Boris stands in front of the massive windows of his loft, looking down at the street below. There is a driving swirl of snowflakes, and he can barely see the street twenty stories below him. Sixteen days until he heads to his fourth mission in space. He looks at his watch, and then crouches down on his knees.
He says in a resolute fashion, to noone in particular : "Exercise. Soon you will be in zero G.. you will grow weak."
He manuevers himself into a push up position, and slowly starts doing pushups.
"One.. two... drei..."
He stops his set of pushups, and walks over to the sleek black glass countertop and picks up a magazine. It's dated 2041, and it's a mining industry magazine, written mostly by and for miners. Most wouldn't pay much attention to it, but everyone would immediately recognize Boris' interest in it. His picture is on the cover, along with the headline "Last Coal Seam in Western Europe Discovered!". Underneath it, in somewhat muted text, "Boris Anchova will unveil world's largest digger at the site opening".
He drops the magazine, and thoughts filled his brain. East Germany. Four years of searching, everyone desperate for any trace of fossil fuels. There were a billion people in the Eastern half of Asia who didn't have enough renewable infrastructure, and 2041 had the beginnings of the coldest weather in forty years. When Boris stumbled upon the seam by accident, it was almost a national celebration for Germany, and he was a hero almost everywhere. He'd found a seam big enough to fire back up the remaining fossil plants for almost ten more years. It is no exaggeration to think that a million people would be saved by this discovery.
In order to get production moving as fast as possible, the German government had created an excessively large machine, ones that made the likes of Bagger 293 look small. And he was going to be the one to drive it's massive buckets into the seam.
He looked away from the magazine in disgust. That was the past. Miners had no place on Earth anymore, as there simply wasn't enough of anything worthwhile. Even after his failure at the coal fields in 2041, he was still offered a job by the GSO to be one of the first extraterrestrial prospectors.
Boris silently takes a GSC coffee mug from the cupboard and prepares himself some tea, contemplating the snow outside.
Tomorrow there would be an interview with a prominent Moscow newspaper, and a few training exercises at the cosmodrome. This was going to be his longest mission.
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Topic: Mars Base RTD Turn:5 (Read 21020 times)