“Come on, I know the cook has been charged with a hundred counts of attempted poisoning, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“You’re hilarious.” The blond retorted. “I am always amazed at how often you manage to squeeze jokes about fecal matter into grown up conversation.”
The darker skinned woman shrugged. “It’s a talent, I guess.”
“That is not the word I would use to describe it, but alright.” Her gaze moved to me with an expression that was part amused and part condescending. “Can I help you, Higgens?”
“Uh yeah. I just, uh, had a bit of a question that I wanted to pick your brains with.”
“Sounds better than staring at these readings. You know, sometimes I swear I can hear my brain rotting from disuse.”
“Perhaps all the toilet humor is its way of cleansing itself.”
Gonzales laughed and it was a long, happy sound. “Maybe! All that shit’s gotta get out somehow. So anyways, what’s your question?”
“Well, I couldn’t help but have a thought after one of the tubes blew last time. I was running standard cleaning procedure with my organic scrubber and micro-organism cleanser and I began to wonder why. There’s not supposed to be anything alive in space, right? The radiation itself would kill pretty much anything that could have possibly existed on it.”
“Yes, that’s the prevailing theory.”
“Yeah, but what if there was something alive on there, something strong enough to survive space radiation, and it managed to get onto our ship in another accident?” I licked my lips nervously. “Shouldn’t we be testing everything we drill for any signs of life before we go tearing it up again.”
“Didn’t I hear you arguing with Giomatti over this?”
“Uh… maybe?”
“Really? What’s with the sudden obsession with the possibilities of life in the cold, dark, unforgiving void of space?”
I laughed nervously, rubbing the back of my head. “I guess one too many horror-flix on the net. But still, it’s not a bad idea, right? We’re exploring sectors where no one has ever been! We crush rocks and moons that have never come in contact with the human race before! What if we’re destroying a microscopic species that could end up being a cure for some insane disease, or the answer to genetically modifying our crops in our colonies to survive in harsher climates? The payout would have to be ridiculous. I’m just trying to think of our future!”
“What, do you mean you don’t want to be a janitorial engineer forever?”
I gave Gonzales a look. “Look, all I want is you science-y folks to tell me if it’s a worthwhile idea or not.”
Ciangi was the one who answered first. “Technically it is a valid point. Although we are completely separated from the materials we bring on, we do run the risk that someway, somehow, something living could get into our stores and possibly have devastating effects were there to be some sort of leak to occur—such as the one you cleaned up. But the chances of that are astronomical and testing each and every ounce of material that we bring on would be incredibly expensive.”
“Really? We couldn’t make some sort of scanner or something and periodically send it through the tubes?”
Both of the engineer’s eyes widened. “Actually,” The blond murmured. “That’s not an entirely terrible idea. Impossible to implement at this point, but a patent of that…”
“Don’t even think about it.”
This time I managed not to jump or squeak as Bahn slid out from one of the consoles, ionic welder in hand. You think I would have realized where one coin twin was, the other was sure to follow.
…or be hiding there the entire time for a lovely little jumpscare. Perfect.
“What, I wasn’t thinking anything!” Ciangi exclaimed innocently.
“You’re telling me you weren’t just contemplating buying off Higgens for a small sum then developing his idea yourself to massive amounts of profit?”
The smaller woman blushed, her round cheeks puffing out. “Okay, maybe. But can you blame me?” Her bright eyes looked back at me a bit guiltily. “I would have given you like, a hundred thousand credits. I’m not a complete jerk.”
“I-it’s fine.” I stammered. “So there’s basically nothing to be done about it?”
“Not as of right now.”
“Alright, well here’s to hoping that we don’t get overrun by space zombies.”
“You read way too many retro-horror comics, you know that?”
“In your opinion.” I countered somewhat sourly. Now that there was no way to scan the rocks coming in through the tubes, I wasn’t quite sure what step to take next.
“Hey, coin-twins!” A voice boomed over their comms loud enough for me to hear it. “I just got a reading for a massive deposit of Eurodyne on a nearby asteroid cluster! Pull back the drills and get ready to relocate a half-click over.”
The comm clicked off and the room shared a collective eyeroll. “Does he have a volume that isn’t full blast and grating?” Gonzales grumbled.
But I was caught up in what he had said rather than how he had said it. “How did he know that?”
Ciangi raised her eyebrow. “Do you not know how our actual scanning system works?”
“We have a scanning system?” I asked sheepishly.
“Yeah, how else do you think we decide which systems to mine?”
“Um… whatever’s in our path?”
Gonzales laughed outright and Bahn cleared his throat, finally standing from where he had been lying under the console. “No. We do have a scanner in the bridge. Headquarters sends us a message of whatever ore or material they want us to focus on next, then Giomatti places a sample of whatever they want in our scanner. From there it detects any large deposits of said whatever and we go there.”
“Oh…” I murmured, the wheels in my head slowly turning. “So, whatever you put in there, it’ll tell you if there’s anything like it nearby?”
“Yes, that about sums it up.”
“So, if you put like… human flesh into it, it would tell you if there were any other humans around?”
“Haha, no. I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. But it would tell you where deposits were of all the different materials that are in human tissue. So iron, calcium, carbon, depending on what kind of sample you’re using. If you wanted to specifically find only humans, I suppose you could narrow the scanner to search for exact percentages of certain elements in relation to each other, but that would be incredibly tedious to plot out all those algorithms. That would take weeks to figure out.”
“Really? Why’s that? It seems like the kind of thing that you could plug and chug with some buttons.”
Now it was Ciangi who gave a short laugh. “Not even close. You would have to not only create an algorithm for every single element in the sample, but an algorithm for every element in relation to every other element.”
“That’s… confusing.”
“You’re not kidding.”
I set my mouth in a firm line. It might be impossible, but I was pretty sure I knew what we had to do to get Mimi back to her people. “Since we’re getting ready to go to a new area, I’m going to go do a checklist run to make sure everything’s still alright. I’ll catch y’all later.”
“Later, Higgens.” Gonzales said with a little salute. “This was fun. You should come hang with us normal folk every now and then.”
“Haha, yeah, totally.” I agreed nervously before backing out of the door and walking quickly to the elevator. As the doors slid closed, I tried to order my thoughts so I could communicate to Mimi effectively.
The lift doors opened and I quickly shuffled out. As fast as I could, I opened my door, slid in, then watched it shut behind me.
“I need files of your staff.”
I yelped, breaking my streak of not sounding like a complete and total coward. I just hated loud noises, was that so wrong?! “What?”