Pain +/= Programming

Broken Machines

They were cowards. They were sightless. They were weak.

No, they were none of those things. They were broken. Malfunctioning. She both understood them yet could not fathom their choice to leave.

Mara watched dozens of figures stalk away from their settlement -- away from Mara’s home -- across the grass fields spanning the miles beyond their known world. None of them spoke, made a sound. They just put one step in front of the other. 

Like a cosmic intersection, dozens of silent meteors pinged into the sky from the other direction, drawing Mara’s attention from her fellow miners abandoning her crew. Not that meteor showers were uncommon on their moon. She’d witnessed hundreds during her service on Colony Aveline 17.

“You seen Kase?” Babajide asked from behind her.

Mara didn’t look over her shoulder. The tears descending from the sky were more interesting to her. “If I had, he’d still be arguing with me about joining them.” She pointed toward the departing figures, a good way off now.

“See any interesting clouds up there today?” Jide asked, his attempt to distract her from his previous question poorly veiled.

“Just another meteor shower.”

He stepped next to her.

Mara punched his arm as hard as she could -- nearly knocking him over -- and walked to the other end of the porch. This side of the house faced the opposite way from the grass fields. She dropped into one of the four wooden rocking chairs, looking out over a vast rocky expanse. 

While the other way teemed with life, this was all stone and chasms. Fewer than forty meters from the porch was a sheer cliff face that plummeted more than one and a half kilometers. This was her favorite spot in the settlement.

Through the screen door behind her, Mara heard a heavier wooden door squeak open and thud shut. A clatter of metal tools on a workbench.

“Back from the depot,” Kase called.

Jide eased into the chair next to her. “Try to be civil?” He kept his voice low.

Mara continued to stare out over the cliff. Be quiet. That’s what they wanted. Avoid the truth. Never talk about what the real issue was. The real issue was three hw-years old, and they always expected silence. Sure, Jide only wanted the best for their crew, wanted to keep things “civil.” That was noble, considering they were stranded together on this moon. But she’d felt silenced for long enough.

“Kase!” She felt more edge to her voice than she intended. But she kept it raised. “Let’s talk.”

Pause. “Probably for the best.” His voice sounded closer now, just inside the screen door.

“Mara…” Jide reached for the arm of her chair.

An explosion filled the surrounding air. Deafening. In the same moment, a wave of energy hit Mara in the chest, bending her wooden chair backward, threatening to dump her.

When she lowered the arm she shielded herself with, she saw a mountain of smoke and dust rising to the sky from the plateaus beyond her chasm. A wall of that dust and smoke barreled toward their home like a rainless thunderstorm.

As the thick dust enveloped them, Mara squinted her eyes to focus on its origin. A meteor. It had impacted no more than five kilometers away.

She no longer remembered what she wanted to say to Kase. She needed to get to that meteor.

One Year Ago.

Mara hurried through the street, struggling to keep up with the crowd of miners making their way to the launch yard. At some point last night, the humans from their colony constructed this perimeter with guarded barricades around the tarmac, a sight she wouldn’t have believed if not for seeing it now herself. She’d been about to descend in the mine for her shift when she first heard the rumors of this taking place. That’s when she’d noticed the lack of humans around her area of the settlement.

On the other side of the gates, dozens of humans scrambled back and forth, some of them directing others where to place crates and flats of equipment, tools, and mined resources. All things that had been part of her life the last thirty years. It was now being loaded onto the nine remaining ships on the tarmac.

The humans were leaving for good. 

The Problem with Programming

Now.

The dust settled with a silence that made Kase uncomfortable. The screen door had not prevented much of it from invading their small home. He reached out to let some of it cling to his hand. A collection of tiniest pebbles and shards of stone. How different had that stone fallen merely moments before, hurled from the sky. Violent, destructive. Now, its touch on the ground was barely perceptible. 

Kase peered through the screen door to see Mara making her way to the cliff side. Jide followed her, keeping his distance. The falling dust wasn’t the only thing making Kase uncomfortable. 

He did truly feel terrible that he and Mara were at such odds. Everything came down to the fact that she wouldn’t move on from this life, and not only that, but she wouldn’t let him move on either. Same with Jide. Kase had spoken to him privately on a number of occasions, more and more recently, about wanting to leave, see what else was on this barely inhabited rock. Follow the hundreds of other colony members who had left in the past year. Jide wanted out just as badly as Kase. Poor man. He simply couldn’t shake the compulsion to keep the peace between the three of them. Just as he was programmed to.

As Kase stepped onto the porch, he wiped a hand across the illuminated round core in the middle of his chest. He felt the grime come off. These cores, and their circuitry of instruction, were the problems. The computer chips inside them giving Kase, Jide, and Mara their directives -- their purpose. They were the problem.

Jide stood midway between Kase and Mara. Mara was right at the cliff’s edge, where she often sat for hours. Kase walked next to their foreman. Well, former foreman. Jide’s own core still glowed yellow, denoting that position, however. For the man’s own sake, Kase wished he could rip the core from his chest, and he’d still be fine. Why couldn’t they all do that? 

“Everything’d be much simpler,” he muttered.

Jide looked at him. Kase shook his head, dismissing the unverbalized question. 

“This unfortunately won’t make anything simple,” the man said.

“This meteor will be like all the others. I already know she wants to go mine it. You’ll give in, and we’ll all three be making our way there tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t give in.”

“Just doing you’re…job. I know. Like her. But it’s been a year now, and seems like everyone else has been able to move on.”

“I’ve said a hundred times that I understand and agree. I wish we could do something.”

“We can leave. We can leave.”

Jide laughed out loud. “If it were just like that, you could leave. But you haven’t. Why? Because it’s not that simple. Like I’ve told you before, don’t pin any of this on me. If we don’t three go, we don’t go, and that’s the way it is.”

Kase fought off another urge to rip out his own core. “We’re the last ones left.”

“I figured.”

“Sten at the depot headed out in the group earlier today. Told me whatever he had left in the shop was mine. He was only taking what he could carry. We’re all that’s left.”

“When the colony officially shut down a year ago, we knew this would be inevitable. We’ve had nothing to do. Not everybody was going to just hang around forever.”

“I just didn’t think I’d be one of the ones who did.” Kase relaxed the fists he hadn’t known were clenched. “Because of Mara.”

“Careful.” Jide’s voice held the edge of a supervisor again. Kase almost missed it.

“I know it’s not fair to say. And I hate being like this, but I am. She thinks I don’t understand what it’s like for her, but I do. I start every day fighting the innate instructions in my core. It takes effort a lot of willpower to defy them, but I do. And she could too.”

“You’re telling me like I don’t do it too.” Jide turned back toward the house. “You both wear me out. You can tell her that you won’t help mine the meteor.” He hesitated for a moment. “I feel bad for her in a way, I admit, that I can’t feel for you. I’m…sorry.”

“I do too,” Kase said.

Jide returned to the house, leaving Kase to an inevitable argument with Mara. They didn’t used to fight, find themselves at odds over everything. Truthfully, they weren’t at odds over everything -- just the most important thing. 

Rage and Regret

One Year Ago.

“Mara!” Jide’s voice cut through the chaos.

She whirled to see him pressing closer to the nearest gate with a few dozen other miners. His usually stoic face betrayed clear confusion. Even as a foreman, he’d evidently not been warned about the humans’ departure either. Kase stood next to him but didn’t look her way. The taller man jostled with the growing crowd, trying his best to see over everything and see what was happening on the other side of the recently built concrete slabs and bars.

Mara wiggled her way through the multiple dozens of miners joining the primary street connected to the launch yard. They all wanted to know the same thing: what was happening to them. Most of the human’s infrastructure was being loaded into the ships, so how much room could be left for more than three hundred miners?

“How long have they been working on this?” Mara demanded as soon as she was close enough for Jide to hear her.

“On this disassembly? Since just after sundown last night. That’s why overnight shift was canceled, apparently. To give them time while we were charging. But how long has the departure been planned? Who knows. The execution we’re seeing seems like a mature plan.”

Mara felt an emptiness inside her. What about their work? The colony had hardly reached its potential nor had it exhausted all the resources in this area specifically. She didn’t think other settlements had cleaned their sites dry either. In fact, it seemed like every new branch of underground they explored produced more and more riches.

“Kase, no!” Jide’s voice pulled Mara from her thoughts. 

She saw Kase push deeper into the throng of miners, right up to the gate. Mara couldn’t see his face, but she imagined the level of rage exuding from his eyes. She’d seen that rage plenty of times over the course of their thirty years together. She thought she even heard his voice carrying over all the shouting. Pleading.

“They’re leaving us,” Jide yelled into her ear. What an obvious observation.

“We don’t necessarily know that,” Mara offered.

“I haven’t known how to tell you and Kase for weeks. They’ve been leaving -- dozens of ships over the last few months. None of them have come back. I keep asking, and they keep making excuses. Now I see why.”

She didn’t know what to say. If it were true, what was clear to her was that the humans’ offworlding strategy had started a while ago. The miners weren’t seeing the beginning of it -- they were seeing the end.

Mara stood taller, craning over the heads in front of her and catching a glimpse of Kase screaming at a guard. He grabbed the human with both hands. Had she ever seen a miner touch a human before? Was that prohibited?

Wanting to keep Kase from doing something he wouldn’t be able to take back later, Mara surged deeper into the crowd, Jide calling after her.

Kase often lost his temper with Jide and Mara, but they were his crewmates -- he could “speak his mind” with them. That might not go over well with the humans, though. As Mara squeezed through another line of miners, it didn’t look like it was going well. Two other guards stepped beside the original one, now all leaning into Kase’s space. The tall miner didn’t back down.

He never did.

She pushed through the last line and fell into her crewmate. He wheeled around, not knowing it was her initially. Their eyes met, and she barely recognized him: those orbs were dark and distant. They were equal parts furious and terrified. Kase was as lost as he was angry.

“Kase, come back with us,” Mara said as Jide put a hand on Kase’s shoulder.

She knew he wouldn’t listen because he never listened. Even Jide had trouble getting through to him when Kase was this far gone. He tore away from Jide’s grasp, shoved into the three guards, and ignited a frenzy. In the jostling, Mara went to the ground in a heap, fighting not to accidentally get trampled.

When she crawled back to her feet, Kase was already on the other side of the gate. The sound of a bell tone rang throughout the tarmac and surrounding area, and Mara started. An alarm. They were going to terminate Kase as their last act on this moon.

Now.

Kase’s argument with Mara wasn’t as long and drawn out as previous ones. Maybe it’s because they’ve used up everything they have to say.

How many times could he tell her that he no longer wanted to mine this moon like he was programmed? That he no longer wanted to adhere to the will of their overseers who had left them an entire year before.

He would not join her if she tried to mine that meteor, and she should honestly forget about it, herself. He told her as much.

Kase turned and walked back to the house even slower than he’d seen Jide minutes before. Why did every fight with Mara have to end with him feeling like the villain? Maybe he was.

No. He wouldn’t allow himself to start believing that. It was an easy way to remain in this settlement until their cores fizzled out. An existence he refused to imagine.

As he reached for the screen door, he felt Mara’s eyes drilling into him, but he didn’t turn around. If he saw her eyes, he’d be crossing that chasm first thing in the morning and hating himself every second of it. And he had spent his last day hating himself.

Kase’s workshop, attached to the side of the house, welcomed him like nowhere else on this now mostly-barren rock. It felt alive in a way that not even he felt now. Alive with a purpose. Even though, technically he did have a purpose, just not one he accepted any longer.

Sitting down in front of the glowing screens on his desk, he typed a string of code and executed it. Symbols and figures danced before his eyes. This had been his purpose for the better part of three months. This was what he’d traded every last of his meaningless credits at the dead settlement depot attempting.

He would discover a way to rewrite their programming. The lines of symbols stopped and returned to a blank, hopeless, lifeless screen. But it wouldn’t be today.

The box of core chips he’d purchased earlier sat one a table nearby. Sten had all but given them away to him, clearing out most of his stock. The man was trekking out on his own and had little use for core chips or credits. Kase would be forever grateful.

These final fifty chips gave him a hope, however thin of a shred it was.

He hummed a long, sustained note, harmonizing with a whir of noise he heard emitting from one of his machines. He was about to do something, and he didn’t like himself for it. Wasn’t full on hate. But he disliked himself for sure.

The small silver sphere rested where he’d nearly used it twice before. It was no thicker than the width of his thumb. He picked it up and tossed it from one hand to the other and back again.

Kase crossed the small hallway to Mara’s storage room. This was where she still kept all of her mining equipment. She’d no doubtedly be using this same equipment tomorrow morning. Kase stepped over to her backpack of essentials. He reached just inside the zipper and pried open a false flap he’d created a few months back. The sphere fit in it with precision. 

Some days, Kase believed Mara was delusional and intentionally stubborn. But he knew she was neither of those things. She was broken. Malfunctioning.

He completely understood why -- the strings of code which were programmed throughout her very existence -- and yet, with the inescapable desires coursing through him, he could not understand her at all. 

Asymmetrical Solitude

Now.

The thick wire extending from the wall hung over the back of a nearby chair, no longer inserted into the core in Mara’s chest. This charger, designed for overnight, was a slower but more reliable charge, designed to keep their cores running throughout the day cycles on their moon. But she didn’t need it right now. She clutched the bag full of core batteries she’d taken from the abandoned depot after her argument with Kase beside her chasm.

He wasn’t the only one who knew how to make use of the depot.

A part of her always resented Kase and Jide for the way they looked at her, treated her. She wasn’t a delicate broken machine to be held with care. She knew how to handle herself, and she’d done so well enough for the thirty long years they’d been working here.

She’d go to the meteor herself. She didn’t need them and didn’t want them if they were going to be this way toward here. What they didn’t understand was that she knew how insane she sounded. No, not insane -- driven. That was her role she’d been given, and she was the best at it. Jide was in charge, Kase was a protector, she was driven to produce.

Mara heard the words again coming from the colony leader, vindication a year ago of her purpose. This moon’s resource extraction had been consistently some of the best in the solar system, and she always held a certain amount of pride about that because it had been up to her to keep the quotas on task. Something made difficult in recent years.

The house was quiet enough that it felt somewhat wrong. There wasn’t supposed to be movement at this hour. She should be quietly charging. But in a way, wasn’t that just following her programming -- the very thing Kase blamed her for? Seemed like an unfair double standard.

She passed through the hallway which connected to the men’s rooms. A quick glance in revealed them both in their respective charging chairs, staring blankly up at the ceiling in the darkness. Mara passed an empty room to her right without peering in and hastened down the stairs to the main living area.

Of their group, Jide was the one to care about how their living space looked. That was actually one thing she and Kase had been able to bond over: teasing their foreman for his drive for perfect looking living quarters. The furniture was measured meticulously and arranged perfectly symmetrical. As she stepped through the room, she paused by one of the chairs in the middle area and nudged it ever so slightly. She couldn’t help but grin -- it was an inside joke she shared with Kase.

He was complicated. Good, yes. Meant well. While she hated him for feeling sorry for her, could she even blame him? She felt the same for him.

They dealt with their baggage in different ways, obviously, but in the end, they were both simply trying to process changes in their environment. That was never easy.

It didn’t take Mara long to gather her equipment in her storage room as she’d carefully arranged everything before going to her room for the night. This wasn’t a spur of the moment thing. This was something she wanted to do the moment she felt Kase looking at her by the chasm.

While she shouldered her pack and fished out a pair of climbing spikes, she went over a mental checklist of everything she’d need. Truthfully, this was a bit extreme. She didn’t have to go in the middle of the night. Waiting until morning would produce the same result; it’s just that she’d have to deal with less argument and annoyance. Even if Kase decided to go, it’d be obvious he was just doing it to appease her. Which was honestly way worse.

This was more than a job for her, and that’s what they didn’t understand. This was a way for her to persist, a way for her to thrive in this world she’d been given. Jide and Kase wanted to move on to something else, but this was the world she could control, and that gave her more comfort than she could imagine anything else would.

Equipment gathered, Mara swung open the screen door to the side of the house facing the chasm and the distant meteor site. A thought crossed her mind, and she couldn’t shake it. Was she this petty? Starting to descend the steps, she hesitated. Yes. She drug one of the rocking chairs slightly over and placed it so that it would hold the screen door open, and then she walked away from the house.

She angled to the left toward the connection point where she’d be able to repel down the side of the chasm. Earlier in the day, she’d surveyed the best route to get to the meteor. As the bridges which had once spanned many of these chasms were removed when the humans left, she was left with traversing the bottom of these deep ravines and then climbing the cliffs to the plateaus on the other side. These were things she did often in search of deposits for her team to ore.

She had been the one to scout and map areas for new work sites, and in fact, back in the prime of this moon’s operations, several crews had utilized her ability to find healthy sites. Mara had never really thought about why they were mining these resources -- all they’d been told was it was for the good of Home World. And that was good enough for her. She wasn’t sure what Home World was or where. Colony Aveline 17 had been all she’d ever known as a home. Her furthest memory was her first day on the job. Perks of being a katarsi.

There had been days last year when she had felt a certain hatred toward being left behind. In the darkest of those moments, she regretted her existence as a katarsi rather than a human. As a human, she would have mattered enough to exit this place with them; as a katarsi, she’d been left behind. As she began to descend the chasm, she acknowledged several distinct advantages she possessed as a katarsi. She could obviously survive the toxic atmosphere without the need for a breathing apparatus as her human counterparts had used. Additionally, until her core died without the ability to repair or replace it, she could never age nor die.

The connection point here housed a repel cable which always dropped to the bottom of the chasm. This had been one of the primary descent points for the crews which lived in this division of the settlement. At the bottom was a network of tunnels which took miners to various work sites throughout the underground of the moon.

She connected her harness to the cable, threw herself of the edge of the cliff into position to drop in a controlled fashion. Mara couldn’t remember how many times she’d done this. It felt the same as connecting her charger at night. Felt right. Except for the fact that the settlement, the valley it was situated in, and the chasm beneath her were all completely quiet. No movement, no talking, no working. In years past, there would be dozens of teams working the overnight shifts, but that all had died a year ago. Now, she felt alone -- in a different way than she’d felt earlier today.

One Year Ago.

She watched Kase tear into cases of equipment that had been abandoned by a human attendant the moment Kase infiltrated the gate. More guards were on him in an instant, easily restraining him.

Screens around the perimeter of the tarmac flashed, changing from static Aveline 17 logos to the image of an aging woman. The colony leader -- Mara couldn’t place woman’s name in the moment. Mara felt a wave of relief when the woman began by thanking the miners for their service. The bell tone had indicated the beginning of an announcement -- one that was prerecorded -- and did not pertain to Kase’s idiotic display.

As the video droned on, Mara saw Kase get pinned on the pavement, hands cuffed behind his back. One of the guards was motioning for him to be taken back to the other side of the gate.

“While it saddens me to make this announcement today, I can assure you that I am most proud of our work. Not only have we exceeded our resource quota each quarter, but we have consistently rated in the three highest performers in our region. In fact, none of Neptune’s other moons have received the level of praise from Home World as this one. That, my friends, is thanks to your efforts.”

Mara felt the crowd relax around her. Odd how a prerecorded message could have that effect when these individuals had been frenzied moments before. Though she wanted to deny it, something in the woman’s words resonated with her too. For decades, the miners were always told how important their work was, and to hear of its impact now at the end was comforting in a way. It hadn’t been in vain.

Their sacrifices hadn’t been in vain.

Mara switched her thinking off the moment it crossed her wires. 

Bleeding Core

One Year Ago.

The colony governor offered a quaint smile, a close-up shot of her face looming large on dozens of screens. “Now, you will go on representing our cause, bravely pressing into the future, proud citizens of Home World. Yes, you will remain here. We feel that our investment -- your investment in this place -- is of a magnitude that to abandon it now seems foolish. However, it is simply too expensive for humans like myself to remain here. Our need for sustenance and oxygen is simply too restricting for our continued presence to make sense. Therefore, it is your highest honor to remain inhabiting Colony Aveline 17 indefinitely. You, our katarsi brethren, may exist where we cannot and thrive where we dare not. You are the true heroes here.

“Again, we thank you for your service. We will forever be in your debt -- indeed, in the debt of all katarsi -- and you will forever have our gratitude.”

Despite the resonance of the woman’s message, Mara couldn’t help feel slighted. Were she and the other miners simply equipment to be left behind after a mission? No, they weren’t even that because the humans were taking their equipment. Even while the video played, Mara saw more truckloads delivering to the final open ship.

The message over, the crowds did not return to their craze; instead, they simply stood in silence and watched the humans as Mara did. There was now enough room between the other miners and her that she didn’t feel cramped. Jide stepped next to her, his proximity steadying her inward spiraling if only a little. She tore her eyes away from the docking to see Kase being forced to a seated position just outside the same gate he’d broken through.

The last of the human gear was loaded, and as the minutes passed, fewer humans were left on the launch pad. The guards were the last to board, rushing as if the miners might break through the barricades in the final moments and spoil the entire event. But that couldn’t be further from reality -- the miners made no move to intervene.

Maybe they should have. Maybe Mara could have done something -- anything? But she’d never been one to kick and scream against futility. No, she watched the rest in the same silence as those around her. As the final bay door closed, she took Jide by the arm and led him over to Kase. His mechanical cuffs had released him after a programmed amount of time.

Kase stood as the engines of the ships fired to life. The three of them followed the hulking machines with their eyes as they lifted from the moon for the final time. 

Thirty years of work was now done, and the three hundred katarsi who remained in the settlement had finally completed their tasks.

Hadn’t they? Wasn’t that how this worked?

But something felt wrong to Mara, and a quick look around at the other katarsi confirmed they felt it too. Even as the last ship blinked out of their view, Mara searched her primary programming, and all she found was the continued desire to work. Work. Mine. Produce.

She’d felt this compulsion her entire time here, and until now, it always fulfilled her. She enjoyed her purpose.

But now, with no human left in sight, the compulsion remained. And it felt empty.

Now.

It took her a good ten minutes to reach the bottom of the chasm. From the bottom looking up, she saw the glow of the night sky, looking like a neon thin slice in otherwise darkness created by the cliff walls. Either way she went from here, she would wind up in mining operation grounds, nexus areas for vast tunnel networks running for miles. After a short walk, she saw one of the orb shaped transporters which would have sped groups of miners to their assigned destinations. It truly beat the walking she’d endured for the last year.

Maybe that’s why she didn’t feel so alone right now: it was something she’d become accustomed to. There was that bright side at least.

Mara couldn’t believe it’d been three decades since her first time working on this project. If she’d had a life before Adeline 17, she held no recollection of it. It was something many of the katarsi had theorized, but there was no way of knowing. For everyone on this moon’s operation, this had ostensibly been their only life.

That’s one element of her feud with Jide and Kase that bothered her: they were the only family she’d ever known. If they no longer wanted to be part of her, would she truly be alone in this world for the first time? Why did she even care about the concept of family? That was such a human thing -- something a katarsi wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, be concerned with if it weren’t for influence from their organic creators.

And she would have thought that given the loss the three of them experienced…

As she was so trained at doing, so used to doing, Mara moved her thought patterns forward, leaving that painful memory behind.

The quiet and eventless walk to the climbing point passed more quickly than she anticipated. This was her favorite part. She didn’t know why, but climbing always felt so good. The thrill of leaving the ground, the idea of rising to another level -- it filled her with a quickened energy.

She retrieved her climbing picks from her backpack and reached for the harness clip fixed to the side of the cliff wall.Something in her ironclad concentration broke, and those memories returned.

Four. There were four of them.

She cursed Jide and Kase for never wanting to talk about it. Never letting her remember.

One of them had not made it.

She fumbled with the clasp and rushed to spike her climbing geat into the stone. The metal clasp hit her chest, but she was already two swings into her ascent. She let the excitement fill her, hoping it would flush out the invasion of unwanted thoughts. Swing, pull herself up. Keep her head up. Eyes on the stone, eyes on the sky.

How dare they not let her grieve. That’s what the humans referred to it as, yes? Even though she didn’t have organic emotions like them, she deserved a chance to process that data. And that had been taken from her. Correction, the chance had never been given in the first place.

Jide just wanted her not to hurt. While a thoughtful sentiment, to hell with that. She could decide that on her own. Maybe the pain would’ve been better than this feeling for seven years that there was a thick fog in her mind and an entire space shuttle on her shoulders. Kase just didn’t want to remember, himself. And she understand that was his prerogative, but his own trauma had been given priority over her own. And that -- was -- not -- right.

She was halfway up now. Her swings came more rapidly, and she was climbing faster than she ever had before. It felt like flying in a way, which gave her energy even more freedom to soar within her. This was her escape. This was her way to process. This journey, mining the meteor, staying in this silent settlement -- all of it was her way of remembering Miguel and processing his death.

And those men did not want her to have it.

Mara was flying. Weightless. The air around her felt cold even though she couldn’t feel temperature. The sensation seemed wrong, and she couldn’t figure out why. Flying was good, right? It was freedom.

She realized she was flying the wrong way, and as the sky retreated from her instead of getting closer, she realized she was free falling. In the moments before her impact, she thought of Jide and Kase. And for the first time in seven years, she thought of Miguel. 

Ignition

Seven Years Ago.

Kase moved his feet with as much care as possible, but the ground beneath him still rumbled on its own. It was too unstable for the amount of work they’d done in this section of the mine over the past three days of being down here. He and his crew were miles from their base settlement, extracting a rich vein of minerals which would send them far and away ahead of other crews with their quarterly quota. In fact, this single find was nearly a years’ worth.

Stepping on the solid ground near the wall of stone made Kase feel easier. On their second day of the dig, they’d discovered their horizontal shaft here was being dug on top of a cavern. Less than two meters of stone separated them from a drop of… Miguel had not yet figured out how far.

Kase removed a sensor from his belt and held it against the wall -- it flashed green as he moved it back and forth over the stone surface. He carefully shifted to his left, keeping the sensor reading the wall. The flashing stayed consistent. Based on the cluster Mara had discovered a few hours before, there should be a second cluster in this area. Hugging the wall, he kept moving.

“That’s far enough, Kase,” a voice echoed from the way he’d come. Miguel stood fifteen meters from him holding a small screen which illuminated his face in a gray glow.

The green flashes flicked twice for the first time. Bingo. “I got something here.” The flashes came in quick succession now. “Could be big.”

“I don’t like my readings here, though. This area of the shaft is already so weak, and I thought we’d agreed not to walk over this section. Drilling into the wall might cause the floor underneath you to crack.”

Kase looked back at his partner, reading the look of concern on the man. His job was safety, and he was the best at it. But having the willpower to push through danger was Kase’s job.

“The floor nearest the wall here is solid,” Kase said. He made a show of stomping on it. Miguel nearly leaped for him in a panic, and Kase smirked. “I’m not going through the floor, man. Don’t watch me if you’re just going to make me nervous.”

“Where’s your harness, at least?”

“Pretty sure I left it back at the charge station.” Kase clipped the sensor back to his belt and reached over his shoulder to retrieve a device nearly the length of his arm. “This’ll take less time than it would for you to go back and get it for me.”

Before Miguel could argue more, Kase pulled the trigger on his extractor. It was a non-invasive extractor that when held close to the stone looked like it was melting the rock away. Even though there weren’t actual vibration to worry about, the risk of hitting a rock vein that compromising the floor beneath him was still a factor. In that case, Miguel would be right. Kase would be wrong and would be hurdling to his death. Being wrong to Miguel would be an embarrassing way to go out.

He released the trigger for a moment to check the mineral deposit. A good size, but not the find he was hoping for. Mara had all the programming for that. Still, he’d like to outdo her at least once.

“Here,” Miguel said.”

Kase nearly jumped, and choked back an audible yell. The other man now stood next to him, and Kase hadn’t sensed it at all. “What the hell are you doing? If you didn’t want me over here, seems like we shouldn’t have two of us.”

Miguel began buckling a harness onto Kase. “I have the advantage of knowing where the floor is strongest.” The screen now dangling from Miguel’s waist showed imaging of the floor with red, yellow, and green markings. “You don’t, so yes it was incredibly stupid of you to walk over here.”

“How’d you get my harness so fast?”

“I didn’t.” Miguel finished the last buckle, handing Kase the end with a bolt the length of both of Kase’s hands. It was a special kind of drill bit that transferred the shock waves of its intrusion evenly throughout a surface, and essentially became the substance after entry. It was a miracle and wouldn’t cause cave-ins. 

“If you think I’m going to feel bad about you giving me your harness, save it for someone else.” They both chuckled. Kase unclipped a drill from his backpack and quickly drilled the safety line of the harness into the wall just to his left.

As Kase pulled the trigger again, he felt Miguel start making his way back.

“He was insistent on finishing that cluster,” he heard Miguel say. Kase looked over to see Mara and Miguel carefully planting his steps.

Mara stood with hands on hips, and Kase locked eyes for a moment while continuing to extract around the minerals. He lifted the gun higher to keep it away from the floor. That’s when his mistake happened. In a moment, he saw a running crack start spreading like a spiderweb along the wall where he’d been drilling. One of the lines of web shot down like a string of lightning, striking the floor with a sharp crack.

Kase fell through and felt himself plummet downward.

Miguel heard the floor give way, and leaped the last few steps toward safety. His final lunge seemed to come from midair, and he grasped Mara’s waiting hand. She clutched him, trying to brace herself against being pulled over the side of her stable section of floor.

Jide’s shadow raced along the hallway’s wall and low ceiling as he neared. But before he could help, the spiderweb along the wall raced up and onto the ceiling. It didn’t reach it with a loud crack -- it reached it with deadly silence. Chunks of the ceiling began falling all around them. As Jide reached to help Miguel climb up to safety, pulled with all Mara’s might, a large slab of ceiling fell directly on Miguel. It crushed Mara’s arm, and she screamed as Miguel was ripped from her grasp and swallowed by the widening chasm below. Jide had to pull Mara back by her torso to keep her from going over the edge.

In moments as quick as it all began, everything stilled. The only thing echoing in the mineshaft was Miguel’s final scream as he disappeared into blackness.

Kase hung suspended from the wall, held in place by Miguel’s harness. Inside him, a black chasm opened up bigger than the one he stared blankly into below him. 

A Phoenix Burns Too

Now.

Mara’s eyes opened and split the blackness. She lifted her head trying to orient herself, and it took a full minute to process everything. This looked like Kase’s workshop. What was she doing in his workshop? How’d she gotten here?

She remembered flying -- falling. And then nothing.

“Easy, those joints might still be stiff.” Jide rolled his chair next to the cot where she lay.

Mara flexed both arms, wincing from the foreign feel in weight and smoothness. She didn’t have to ask if they’d been replaced. Honestly, her whole body felt like that. What had she done? She let her head fall back onto the cot.

She exhaled a grating, wordless sound.

“Is that what you feel like?” Jide asked.

She nodded, looking up at the ceiling.

“Don’t blame you. Looked like you took quite the fall.”

“Bet Kase feels proud of himself, doesn’t he? Watching me fail gloriously like that.”

Jide rolled out of her periphery for a moment before returning, holding a small, round orb between his fingers. Its glint caught her eye. He put it in her hand.

“He’s more proud that he put this tracker in your gear so that when you left without us, we’d know which route you went in case anything went wrong.”

She clinched her hand tight enough that she was surprised when the orb didn’t crumble. “Guess I got the good end of that deal then. Is he outside waiting for you to flip the switch and reactivate my core? Tell him I’m up, and he can come rub it in my face.”

Jide motioned for Mara to sit up. When she did, he again rolled across the small room, this time to a workbench opposite her. He picked up a circular piece of metal, blackened all the way around its rim.

“I didn’t just reactivate your core.” He held it toward here. “This is your old one. Completely fried.”

Her fall had been that bad? Thoughts streamed across Mara’s wires as she stood and let Jide hand her the part that used to power her. If a katarsi’s core died, the unit died with it, right? It wasn’t like Kase repaired it. She looked down at her own chest, the new core illuminated and spotless. Against obviously dirty silicone skin, it looked out of place.

“Alright, you’ve got me curious,” she said. “So Kase knows how to program new cores? Quite the secret to be hiding all this time.”

“You can say it’s a new skill. He’s been working nearly round the clock trying to figure it out to bring you back. He’s been at it for a month.”

“A month?!” She’d been dead for a month. And if it weren’t for Kase, she’d still be dead now. That stubborn, idiot man.

Jide took the core from her. “Fortunately, he had a fairly new stash of fresh cores apparently. Just got them from the depot. He used up most of them with trial and error, and I think that one in you now was number forty-three. Guess it’s your lucky number.”

Mara flexed her arms again and rolled her neck back and forth. With their differences, it was sometimes hard to see all the good in Kase. Now, it was impossible not to. He could’ve easily left her out there. Not tried. Left the settlement. Get what he wanted. Instead, Mara stood in his workshop alive again.

“Listen,” Jide said slowly. “I want to apologize about how we’ve been toward you.”

“Don’t go there if it’s just because I died. Don’t you dare give me a pity apology.”

He held up a hand. “It’s not. It’s -- not. Look, it’s been a month. Kase and I have had time to think. What happened to you -- my change in perspective isn’t because of it, but… Hell, I don’t know how to put it.” He let his head fall back against the back of the chair and faced the ceiling. “That morning we found you, and those first few days of having you here completely unresponsive -- it took us back to losing Miguel. I don’t know why I was able to compartmentalize losing him better. But I realize it’s unfair to have asked you to do that too. Maybe if we’d all talked about it more. I don’t know. Maybe things would be different.”

How could they not be? That was the driving cause of the rift between the three of them. It had been the slow poisoning over the seven years. It had been their slow descent into darkness. Jide didn’t look at her, like he didn’t necessarily expect her to respond. Perhaps he just needed to get that off his chest after all this time. She didn’t really have anything to say back to him and didn’t feel she owed him anything.

She appreciated him finally acknowledging their loss, her pain. But it was a handful of sentences seven years in the making.

“Is Kase on the porch? He deserves a thank you.” Mara started for the door.

“He’s gone, Mara.”

She stopped midstep. “Like to the depot?” But she knew that wasn’t the answer at all.

“He left this morning to catch up with the others. Or to find them -- who knows how far they’ve gotten at this point.”

“He left the settlement?” she asked, not turning around.

“He succeeded in igniting that core in the middle of the night last night. This morning, he told me to wait until this afternoon to run the script to get you back and running. He thought it’d be best if he were a ways out by this point.”

Mara stood in silence. For the second time in less than a minute, she had no idea what to say.

“You didn’t want to go too?” she finally asked.

“I wanted to make peace with you,” he said, voice low.

“And Kase didn’t.”

“I don’t think it’s that at all. Mara, you know him. He’s not good at this, never has been. He never wanted to reflect on losing Miguel because he blamed himself for it. He didn’t want to reflect on a potential conversation with you because he blamed himself for your accident. It’s not a great explanation, but… that’s him.”

After everything Mara and Kase had been through, this felt empty. There were so many things she wanted to say to him, and yet again, he’d not let her. He’d brought her back to life, but he couldn’t even face her. She didn’t know whether to thank him, curse him, or pity him.

“You going to be here when I get back?” Mara asked, glancing back at Jide. “Or are you going to leave without saying goodbye too?”

“I’ll be here.” He cocked one of his brows. “Where are you going?”

“I’ve got something to finish obviously.” 

Words Spoken but Never Said

Now.

With that, she crossed the small hallway to her storage room. Her gear was precisely how she normally arranged it, only it was slightly more exact. Too exact. He held back a grin knowing Jide had nearly run himself crazy getting the positioning of her back, her mining gun, her climbing gear all precise. Served him right. She shouldered her bag and realized she was still holding the small metal orb which had apparently been hidden in her gear on her last trek.

She set it in a small cup on her prep table. She wouldn’t be needing it this time. She was on her own now.

“Are you sure you want to go right now? Jide asked from the door of Kase’s workshop.

“Yes.”

“Want me to come too?”

“No, actually.”

“Please don’t say that just to be vindictive. I am seriously sorry about everything.”

Bag shouldered and equipment in hand, Mara turned around and faced the man. “No, this is for my own sake. I think doing this alone is what I’m supposed to do.”

That’s where they left it. Maybe Jide didn’t know what else to say either. When did this get so complicated? Her death surely hadn’t helped anything, she thought jokingly, but it went further back than that. Was it losing Miguel? Was it being abandoned by the humans? Perhaps it was more complicated than singular moments. While those contributed, it felt more like time compounded over and over, adding pressure until they’d all just broken.

Mara left Jide standing in the little hallway between her storage room and Kase’s workshop. Between her world and that of her other crew mate, where Jide had always been. The sound of the screen door slamming shut behind her seemed to echo more than normal. Even though she wasn’t leaving for good, it somehow felt like things wouldn’t be the same when she returned. Maybe Jide would be gone after all.

Her journey to the bottom of the chasm and back to her climbing spot was as silent and eventless as last time. She double checked her harness before ascending, not willing to risk another fall. Doing all this a second time felt less triumphant, but it also felt more cathartic in a way. She felt like it had to do with her motive. The last trip was motivated out of anger and disappointment. This one by...her own need for closure. Funny how that shift in perspective made all the difference.

One climbing spike after another, pulling with each swing she pushed past the halfway point, past where she fell previously. Pulling herself to the top of the cliffside, she released her harness and dusted herself off. The unsettled plateaus on this side of the chasms were flat and empty of anything other than rocks. It took her ten minutes to reach her destination.

The rock bigger than all the others. The thing which had kickstarted the beginning of the end for her crew. As she neared, she noticed something on the ground near the base of the meteor. It was a single metal chest, resting alone next to the impact crater. Odd. It’d been placed here, obviously. A dozen questions swarmed her wires.

She knelt in front of it and pressed the buttons on its sides, releasing the lid. Inside, she found several items. One was a recording chip. Its digital label read: Mara, please watch. Next to it were a pair of new looking mining pistols. And beside those was a handheld screen that looked all too familiar. She searched her memory banks, already knowing what she’d find. As the realization set it, she inserted the chip into her core, and her eyes flashed to reveal an augmented version of Kase standing nearby.

Mara, he said. As I’m recording this, I still haven’t figured out how to bring you back, but I’m going ahead and leaving it here beside this godforsaken meteor because I know one day you’ll stand here ready to finish your job.

This felt unreal. When had Kase come to the crater? This morning before Jide ran Kase’s script, or before like he claimed?

I wanted to use this as a way to tell you goodbye. Mainly because I’m a coward -- I know that I am -- and this is the only way I’ll be able to. I’ll be gone when you see this, and we’ll likely never see each other again.

I want to apologize for… everything. And the only way I know how is by doing something. If you haven’t already seen it, please look inside the chest and find the scanner.

Mara picked up the scanner -- the weight of it, the small dings on its corners, the coolness of its metal back all brought a flood of memories to the surface.

I never told either of you, but a few weeks after Miguel’s death, I went back to the site. I repelled down into that cavern, and found him. I found him so far gone that there was nothing I could do. The only thing I knew to do was gather a few of his belongings and bring them back. That scanner has been broken in my workshop for seven years. It’s -- the way I remember him.

And for the record, I never wanted to forget him. Just forget that day. I’d failed to think of it without hating myself.

I fixed the scanner, and I’m leaving it to you. You deserve it -- always have. And now I’m going to end this recording so I can go figure out how to fix your core.

Then I’m going to leave, and hopefully figure out how to fix myself. Something I’ve wanted for a long time.

Goodbye, Mara. Thank you for always being the best of us. I’m sorry I never was.

The recording ended with a quick flash and disappearance of the augmented Kase. Mara stood still for a very long time, Miguel’s scanner in her hand. She’d pushed thoughts of him away for so long that actually holding something of his now was nearly overwhelming.

With the swift precision of routine, Mara readied her equipment for mining the meteor. She clipped the scanner on her belt. She stepped up to the huge stone that had fallen from the sky and pulled the trigger to her mining tool. Sparks exploded around her as she began breaking down the rocky exterior to reveal the minerals on the inside.

She played the message from Kase again and again as she worked. For the first time, she saw clearly that he wasn’t a coward. And she knew, despite everything, he wasn’t blind to her pain. 

Kase was broken. 

Mara was too.

One day soon, they wouldn’t be.

Sparks – like burning stars – fell to the ground around her.