⚒️ More Meat For The Machine

by Joel Glover

Littler Reedy had totally lost his goats. Like his father, Bigger Reedy, he was a man who appeared to be made entirely out of the rock they mined. The finger he was waving at the counter was as thick as a screwdriver handle, scarred and gnarled. 

The AI installed by the Minikoi Minerals Exchange was unmoved by the tone Littler Reedy was taking, or the prospect of imminent violence. 

Passersby on the concourse were less phlegmatic, knowing that whilst the AI would feel no pain if a chair or hammer was used to its shatter glass housing they would be in prime position to be sprayed by debris.

From the high stools bolted to the floor outside Slick Tony’s, Ayşe and Ken Soon watched with bemused detachment.

“Someone should really do something about that.” Ken Soon sipped his moonshine and rattled the ice cubes against the inside of the cup.

Ayşe looked at him levelly over the rim of her own drink.

“What?”

“Should that someone not be you?” She waved at his uniform, the cerulean blue with silver thread, the cap, and most important of all, the badge on the breast pocket that read “Minikoi Safety”.

“If I get involved, then I am involved.”

He made a good point. Ayşe nodded, drained the final drops of moonshine, yuzu, ginger and meltwater, and slid down from the stool.

“Littler!” She called over to him as she approached, making sure she didn’t take a bludgeoning elbow to the nose. 

Littler leaned back and slammed his heel into the screen. He was surprisingly flexible for such a cuboid man.

“They’re cheating me Pigman! They always do, but they’ve gone too far this time.”

“Is there anything else going on, Littler?”

“Ellie dumped me, Ayşe! For some contracted miner out of Bulawayo! Sick of living on the scraps Big Blue gives us to scrape by!” She tried to hug him, but her arms weren’t long enough to get all the way around. He put his head on top of hers and wept, tears as big as platinum beads falling into her hair. He snuffled the way her sounder did when they found a treat hidden in their playpen. “Then I come here and they’re buying at thirteen points less than they were when I left this morning, and I can’t make rent without extending my credit again.”

Ayşe took a moment to look around Littler Reedy and glare at Ken Soon. She was not a hugger. ‘Look what I do for you,’ her face said. ‘Look how little I care,’ his face replied. He had a new cup of moonshine. It was his round and he had not bought her one. Of course.

“I’ll tell you what,” she offered. “I’ll buy from you at the price they were offering this morning. I can wait.”

He sobbed, a coughing hiccup sob of gratitude and dismay. Some of his spit landed on her. Washing her hair already took up far more of her day than she would prefer, and now she was going to have to do it again.

“You come to my shop whenever you want.”

‘Whenever’, it transpired, was ‘immediately’. She took digital possession of platinum, gold, magnesium, and the various other minerals smelted and tapped by Littler Reedy. He took the credits, the shot of moonshine she offered to seal the deal, and she took the bone crushing handshake. Nursing imminent bruises, she checked her account balances. Homebrew algorithms parsed pricing and secretly harvested activity data, and told her that Litter Reedy’s paranoia about the AI’s motives was not entirely unreasonable. The uniformity of the price swing against him and all the zero-hours miners looked to be deliberately designed to drive the contractors into the more dangerous zones of the asteroid field. 

“More meat for the machine,” she toasted, taking another dash of moonshine, holding it in her mouth for a moment.

Things were going to get worse, before they got worse.