I think she was, like, eight months pregnant, the day I left. Everybody in the Fleets is asked by their friends at some point, ‘What was the last thing you did before getting on the shuttle?’. I just stood there, staring at my growing child in her mothers womb, and apologised for not being there for her first few birthdays.
I’m not going to tell you about the War. It’s…difficult, thinking about it sometimes. Go watch a documentary or something, read a book, if you want dates or battles. But it did teach me a few things about the Universe, lessons that are still with me to this day.
After the war, families of veterans were given funds to help them settle down somewhere. ‘Land for Heroes’ and all that. Most went to the new cities of the ‘Greenhouse’ worlds, once-inhospitable planets terraformed into somewhere livable.
We chose somewhere a little, well, different.
Natalia had found a job at a factory in the Hubble Belt, in the system we lived, making parts for infantry armour. We used to live on an O’Neil, but this place was different. She told me it reminded her of a ship, or a submarine in those old vids. The factory was built into the side of an asteroid, positioned so it was blocked from the sun. You could look out a window, and see nothing but a screen of stars, each one sharp and distinct. I asked her if it felt cramped, or sterile. She replied that, surprisingly, it didn’t. The place was clean, the factory floor by necessity of course, but living quarters were allowed to be personalised to an extent. Her room was well lit, smelled fresh, there was enough toys, other children and soft surfaces for the baby – Emily, she called her – , she could walk to work, to the school and to the shop. It was a village, not an ant-farm. It was peaceful.
I came back home far better off than many other kids, but I was…tired. Dirt and rain and wind was just so disconcerting, so alien when I was done. I arrived at Natalia’s factory, and I had finally met Emily face-to-face. She was so big…
We started planning for the future. The factory was nice, but we needed somewhere bigger for Emily. We found two vacants spots still within the Hubble, on a mine. We took them as soon as we could.
It took me a while getting used to a lack of grass, but then again, during the War I had spent enough time digging up grass to last me a lifetime. It surprised me how similar expanding out a mine on an asteroid was to my work in college and in the Fleets, and Natalia adapted easily to working a TBM. Emily made new friends, and started school. Life went on.
I know what you’re thinking. ‘How could he overlook the sheer danger of it all?’. Yes, it’s true that death is a few metres of bulkhead away. If life support and all backups failed, we would suffocate. Every EVA is dancing with the devil. To you, it seems uninhabitable. Let me ask you something: Is a forest habitable? Is a hill or mountain range habitable? What about steppes, marshland, deserts, tundra? None of those are, for a monkey that just climbed down from a tree in East Africa. But people still live there, they work, find love, have kids, even though common sense says they shouldn’t. Every day, I wake up, take a shower, have breakfast, walk Emily to school, walk to work, put on an EVA suit, and step out into the vacuum of space, even though I shouldn’t be able to. But that’s the thing, I shouldn’t be able to.