2040-05-22 A Good Start

"No, that's partially fossilized hippo dung."

I invent because I cannot help it.—Beulah Louise Henry

The crash couch was level and stable under me, a welcome relief from the swaying helicopter ride and the intermittent drops and tilts of my robots' excavation. The task lights cast a balanced daylight over my work area, leaving the rest of the habitat's cluttered interior in shadow punctuated by instrument panel lamps and status indicators. No sound penetrated from the exterior; internally, speakers laid a muted symphony of jungle noises under the chortles, hums, and clacks of my lab equipment. The persistent tang of outgassing plastic and packaging was gradually being replaced by the dense green scent of the jungle overhead as the ventilation system labored. The glass in my hand was cool and smooth as I examined the water sample my testing had just cleared. I took a cautious sip. Excellent. No noticeable taste. Just cool, clear water, perfect for my needs.

Finding a plentiful source of clean water was such a relief that I had a letdown migraine. I had not had one of those in years and had not recognized the warning signs in time to prevent it. I took a painkiller, hydrated by drinking the rest of the sample, turned off the lights and dimmed the displays, and tried to sleep it off. With so much to do, it was difficult to empty my mind enough for sleep. I finally drifted off for a few hours.

The migraine was a much-needed reminder that I needed to take care of myself. I was in-country, on my own, far from any advanced medical assistance. If anything went seriously wrong with my health, my habitat would become my tomb. I would have to slow down and to explicitly incorporate self-care into my plans.

To that end, on waking I did a set of isometric exercises and yoga, using the cramped habitat space as fully as possible. I checked the air filtration to confirm that it was changing out the air in the habitat at least once per hour. The external ventilation for the ongoing excavation was pushing the radon-laced mix of gases to the surface, keeping it from infiltrating the habitat. Water from the new well had tested excellent, with no significant traces of heavy metals or other toxins.

The habitat would become less cramped as I spent more time in it. Even with dehydrated supplies, food and other consumables took up space. The more I ate, the more space I would free up.

The second half of the habitat was packed solid with raw materials and crucial elements that would be difficult to print onsite. As the excavation progressed, some of these materials would be incorporated into the underground facilities, while others would become part of the mobile surface construction systems. For now, most of it would stay packed away.

Fortunately for my plans, I was not readily susceptible to cabin fever. I had a long history of working in basement labs or fully enclosed industrial facilities, and I actually prefer the quiet and the moderated temperatures. People who have not spent time underground sometimes don't understand how quiet it gets. Almost all surface noise fails to penetrate more than a few feet underground. Large subsonic vibrations such as earthquakes and heavy trucks will penetrate, but not much else. Once I muted the speakers, the habitat was silent enough that my breathing was the loudest sound.

The temperature underground was a major advantage for me. Once you go more than a few feet down, the ambient temperature stays relatively steady around the average annual surface temperature. The daytime high temperatures in this part of the Central African Republic were almost unbearable and were having a significant effect on driving out the wildlife and the resident human populations. In my habitat, it was slightly warm, but bearable as long as the air kept moving.

That first month was busy, productive, educational, and frustrating, in equal measures. At times I was ready to tear my hair out and run screaming into the jungle, and at others I wondered if I could not have completely automated the project and supervised via satellite connection.

Looking back, I believe that most of my time was spent in fine-tuning the expert systems. Those had begun with my own customizations of open-source bootstraps. The individual modules were well established and tested. Soil mapping was valuable to everyone from farmers to miners to civil engineers, so the technology was mature and well understood.

One of my tweaks to the standard was a specific routine that could identify and extract rough diamonds. The basic module had been trained on boxes of sand and gravel with a handful of rough diamonds mixed in. That was, of course, a gross oversimplification compared to actual field conditions. I spent a lot of time doing the equivalent of saying, "No, that's a twig. No, that's quartz. No, that's partially fossilized hippo dung." It got old really fast.

I have to admit I was rather excited the first time the system delivered a rough diamond of marketable size. It was tiny and ugly and had a number of flaws and inclusions, but it was a real diamond and the system had picked it out of the background clutter. I put it in the container I had set aside for rough diamonds and went back to looking for other resources.

The soil map for the area around the habitat was evolving nicely. The probes were moving through the soil where possible. Surface probes explored in the jungle overhead at night. Sounding probes vibrated the bedrock. Put together and processed through multiple systems, the probe data built up a comprehensive view of the available resources. The cylinder of data grew outward daily.

At times, I was tempted to order the probes to follow up a particularly rich vein of one mineral or another. There is always a bit of gold fever, or silver, or molybdenum, or uranium, or whatever the miner is hungry for at the moment. I was just as vulnerable to these manias as the next person. One night I re-watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre to remind myself that that way lies madness.

Aside from picking up loose diamonds, I did nothing to extract any of the mineral resources yet. Extraction took significantly more energy than data gathering, and I was still hiding out. The hydrogen tank and fuel cells would power my habitat for a long time, but they could not power extraction activities for very long. Once I began the extraction, I would have to build visible power generation systems. That would lead quickly to my discovery by the locals. I needed to be ready for that, because I would not get a second chance.