The big machine shuddered to a halt, skewing slightly as it stopped. A small cover opened on its side and an eyebot skimmed out over the yellow encrusted terrain.
Jake manoeuvred the eyebot to the port side, viewing the mangle of twisted metal bunched on the front driving sprocket.
“Grounder One to Basecom.”
The message was instantaneous and the response just as fast, flashing between him and the base computer thousands of kilometres away.
“Basecom.”
“I’ve thrown a track.”
“Yes. I’ll send a repbot out to you.”
Jake had been a digger for ten years, but still wasn’t comfortable about his every thought and action being automatically relayed back to Basecom.
Mentally stretching his left leg, he eased the cramps. The port track trembled in reaction.
Jake wondered how long it would take the repbot to get to him.
“Five hours,” Basecom replied.
Jake visualised the eyebot back into its recess and sighed.
“Sleep break,” he thought.
“Confirmed,” Basecom responded almost before Jake had finished his thought.
Good, now if he could just —
Jake knew Basecom would now log most of his systems off for the sleep break. He sent a tentative poke of electrons towards the communications chip and a quiet snick echoed in his mind.
“Hello base?” Jake thought.
He was met with silence.
Another poke of electrons switched frequencies.
“Okay Jake?”
“We’ve got five hours. Make it four to be on the safe side.”
“Basecom took the bait then?”
“Yeah, that self-hypnosis session you did with me had them fooled. I was able to convince them that I’d thrown a track.”
“Good. The rest are ready to move when you give the okay. It’s all down to you now Jake. You’re our one hope. We have to capture Torsion and get a message back to earth about what’s happening out here.”
Jake moved his feet and the four big electric engines purred into life, the whole digger vibrating with pent-up energy. But Jake didn’t feel a thing, his liquid encased brain, safely buried deep in the guts of the digger, was cradled by rubber suspension units.
Torsion Inc. had quickly learnt that human brains were easily damaged in the big digging machines. It was a huge expense protecting them so well, but far cheaper than flying up replacements from their base on Carselius.
Jake thought his digger onto the right heading and set off, riding blind, hoping the co-ordinates he’d been given would get him where he needed to go.
Normally he’d have his eyebot out front so that he could see where he was going, but he couldn’t chance that. The small bot, controlled by a monkey’s brain, reported every sighting back to Basecom directly and the only way he could circumvent that was to overwhelm the eyebots signals with his own mental images. Something that only worked for short bursts.
As he rumbled across Gidarion, the largest of Carselius’ three moons, Jake daydreamed about his childhood - the big open spaces that he’d played in around his native village.
The thing Jake missed most was sunlight. Unlike here, where the sun rarely shone, his village had been bright and colourful, full of laughter and bustling with people.
He’d been about ten when one of the patrols had caught him. He hadn’t been worried at first, knowing that the worst that would happen was being sent to an orphanage.
Jake had a quick, inquisitive mind and the Rector of the orphanage soon spotted his potential, selling him on to a Torsion Inc. agent.
Torsion Inc., the off-world ore specialist, had spent billions of credits developing their remote mining machines, using animal brains as controllers. A quick burst of stimulation to the sexual and hunger centres of the brains kept most RMMs functioning properly. Those that didn’t were destroyed.
The drive for profits eventually led Torsion Inc. to search for more efficient RMM controllers - the brains of young orphans, sold through an illegal market by unscrupulous orphanage Rectors.
Nobody missed the orphans, assuming they’d either moved on or had run away. It was a terrible, lonely life, that sent most new RMM’s insane within months of their captivity.
* * *
Arriving at the co-ordinates, Jake rumbled to a stop.
This was the dangerous part because he needed to see what he was doing.
Jake squirted some more electrons along the embedded wires in his frame, hoping the sequence they’d come up with would work. If all went well the eyebot would report a series of pre-recorded events to Basecom.
Jake slid open the cover and the eyebot sped out, tumbling over and over, out of control.
“Eyebot, engage jet stabilisers,” Jake thought, using Basecom’s frequency signature.
The eyebot settled down, allowing Jake control of its miniature jets.
Jake began digging, pushing great mounds of yellow soil into piles around the steadily growing trench. He had little time left before Basecom rebooted his systems again.
“Have you reached it yet?”
The thought caught Jake unaware and he stopped digging.
“No.”
“You haven’t much time left.”
“I know.”
As he lowered his blade again, Jake felt it scrape something solid in the ground and sent eyebot to have a look.
Laying half-covered in the trench was a heavily reinforced cable - the power line from Torsion Inc.’s nuclear plant on the far side of the moon. If Jake managed to destroy it, Torsion Inc.’s defences would be shut down and the machines poised around the big centre would be able to start their attack.
Jake raised his blade as high as it would go, ready to strike.
“Stop!”
The thought threw Jake into confusion and he hesitated.
“You can’t kill God. I won’t let you. God gave me my life.”
The eyebot slammed itself into Jake’s blade and exploded, leaving Jake blind.
When the repbot finally arrived, it found the huge digging machine slamming its big blade into the ground, over and over, in a blind rage.