Using their gauntlets, the miners drilled thumb-sized pits into the dirty rock. They plucked color-coded blasting caps from damp-stained satchels at their waists. They tamped in charges. Within a minute came the blast. Vera, sealed within her suit and padded helmet, felt her teeth clack in her head.
With a groan and squeak of their boneware, the miners wrestled out a cracked slab the size of a coffin.
A stew of effluent gushed forth. The bowels of the Earth oozed false-color gushes of scarlet and maroon.
“You can help me now.” Karen beckoned.
Vera chased the software from her faceplate with a shake of her head. Vera’s sensorweb offered sturdy tech support to anyone who might redeem the island, but the mediation down this mine was in a terrible state. These miners were plumbing the island’s bowels with bombs and picks, but when it came to running their everyware, they never synchronized the applications, they never optimized the servers, they never once emptied the caches of the client engines. Why were people like that?
Badly encumbered by her filter shroud, Vera clambered to Karen’s side through a cobweb of safety supports. The carbon-fiber safety webs looked as useless as dirty gossamer. Strain monitors glowed all over them, a spectral host of underground glowworms.
Vera found her voice. “What do you need me to do?”
“Put both your hands up. Here. And over there. Right. Hold all that up.”
Vera stood obediently. Her exoskeleton locked her body tight against the ceiling.
Karen’s boneware creaked as she hefted her power drill. She studied the rock’s warping grain through the mediation of her faceplate, whistling a little through her teeth. Then she probed at a dripping seam. “This part’s nasty,” she warned.
Her drill spewed a tornado of noise. Vera’s guts, lungs, and muscles shook with the racket. It got much worse as Karen dug, jammed, and twisted. Within her boneware, Vera’s flesh turned to jelly.