When people ask me where I’ve been for the last year, I always enjoy seeing the look on their faces when I tell them.
“Titan? That’s so far away. There’s nothing out there.”
“Wait, did you say they didn’t even pay you? I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”
“Oh, the helium-3 mines. I heard about that. Weren’t you guys kept in slavery?”
People who’ve spent their entire lives on-planet just aren’t driven. They don’t understand things like “growth phase” or “building resilience.” I’m only 30 years old and I’m worth €1.2 million. Or I was, before my assets were seized, after I’d been declared missing.
Now, obviously, mining wasn’t part of my skills portfolio, to start with. But when you put yourself out there and meet people from different walks of life, opportunities open themselves up to you. My opportunity came in the form of an unmarked pirate cruiser that intercepted the company craft en route to the Away Day on Ganymede. With blatant disregard for our itinerary, they fired a volley of harpoons through our hull and reeled themselves in, sending over a boarding party bristling with unsanctioned e-weaponry.
Those of us who survived the breach were put in chains and dragged over to their cruiser. They ripped out the harpoons, boosted away, and torpedoed the company craft into untraceable shrapnel from a safe distance.
Most people would have seen this as a setback, but me? I saw it for what it was: a paradigm shift.
After the onboarding process, they skipped the interview stage and posted me straightaway in their state-of-the-art helium-3 extraction facility on Titan. They must have seen my track record with closing out multi-million-euro contracts.
Even for a small start-up business like theirs, no expense was spared. Myself and the other survivors were given thermal vac-suits, flashlights, tungsten-tipped pickaxes, and shock collars for motivational regulation.
Employee motivation is so important. A happy chicken lays happy eggs. But a chicken that can lounge around without getting a hundred volts to the neck every time it thinks about slacking off? Why would that chicken put in the effort to lay any eggs at all?
We were dragged out of bed every morning at 5am, which lined up nicely with my executive sleep cycle, and pushed into icy cold showers. It’s always nice to see a clear appreciation for the obvious health benefits of a morning cold plunge! No dedicated time for meditation or team-building exercises, though: we were shuttled straight down into the heart of the mine. A lot of the others moaned and complained, especially the first few days. There were a fair share of nervous breakdowns and panic attacks. But what sort of image does that put forward? That we’re unable to cope with a simple change to the working environment? Adaptability is key. I swung that pickaxe like I’d been extracting helium-3 all my life. Talk about an icebreaker!
At the end of the day, that’s what’s truly important. Showing up. Even when you can’t physically get away.
It turns out that raw helium-3, once we supercool the rockface with cryo equipment and hack it out, is a superfluid. It’s a rare state of matter, and it innovates. Superfluids are like regular fluids, but flow regardless of gravity. You put some in a bucket, it will pour up the sides and out of the bucket.
Forget thinking outside the box; helium-3 escapes the box.
It’s a nightmare to handle, but it taught me a lot about motivation. If life puts you in a bucket? You superfluid your way out of there. And if life pickaxes a big pocket of you out of the substrate? You flow down the handle of the axe and smother the person swinging it, cryogenically freezing their air tank and shattering it, exploring the new and exciting gap.
(RIP, Eric from Sales, Jen from Payroll, and New Patricia.)
There were no lunch breaks — not even a power hour. They would let you use the bathroom, supposedly because it was cheaper than having to constantly clean out the soiled vac suits. We were normally rounded up and escorted back to our quarters after 12 hours or so, standard universal time, depending on how many of us had collapsed that day.
The thing about collapsing on Titan, or any other low-g body, is that it just looks overly dramatic. With gravity something like one-seventh of Earth’s, anyone fainting or falling to the ground would take several long seconds to get there, while the rest of the team and the black-masked site supervisor would stand there and watch. Of course, I’d keep on swinging.
Broadcasting how hard you have it doesn’t win you any points.
Broadcasting how hard you’re working does. Even if it doesn’t seem like they’ve noticed, they have.
When they say it’s time to stop? I say it’s time to start.
I would ignore the chimes that rang through the open comm channel in our vac suits at the end of each day, telling us to head back, that our shift was over. I’d keep on swinging my pickaxe, shepherding rapidly-escaping blobs of helium-3 into my cask, picking myself up off the floor after every shock they sent to my collar. Eventually, they’d send a supervisor down to hit me over the head and drag me back to the cells.
My advice? Be so good at your job that they have to physically stop you.
Of course, my efforts paid off, in time. The supervisors saw my efforts and eventually stopped coming to beat me when the other workers were led back. I’d be free to break up a few more yards of rock, fill another cask or two, before I packed up for the day.
They had expectations for me — I exceeded them.
They told me no — I told them yes.
They never said thank you, or gave me a raise (or paid me at all) — I didn’t ask for it.
When we were rescued, when a UNATO dreadnought blasted the area surrounding the mine with a category 6 EMP and sent shock troops in to execute our captors, all of my colleagues rejoiced. A few of them actually sobbed when those soldiers strode through the blast doors, the sea-and-stars flag blazing across their armor.
I gave them a nod and carried on digging.
They didn’t seem to understand. I don’t blame them. It’s easy to lose sight of the things that matter when you do the bare minimum that’s required. You can get lost in the day-to-day.
But when you push yourself? There is no day-to-day. One day, you’re closing a lucrative deal on the slopes of Olympus Mons, the next, you’re dragging the carcass of another helium-cracked teammate into the acid pits. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
When I refused to put down my pickaxe and leave my half-full cask behind, they had to tase me to get me onto the rescue craft.
As we cleared Saturn’s orbit and headed back to Earth, once my muscles were all working again, I asked to use one of the soldiers’ devices. I hadn’t been online since our capture, since our forcible reassignment. My first stop was our company’s website.
My position, all of our positions, had been filled. But when one door closes, another opens. I set myself as “Available for work” and updated my job profile.
August 2118 – July 2119
Resource Extraction Executive & Thought Leader, private contractor, Titan
• Provided front-line support, working independently to exceed daily performance targets
• Helped supervise a team of thirty eighteen, taking into account a complex range of ongoing workplace injuries
• Successfully negotiated with challenging stakeholders
• Improved and streamlined core processes to optimise workflow
I added a few more bullet points, then hit update.
I know it won’t be long before offers start coming in. Recruiters don’t want people who stop working at 4 and clock out at 5. They want people who keep swinging the pickaxe, figuratively literally, long after the rest have gone home. They want go-getters. They want people who won’t settle for second-best. They want people who won’t even settle for first-best! They want zeroth-best.
That’s me.
I’m your guy.
Are you hiring?
#workethic #leadership #thoughtleadership #marketing #newopportunities #success #marketing #networking #business
Dan Peacock is a writer from the UK. His stories have been published in F&SF, Cast of Wonders, and Metastellar, among others. You can find his work at danpeacockwriter.com. He lives with his long-suffering partner and daughter, along with a second-hand cat that doesn’t work properly.
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