Ficton AESIR Mining Colony: Choose your own Adventure

You wake up in your sleep capsule, pull on your issued jumpsuit and step into the isle. Today is your first day on the Aesir Mining Colony. You had signed your contract 18 months earlier on earth with hopes and dreams of making your fortune mining in distant systems. A free rights corporation mining colony Aesir citizens owe nothing to the colony, they have no contractual obligations other than their initial payment for travel to the colony. They are however responsible for their own livelihood and equipment once they arrive and any profits or losses they incur with their activities are their own risk.


This sounded great when you signed the travel agreements back then, but yesterday upon finally arriving you discovered the truth. Everything on Aesir cost credits, Everything! You are allowed a sleeping pod and minimal food for free, but anything beyond that cost you credits. Any personal space cost you credits, any good food cost you credits, any mining equipment cost you credits, but most importantly time in the drone control labs cost you credits. Without access to time in the DCL, you can’t mine, and if you cant mine you will never be able to make your fortune. The catch-twenty-two no one ever told you about before you started this journey into a new life.


You have zero skills, zero experience, and the 1 hour worth of credits that came as a ‘bonus’ with the travel agreement you signed. Living in the free sleep pods provided classifies you as a level one citizen and you have no security or safety clearances.


Credits are the lifeblood of Aesir mining colony. Each credit is worth one minute of Drone Control Lab (DCL) time. Credits are counted by Minutes, Hours, Days, and Years.



You walk down the hall and log into a public terminal. You don’t even have a wearable terminal as that would cost credits you don’t have, even if you could afford the network fees. Opening the terminal you go to open job listings. It is overwhelming, the sheer number of tasks needed daily to keep the station running, operational and clean. However, you do not appear to have the qualifications, security clearance, or safety clearance to do any of them. With a little bit of searching around you finally figure out how to limit the search to just tasks you are qualified for.


Custodial – 3 tasks available

Housekeeping – 2 tasks available

Food Services – 2 tasks available

Hangar Crew – 1 task available

Control Tower – 1 task available

Administration – 1 task available


You open up the Hangar Crew task list and open the only listing with in it, “Assistant ore loader”.


Assistant Ore Loader

Requirements

Level 1 Citizen

Level 0 Security

Level 0 Safety

0 Skills

0 Experience

0 Training

Contract cost – 5 credits

Contract Reward – 20 credits

Expected time to complete - 10 minutes

Time limit – 1 hour


Accept? Decline?


Not knowing any other option, you click Accept and thumb your biometrics to confirm. You see your credits go down in the corner of the terminal screen, from 60 to 55, and a timer bottom center showing 59:55 remaining.


Hmm you don’t even know where you are supposed to go, so you click more info on your task in the terminal and pull up a map to the hangar and the supervisor you are supposed to report to. 30 minutes later, after going to two wrong hangar bays, you finally find the right one and the supervisor you were supposed to report to. He shows you to a conveyer belt with a line of mining drones beside it. There are laborors opening the hatches on the drones and lifting the ore out and onto the conveyer belt. Once empty the drones move forward and center over a drain on the floor. Your task is to rinse out the bays blow them dry and then mist them with an anti-corrosive agent and close them back up. Once closed there are 5 grease points you lubricate and the drone moves on only to be replaced with another. Fifteen minutes later you are wet from the knees down and your arms are covered in oil and grease with water dripping off of them as well.



The supervisor brings another laborer to replace you, checks some things on his tablet and thumbs the completion of your task. There is a shower room to the side of the exit from the hangar and you strip down, soap up and rinse down. There is a fresh jumpsuit dispenser next to the laundry shoot you placed your dirty one, and you are fresh and ready to go again.



You return to the same public terminal near your sleeping capsule and log back in. You aren’t sure why you chose this terminal instead of one near the hangar where you just exited, but there is something that feels right about the familiarity of using the same terminal near your ‘home’.

Skills – 0

Training – 0

Experience

General Hangar – 1

Credits: 1hr 15min


Available tasks

Available training

Rent Drone Control Lab time

Rent Manufacturing Lab time

Rent Specialty Lab time

Housing Options Available

Auction