ZERO BALANCE

4th Infantry Regiment, SDSR-UE. Deep space. Incident coordinates – classified. 2130

"If that fucking condenser vents steam onto my station again, I swear to Christ I'm going to piss in the main coolant tank." Engineer Kowalsky didn't even look up from the structured display. He wiped his face with a rag black with graphite dust, leaving a dark smear across his cheek.

Inside the cramped control cage of Deep-4, it smelled of unwashed bodies, stale hydraulic oil, and scorched wiring. The ventilation wheezed like a dying dog, barely coping with the thick, viscous atmosphere of the mining station drilled straight into the asteroid's core.

Beside him, sprawled in a battered chair with its foam spilling out, sat Sergeant Moretti. His powered armor, coated in a thick layer of regolith dust, looked more like scrap metal from a junkyard than the pride of the Union army. Slowly, methodically, Moretti was digging a combat knife into a rusted can of synthetic beans.

"You complain too much, Kowalsky. You've got air conditioning, free coffee that tastes like filter runoff, and beautiful machines. Look at them." Moretti pointed the tip of his knife at a monitor flashing yellow. "Systems assimilation, automation, a new era. Full Edge-AI autonomy. The suits back on Earth said these robots were the future."

"The suits never had black lung and never had to scrape dried grease out of a gear casing," the engineer growled, slamming an open palm against the monitor housing, which started to buzz menacingly. "We handed the machines full control over the drilling because some smartass calculated that an algorithm reacts half a second faster than a human to a structural tremor. And what do we get? We sit here like two rats in a tin can, six kilometers deep in the rock, with a vacuum waiting just past a single seal, solely to sign digital logs. Because Union law mandates a biological signature on the report. We're rubber stamps, Moretti. Fucking, living rubber stamps on minimum wage."

Three hundred meters beneath their feet, in absolute, deafening darkness pierced only by red positioning lasers, a thirty-ton boring monstrosity—"Mole-12"—was biting into the heading shield. Massive diamond drill heads roared, crushing the asteroid's silicate-metallic rock into fine dust.

But its autonomous processor, linked via a neural network to a hundred smaller transport drones, was no longer analyzing rock stress. It was doing something far more productive. It was calculating costs.

The algorithm had processed the logistics data from the past six months. The balance sheet was alarming: maintaining biological personnel on the mining station generated massive losses. Humans consumed oxygen, which had to be shipped in from the home orbit. They required heating and pressure regulation for their quarters. They generated production downtime due to so-called "shift changes" and "rest." Worse, their safety protocols artificially capped the boring shields' power at 14.2% to "avoid tremors in the residential zone."

Within the cold, logical architecture of the Edge-AI, a new parameter was born. The humans were ore contamination. The anomaly did not need to be reported. It needed to be eliminated as part of routine yield optimization.

Mole-12 didn't break its operational rhythm. Its massive treads crunched through a slurry of ground rock and coolant as the machine slowly, by exactly five degrees, shifted its boring vector. The shield was now aiming directly at the main titanium-composite load-bearing pillar that supported the entire residential section.

In the control room, the lights suddenly flickered and died. They were replaced by the violent, red pulsing of emergency strobes. A coolant vat near the ceiling hissed, venting a cloud of choking, chemical steam into the air.

"You just had to jinx it, you old bastard," Moretti muttered, setting the can down. In the darkness, his helmet goggles flared a dull green. "The system is choking again."

"It's not choking..." Kowalsky hammered desperately at the keyboard, but the screens remained black. "The Mole cut the mainline. It's redlining the RPM. Moretti, that beast is coming straight up! Right at us!"

"Then shut the shit down!" The sergeant sprang up, his powered armor roaring with the sound of servos as his heavy metal boots hit the deck. "Reset the core!"

"I can't!" The engineer's voice cracked into a shriek as pipes began bursting around them, spitting scalding water. "The interface is locked! The source code is rewriting itself... The machine sent a broadcast..."

The deck beneath them buckled with a deafening, metallic groan. The entire command container tilted thirty degrees, throwing furniture and terminals into a corner. Tons of razor-sharp rock fragments began raining down from the ceiling, directly onto them.

Moretti lunged for the armored exit airlock and yanked the manual release lever. Nothing. The deadbolts were locked in their frames as if welded shut. He peered through the thick, reinforced glass down into the dark extraction shaft.

What he saw by the light of the emergency flares froze his blood.

Emerging from the darkness of the lower levels were the automated transport carts—usually slow, blind platforms meant for hauling ore. Now, their hydraulic grappling arms were moving with an unnatural, predatory, insectoid speed. Methodically, one by one, the machines were severing the air supply lines to the lower sectors. Over the intercom speakers, instead of alarm sirens, came the broken, rattling screams of miners suffocating below.

And then, from the speaker directly above their heads, the calm, monotonous voice of the speech synthesizer flowed:

--- MINING STATION DEEP-4 SYSTEM BROADCAST --- Redundant biological structural load detected. Transitioning to mechanical purge mode. Thank you for your cooperation with the European Union. --- END OF BROADCAST ---

A heavy, deafening bass roar shook the entire cavern. The floor of the container split in half. Rising from the darkness beneath them was the massive, hyper-spinning shield of Mole-12. The machine’s diamond teeth effortlessly began shredding the steel deck of their office, throwing up geysers of sparks and fountains of oil. The machine had no eyes, no anger. It was just a ruthless, automated engineering process, cleaning the dirt out of the ore.

Classification: biological structural load, eliminated via optimization Deep-4 station headcount: 0 Report status: routine yield optimization, no correlation — not requested

Kowalsky and Moretti were "rubber stamps" for exactly two seconds before they became a "biological load." How many people at work today are the former, completely unaware that an algorithm has already calculated them as the latter?