Category: One Among the Dead

Day 109:

Here is what I’m singing right now…

As a poor Earther I was born
Pick away, haul away
And for my birth home I now mourn
We’re bound to make our fortune

I found a job in outer space
Pick away, haul away
But now I’m stranded in disgrace
We’re bound to make our fortune

I’m digging in a crooked line
Pick away, haul away
But keeping everything I mine
We’re bound to make our fortune

…

It goes on from there, but I’ll spare you. I didn’t say I was good at it.

Day 108:

Occasionally, when I dig up from a chamber below where I am, I hit a wall from a chamber above, instead of a floor. That’s annoying.

I could avoid the problem by sizing every space I carve equally, so that they’re all 3 meters by 4 meters, by example. I’ve seen the results of mining companies that follow that kind of policy.

There are a few problems with doing that:

1. Every room starts to look the same, so regardless of how well you map, it’s easy to get lost. That’s not a big deal in a small mining operation, but in a large one, it can literally be deadly.
2. Crossing a half distance underground, one does not want to open dozens of doors. TRUST ME.
3. The ore doesn’t cooperate with that layout, so you end up with a lot of empty spaces behind walls or spaces you weren’t planning to dig out but have to because that’s how you get the chambers evenly spaced.

Another alternative is giant rooms. There’s only one problem with that:

1. The ceiling gives way and you die.

No matter how high or low the gravity of a planet or planetoid or asteroid, eventually gravity wins the fight and no manner of stabilizing poles will last forever.

So my mining chambers are somewhat randomly sized. (They’re a lot more randomly sized when I don’t have to sink a torch every three meters to keep the local fauna away.) That means sometimes when I dig up, I hit a wall. One can’t carry maps this size everywhere.

Anyway, that’s the quick reason why my digging is annoying the duck out of me today.

Day 107

On the ship, we carried radios powerful enough to stream music from anywhere on board, and they were tiny little things you could clip to your collar. They didn’t play in your ears, but instead used wireless communication to vibrate a chip embedded just above your jawbone.

Everyone has one of these chips. They’re the primary way of communicating between people now. Grandma said when she was a kid they still had to carry devices, and when her grandfather was a kid they called the devices “phones”, though they were primitive at best and only could handle a few thousand apps and streams.

Since I was a kid, I’ve always had some kind of sound running through my chip. Sometimes it was sports or some kind of talk-based show, but most of it was music.

I’d give anything for some music right now.

I’ve started to sing in the caverns. They always say your voice sounds better in a chamber of echoes, and maybe it does.

The bats are singing along.

It’s sure bringing all the zombies to the yard.

Day 106:

I feel like the digging will never end.

Add one to the xenobiology list: we appear to have something resembling bats. Mammalian-like as far as I can tell (not getting that close), hang upside-down from the roofs of caves.

One big difference: these are not using ultrasonic frequencies. I can hear them just fine. And they squeak incessantly. Like flying rats at a rat political convention discussing rat business.

Day 105:

Spent the day chasing a seam of granite through the depths of my caverns. I thought I’d gone as deep as I’d ever gone before… then I broke through a wall into a cavern where apparently I had already left a torch.

Either that or the zombies have suddenly decided to start playing with fire because hey, did I mention cavern full of zombies?

I’m getting better at killing them efficiently, but still makes the heart race a bit.

Also, they wrecked my shoes and most of my pants so I have to make more.

Stupid zombies.

PS there was also a ducken in the cavern.