Plastic. Logan hated ‘stic. His mole had been tunneling through a flotsam rainbow of it for the past three days. The non-biodegradable vein of a bygone age was prone to gumming up the grinders and blocking off the sorters from receiving any useful materials his mole gobbled up. He had already lost half a day swapping out grindheads and changed course four times to try to break clear.
This is what it was going to be today, he mused as he fumbled for his patch case. Taking out one of the quarter sized blue slappatches, he briefly debated and grabbed a second one, removing the silvery backing, and adhering them to the back of his neck. As the saying goes, no one ever complains about the blue ones. He could already feel the comfortable numb removing him from his sense of time as he settled in behind the controls.
Plastics. It’s not all bad. After he dropped it off at Control he would still cover his costs. Its not that ‘stic didn’t pay well. Recovered plastic was reconstituted back into the petroleum that it came from and still brought a fair price by weight, but mining it was tedious. You can’t run the mole all out and it generally cost plenty to extract in both time and parts. He really wouldn’t mind plowing through a vein of organics to close out the week. You could punch through that at full throttle and be done in half a day with full tanks of high-grade compost. Maybe he could hit a vein of old IC boards or cell phones. A load of lithium or gold would make up for all the ‘stic he had been hauling and, as he figured, he was due.
Suddenly the mole lurched and shuddered to a halt. Logan shot up, pulling the transmission into neutral and locking the mole down by rote, before even bothering to check the damage panel to see what the ‘stic had gotten to this time. The damage panel showed up clean so he flipped it into diagnostic just in case. He brought up the analyzer log from the sorter. The mole had frozen on an error code from the spectrometer and had already uplinked the data back to Control. He pulled at the virtual panels trying to get at the definition of the error code. They were written for desk jockeys who apparently had a background in organic chemistry.
He slapped the panels shut and pulled up the last few seconds of the spectrometer’s log. It was reading that he had broken into a pocket of organics.
Great, what’s the problem. He popped the hatch and was momentarily stung by the decomposition of rotting biomatter. Should have put on a wet suit, he thought as he grabbed a re-breather and gathered himself to go up to the grinders. Walking up to the front along the tunnel under the old landfill, he could hear one of the sleds from Control pulling in behind the mole. Wonder what I hit that they came all the way down here to ‘help’ me with.
He hauled himself up the outer ring of the grinder cone and leaned past the yellow and black warning bars. He found himself face to face with a human skull. Only partially decomposed, the empty sockets of its eyes looked back at him almost as shocked as he was. It’s face had been mostly lost to the grinders but even the sickening glance that Logan managed before he slid off the mole and began retching into his re-breather told him all he needed to know.
As the suits from Control strolled up, he was able to pull himself together just enough to speak.
“It’s a little girl”.
