196 Askadar had been mined for two years and still had over a million metric tons of ore to be recovered. The asteroid was pulled into Earth orbit in 2081 by the tractor ship Aegeus and once stabilized by attaching and activating six nuclear thrusters to keep it in the same orbit as the moon, a mining ship was launched from the lunar refinery on the rim of the Peary Crater. The crater itself is in shadow for most of the lunar day, but the rim receives nearly continuous sunlight and makes it ideal for the solar furnaces necessary to refine the minerals taken from 196 Askadar. Iron and the other common metals go to the ship fabrication sites on the Moon. Gold, silver, and platinum go back to Earth.
The first mining ship, the Browhudar, carried on it's nose a circular rasping plow a hundred meters in diameter that dug a circular ring into the flattest side of 196 Askadar. Once the resulting planar surface had been completed, the Browhudar backed away from 196 Askadar and returned to the space port at Peary Crater. The rasping nose was replaced with a hemisphere of steel and diamond glass with a docking station on the side. This hemispherical structure was designated by The Lunar Mining and Extraction Corporation as an Environmental Sustaining Enclosure, or ESE for short.
The Browhudar returned to 196 Askadar and placed the rim of the ESE into the rasped ring, and workers in EVA suits attached the hemisphere to 196 Askadar with two thousand iron/cobalt alloy anchor bolts. More workers sealed the rim with a cement mixture manufactured from lunar soil and water obtained from ice trapped in craters at the south pole of the moon. Once the seal was complete and inspected, the Browhudar disconnected from the docking station and returned to Peary Crater.
The next piece of infrastructure to be installed was a nuclear powered electromagnet secured to 196 Askadar on the side opposite that of the ESE. The large magnet would generate enough magnetic force to generate the feeling of gravity because of the boots the subsequent work crews and later on, the mining crew would wear. That same magnetic force would prevent any stray clumps of ore from the mine from floating around and potentially damaging the integrity of the ESE.
Container ships from the gas generation plant at the lunar south pole then brought a mix of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen to the hemisphere and filled it with an atmosphere suitable for human habitation. An automatic atmosphere controller with a carbon dioxide scrubber and reserve tanks of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen was started to maintain the appropriate concentrations of each gas once human miners occupied the ESE. It would also add atmosphere as the mine became enlarged. That let the miners work without EVA suits.
Another container ship and more workers installed two emergency escape pods in the side of the ESE at ground level. These were required by Earth law to have enough fuel and food to carry two people each back to Earth, and a further supply of food for a week in case the pod had to land somewhere besides a lunar spaceport. Normally, the inhabitants would go back to the moon if something happened to the ESE or to the asteroid, but there was always a risk that an asteroid explosion would make the moon bases uninhabitable. That had happened once in the early development of asteroid mining. A hundred and twenty three employees of LMEC were killed and it took five years and two billion in Earth currency to put the infrastructure back in place. There were another two hundred similar pods at Copernicus Space Port, Peary Crater and at the gas generation plant at the lunar south pole to evacuate all the lunar personnel should that become necessary.
Other ships brought materials and workers who established a habitat, storage facilities, and placed mining equipment inside the ESE. After six Earth months, 196 Askadar was prepared for mining activities. A ship docked at the ESE and unloaded supplies for three for a year and three men -- an asteroid mining engineer and two miners.
On that mining mission to 196 Askadar, they also unloaded a robotic sex surrogate. The psychiatrists of LMEC's research department predicted isolation from women for the year-long duration of the miner's stay on an asteroid would result in friction among the men and loss of productivity. The expense of transporting the miners from the ESE to the lunar colony on any sort of regular basis was prohibitive. The sex surrogate was the answer to that problem.
Lucy, as all sex surrogates furnished to the eighteen asteroid mining sites were named, was blonde, beautiful, and programmed to fulfil the needs of the miners. Her design had been developed after numerous studies of male preferences as to hair color, breast size and what the robot engineers had dubbed "tube constriction". That name meant they designed her sexual apparatus to automatically accommodate a range of male organ sizes so no miner would feel she was too tight or too loose.
Most miners were happy with Lucy at first. She wouldn't refuse any request and was available at any time. Although some miners wanted to indulge in her capabilities at the same time, most preferred to be alone with her. Lucy had her own quarters in the habitat to facilitate both requests.
After a year of mining though, many miners complained that Lucy's actions were becoming predictable and therefore boring. By the eleventh month of their stay on an asteroid, the miners were becoming easily upset and a few fights had even ensued. The engineers at LMEC increased Lucy's memory capacity and programmed an additional hundred thousand motions and responses into her database.
After the second crop of miners had served their term in the ESE's of the asteroids circling the moon, it became apparent that Lucy was still not an acceptable substitute for a human female. The miners complained about dryness and looseness. Examination of several Lucys revealed the mechanisms for lube dispensing and tube tensioning were somewhat prone to failure due to the number of components and the complexity of the assemblies.
The engineers at LMEC were still working on the problem when I was assigned to 196 Askadar as the asteroid mining engineer. My job was to instruct the miners where to drill, the size of the hydrogen/oxygen demolition charges to use and how to place them, and to inspect the quality of the ore removed from the asteroid. In addition, I was the man in charge of the operation, the third man who would mediate any disputes and the one who would control the schedule of the sex surrogate.
When we gathered at the spaceport at Copernicus, I assumed another Lucy would be accompanying us to 196 Askadar. I was surprised to see a slender redhead standing there dressed in LMEC issued coveralls. I figured they'd just changed Lucy's hair color for some reason. It looked like her breasts were a little smaller too, although it was hard to tell because the coveralls didn't fit her very well.
Before we climbed into the shuttle, my boss walked up and held out his hand. That was a little different, too. I'd never known Jack to go to the space port before a mining contingent left. I shook his hand and he smiled.
"Let's go in the conference room. I have some information you need to know."
When we sat down, he smiled again.
"Tom, you'll have to be careful up there with your demolition charges. When Robby came back last week, he said he'd seen fissures developing in the working face of the mine. He wasn't too worried about them, but he said anything much bigger than a hundred joules might cause them to open enough to proliferate. I don't have to tell you what that would mean. Just use your experience. Robby's only worked at a mine twice, so he may just be exaggerating due to inexperience.
"There's one other thing. I saw you looking at the redhead. She's not a sex bot. She's a real woman, well, as real as we wanted to make her. Her name is Barbara, and she's a clone, but with some important differences from an actual woman."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing as Jack handed me a thin booklet.
"It's all in this manual, but I'll give you the important stuff. She has memories we gave her from her childhood up until this morning. She thinks she was born on Earth in Idaho twenty years ago, and came to the moon with her mother and father when she was sixteen. We implanted images of her father and mother into her memory. They're just composites, but she believes they're real. She also believes they died two years ago.
"We gave her a strong libido by increasing her production of the required hormones, but didn't give her the ability to reproduce for obvious reasons. She'll be no different than any other woman as far as the complaints we've received from the miners from past tours.
"She can speak English, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Mandarin, so there shouldn't be any language difficulties, and to a certain extent, she can learn. Your men will have to teach her what they like, but she'll accommodate them once she learns what that is.
I ask Jack what "to a certain extent meant".
