The Ring of Acies

Chapter Two: Terraforming Secrecy

The illumination of R&R's artificial daylight ceiling breaks Terrine out of her state of half-consciousness. She did not sleep a wink since her nightmare. She spent the night floating aimlessly through her apartment, aside from doing the occasional menial task. She feels like a corpse stuffed into a role with expectations to meet. When her alarm goes off, she does not have the strength to fight it. She just unplugs it and starts her routine. She cleans up and dresses on muscle memory alone and floats out her door into the spiral hallway.

She does not go to the deli she usually goes to. Something inside her just does not want to interact with people. She lowers the intensity of her mag-shoes so she does not have to expend as much effort walking to the inter-module transit station. She waits at the gate for the 0550 car. The pain in her stomach reminds her that she has not eaten yet. She floats over to an automated food stand and grabs a protein bar and a caffeinated beverage from a very chipper service drone. She thanks it and returns to the gate to catch the train. The ride is typical—the train bumps as it passes over bulkheads in the tunnel. However, the train oddly does not stop at P. Op. which causes it to arrive at Biz. early.

She takes her time walking through Biz. The buildings are much more concentrated than in R&R. There are a few open malls and the occasional executive park. Still, Biz. was built to maximize efficient use of space while maintaining beauty. She takes an intra-module transit train across the module. The monorail vehicles are the quickest way to get around a module. Once she reaches her stop in the Terraforming District, she gets off. She walks by a drone switching out air filters in the hall alongside a human worker outside a convenience store. Sanitation drones carefully clean and sterilize the floors and walls, being careful not to damage the module government-mandated posters warning people about disease and not wasting resources. The clicking of magnetic shoes locking to the deck echo through the halls. Her engineering firm is one of the more refined buildings in Biz. It has space for its employees to breathe and is kept clean by its arsenal of drones.

As she enters the building, she notices the load-lifter drones are in the lobby again, passing equipment to each other through the air. One of them notices Terrine and adjusts the trajectory of a package it is about to throw to pass slightly above Terrine's head.

"Thank you, 117," Terrine says.

"Of course," the drone responds.

She makes her way to the elevator. She prepares herself for the acceleration and manages it better than she did the day before. She notices a slightly increased security presence around the building, but nothing is of any significant concern. She avoids talking to anyone. She still does not have the energy to engage in any interaction longer than a few kind words. She attaches her bag to the wall of her cubicle and locks her feet to the sliding plate at the base of her desk. She is hesitant about working on the project. The ambiguity of the project bothers her, and she does not want to put her stamp of approval on work that will be used for unethical purposes. Maybe her sleep-deprived mind is exaggerating the facts, but she cannot deny the feeling that something about this project is at least suspicious.

She begins to pull up records of similar guidance systems used on surface drones for uninhabitable planets. She skims through official documents published by multiple engineering firms both on Initium and from other solar systems. The code for the drones is repetitive between documents. However, one common aspect which increases her suspicion in the project is this: No drone deployed to the surface of a planet this early in the terraforming process is programmed with a targeted objective. If any drones are deployed to the surface pre-settlement, it is for surveillance and surveying purposes only. She continues to research and confirms that although there is no galactic or company legislation indicating that active probing and prospecting is prohibited in this stage of terraforming, early colonizers found that it was not feasible to start accessing the planet's resources until it had active settlements on the surface. It has become a common practice among colonies over the years. In fact, in a book published by the founder of the Eftai Corporation, Eftai Jerad, outlining the basics of terraforming and planetary colonization, he cited the restraint on premature prospecting as one of the key strategies to build a thriving independent colony. He also considered it one of the early failures that led to the fall of Liaskalia. Terrine begins to suspect that if P. Op. is calling for engineering firms to design drones meant to extract or at the very least interface with potential resources on the surface, that the resource must be so useful or valuable that it is worth risking civil unrest to have access to it.