I perfectly remember the days when our entire great civilization consisted of three folding cots shoved into a cramped, dusty sandstone cave. We had a Printing Pod that glowed with a soft, organic light, a couple of boxes of tasteless rations, and a naive, almost childish belief that we were in control. Back then, our biggest problem was remembering to dig the waste pit far away from the drinking water.
Now, Zemlola is a chaotic, pulsating maze of machinery that has chewed its way down to the asteroid's core. Kilometers of tangled pipes, high-voltage cables, conveyor belts, and ventilation ducts pierce the rock like the circulatory system of a giant, perpetually suffocating beast. It smells of ozone, machine oil, recycled water, and fried mealwood. And all this industrial chaos is orchestrated by the Voice.
None of us have ever seen it. We don't know if it sits at a control panel in another galaxy or if it's just a bizarre algorithm running inside the Printing Pod itself. But we hear its orders; we feel its unseen presence in every yellow priority alert that flashes on our tactical visors. The Voice doesn't wish us harm. On the contrary, it is genuinely obsessed with our prosperity. The problem is that its idea of prosperity usually involves a radical redesign of critical life-support systems at the worst possible moment. And a perpetual, chronic shortage of clean air.
It was a standard working noon—if that concept even applies to life inside a chunk of rock hurtling through an icy vacuum. I had just finished inspecting the launch pad on the surface and headed down to the residential sectors. My muscles ached from installing heavy tungsten plating in the rocket nozzles, and a mild hypoxia throbbed in my temples—the result of working in a distant mineshaft where oxygen only arrived in pathetic trickles.
In the agricultural block, Bubbles was fighting her endless, exhausting battle for the colony's food security.
"Minus two degrees in the third hydroponic bay!" she cursed, jabbing her finger furiously at the screen of her calorie-tracking tablet. "Mealwood can't handle these fluctuations. Its ideal temperature range is between ten and thirty degrees, and right now the roots are barely hitting nine! If the thermo-regulator is failing again because someone ran freezing water through the adjacent pipe, we're going to lose thirty thousand kilocalories by the end of the cycle."
She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of damp dirt on her skin. Her utilitarian apron was stained with nutrient mush and phosphorite fertilizer, but her movements remained sharp and precise.
"I am not going to feed the colony mush bars just because engineering decided to skimp on ceramic insulation!" she continued to rage, shutting off the water supply valve.
Bubbles was our anchor. While we reached for the stars, built reactors, and drilled oil wells, she made sure we had something to chew on when we got back. Without her pragmatism, our grand space program would have starved to death in about five cycles.
One floor down, in the sweltering power zone, Ledward was installing a heavy-duty conductive wire main. Welding sparks bounced off his integrated metal plates, illuminating the dim room with flashes of blue light.
"Battery charge at eighty-five percent," he reported in a flat, emotionless tone upon noticing my approach. "Mechanical joints are nominal. However, the left shoulder hinge requires scheduled high-temperature lubrication. The friction coefficient has exceeded the permissible limit by four-tenths."
"Drop by the tech bay after your shift, I'll top you up with fresh lubricant," I nodded, leaning against the wall.
Ledward was living—or rather, semi-living—proof that technology doesn't eliminate problems; it just replaces them with new, more complex ones. He didn't need oxygen in the volumes we did, he could work in boiling oil, and he never complained about stress. But he required a separate maintenance infrastructure, power banks, and regular servo calibration. Sometimes I caught him watching us organic beings with mild philosophical bewilderment, marveling at our fragility and fussiness.
And in the central mess hall, Stinky was creating art. He stood on an aluminum stepladder, carefully polishing the curves of a brand-new marble sculpture. Stinky, our resident decorator—who, by some unfathomable logic of the Voice's personnel policy, had recently been appointed as an exploration module pilot—genuinely believed that a piece of well-crafted stone could compensate for the fact that we lived in an industrial hellscape.
"Just a little more expression in the lines," he muttered, blowing marble dust off his respirator. "This should remind us of home. Of the wind, of freedom... Of the fact that we aren't just cogs in a machine."
I didn't have the heart to tell him that the sculpture looked more like a deformed Hatch suffering from indigestion. After all, morale is a fragile thing, and Stinky was pouring his entire delicate soul into that chunk of marble.
It was at that exact moment that a piercing yellow alert flashed across our visors. Priority nine.
I opened the brief and cursed quietly, with feeling, through my teeth. The Voice had made another brilliant decision. We were ordered to reroute the flow from the central oxygen manifold to supply gas to the new rocket sector. And it had to be done immediately.
'We'll just quickly redesign this,' is how I mentally translated the Voice's directive. It was the most terrifying phrase in our universe. Any 'quick fix' in Zemlola inevitably devolved into a multi-hour fight for survival.
We got to work without any unnecessary chatter. The plan seemed simple: dismantle the old bypass in the ventilation hub right above the mess hall and splice in a new gas distribution valve.
I grabbed a heavy laser cutter, checked the battery charge, and began carefully slicing open the pipe's casing. Ledward spotted me from below, ready to catch the heavy segment of the main with his reinforced manipulators.
But we forgot one detail. Or rather, the Voice forgot about it, and we hadn't had time to check engineering blueprints from a hundred cycles ago. In a blind offshoot of the old ventilation system, right behind the bypass, hydrogen had pooled. Hot, highly pressurized gas that had been trapped there since our early, less-than-successful experiments with electrolyzers.
The moment the laser pierced the metal, the pipe shuddered as if it were alive. A deafening, ear-piercing hiss erupted.
A jet of scorching hydrogen slammed into the ceiling, instantly melting the plastic insulation. The gas, being significantly lighter than oxygen, rapidly pooled beneath the sector's vaulted roof, displacing the breathable air downward and outward.
"Breach in the loop!" I shouted, reflexively snapping my helmet visor shut.
But that was only half the disaster. The hot hydrogen found a perfect target: the power transformer supplying the entire residential block, located on the upper tier. The room temperature spiked in seconds. The transformer's metal glowed red, and the automated systems shrieked frantically, registering a critical overheat. The safety relays tripped with a dry crack.
The lights went out. The fans ground to a halt with a pitiful groan. The pumps pushing oxygen up from the lower levels fell silent. The base began to suffocate in pitch darkness, illuminated only by the red glare of emergency lamps.
There was no panic. Panic is a luxury reserved for people who have a spare asteroid lying around. We didn't.
"Ledward, the valve!" I commanded, lunging for the emergency building materials crate.
The bionic duplicant stepped straight into the cloud of scalding gas. His LED indicators flashed an alarming red, signaling a critical fault.
"Thermal overload in manipulators. Imminent risk of synthetic skin melting and hydraulic damage," he reported dispassionately.
Despite his own system's warnings, he clamped onto the red-hot emergency release valve and wrenched it hard to shut off the main flow. Metal shrieked, and Ledward's servos whined under the extreme strain, but he didn't yield a single millimeter, holding back the pressure.
I snatched granite blocks from the crate. Granite has excellent thermal capacity and could withstand this inferno. Cranking the laser tool to maximum power, I began welding a temporary bypass right over the melted main. Sparks flew in every direction, sweat flooded my eyes, and my breathing grew ragged—I only had a couple of minutes of oxygen left in my suit, and my lungs were already burning from the carbon dioxide.
From below came the strained clank of metal. It was Bubbles; she had abandoned her precious farms and dragged over a heavy manual gas pump.
"Come on, come on, pull this garbage!" she growled, throwing her weight onto the lever with such force that the muscles in her arms bulged. She was manually pumping the hydrogen impurities out of the residential zone, forcing them through a hastily assembled carbon filter to buy us a little time.
We worked as a single, synchronized machine. Ledward held back the pressure, ignoring the degradation of his own chassis; I sealed the loop; Bubbles scrubbed the air. No wasted movements. Just the grim muscle memory of specialists honed by hundreds of emergencies, people who had stared disaster in the face far too many times.
The final seam cooled, shifting from cherry-red to a dull gray. I tightened the bracket and gave the signal. Ledward released the valve and stepped heavily backward. His right manipulator was smoking, and the plastic on his forearm had bubbled hideously, exposing the metal endoskeleton beneath, but he remained as unbothered as ever.
The transformer, deprived of its hydrogen 'sauna,' began to slowly cool down. The automated systems clicked, rebooting the grid, and the bright overhead lamps flickered back to life. With a strained hum, the fans began pushing fresh, cool oxygen into the compartments.
I pulled off my helmet and took a greedy breath. The air smelled of burnt insulation, sweat, and ozone, but in that moment, it was the best scent in the entire universe.
"Catastrophe averted," Ledward stated, melancholically inspecting his melted arm. "Replacement of the exterior casing and calibration of the pressure sensors are required."
I looked around. The temporary granite bypass bulged out of the flat mess hall wall like an ugly, crooked intestine, ruining the room's geometry. I knew it would stay there forever. In Zemlola, there is nothing more permanent than a temporary fix made while suffocating.
With a quiet hiss, a small cloud of black soot escaped from the bypass valve and settled directly onto Stinky's brand-new marble sculpture. The pristine white stone was instantly coated in a greasy, indelible layer of ash.
Stinky, standing in the doorway with a face pale from the terror he had just endured, let out a strangled groan.
"My art..." he whispered, staring at the ruined masterpiece he had poured so much effort into. "It was supposed to elevate the spirit..."
"Consider it industrial realism," I said, walking over and patting him on the shoulder. "It perfectly reflects our lives. Dirt, soot, and a desperate attempt to survive."
We barely had time to catch our breath before the alert flashed on our visors again. The Voice had shifted its attention. Now it demanded an immediate rocket launch, and the logistics system was waiting for us to configure it. No breaks for rest, no time for reflection.
I looked at Bubbles, leaning heavily on the manual pump and wiping sweat from her brow, at the smoking Ledward, and at Stinky, who was already pulling out a rag to scrub his statue.
"Alright, team," I sighed, scooping up the laser cutter and slinging it smoothly over my shoulder. "You heard the Voice. Time to build an interplanetary civilization. Try not to suffocate on the way."