Dating : Traditions

He tried to follow the old-timers’ advice

The bolts tightened around his shoulders and J.R. stared straight ahead, trying not to flinch. It was a point of pride in the mines to show as little reaction as possible during the fitting. The smallest grunt or show of discomfort would be reported back to the tunnels, where it would be counted against him when he joined one of the crews. Nobody in J.R.’s family had ever hollered out during a fitting, and he was determined not to be the first. As the mounting bot brought up the next rack of steel, J.R. tried to follow the old-timers’ advice to think of somewhere pretty.

Grandma had taken J.R. to the surface once, by hiding him in a tool container that she loaded onto the freight elevator. When they arrived topside, grandpa carried him for an hour through the blasted terrain, until they arrived at the top of a steep ridge where she let J.R. clamber down onto the ground.

Here, away from the smoke columns of the mine, the sky was a canvas of deep blues and purples, inset with a thousand stars. Asylum’s azure orb filled almost half the sky, its green continents clearly outlined in the sunlight that never touched Stake 1218.

They found a flat boulder at the edge of the ridge and sat there for a long time. As J.R. watched the ore transports snaking into orbit, grandma told him stories about the early days of working the asteroid, before the atmospheric systems were stable. Back then, some convict mines were still in open revolt against Kepler GeoTech, and grandma had even known a few miners that had come to the fields voluntarily. Miners who simply climbed out of their exos at the end of a shift, putting them aside like the rest of their tools.

Sitting on their boulder under the twinkling canopy, J.R. and grandma marvelled at the idea of an exo you could just take off when you wanted to. One that didn’t jolt your body into movement when the shift bell rang, that didn’t chain your body to its harsh, pneumatic rhythms. An exo that didn’t entomb you in steel on the day the company decided you had grown enough.

As the mounting bot turned toward him again, J.R. clenched his jaw and tried to think about that day with grandma on the surface.