Company

The storm passed and silence settled again under the unrelenting sun. Sand stretched to the horizon, baked and glittering like tawny snow. The flatness made her eyes hurt; an endless beach with no water. She felt the sweat beading on her upper lip, on the back of her neck. She shook her head, reflexively blinking her eyes before brushing the sand from her arms. She hadn’t been afraid to come because she knew, in spite of all the reports, that deserts were alive. That she wouldn’t really be alone. You just had to know how to look. How to listen. But instead, it had been silent here. Utterly empty. 

“Weekly report complete.  Please respond with further instructions, 4R,” she sent. 

No response. HQ had been slow to respond lately.

“Please respond,” she tried again. Please respond. 

No response. She went to check on the compressor, mentally counting her rations.

It was lonely out here, she admitted, but deserts are solitary places. That’s why she’d come, after all, to the red rocks and wide-as-a-satellite-dish craters, as a technical supervisor for 4R Mining Company: to be alone. It was no more absurd than Vegas, if you thought about it. A city had no business being there, shouldn’t even have been possible, but the legendary Strip had been built all the same. 

She longed for a saguaro cactus to break up the landscape, spikey arms raised as if in greeting, like in the old animated TV shows. The flicker of beetle wings, dusty pelts of desert animals, and the whoosh-swoop of birds. She was part of the fourth expedition, the fourth desperate attempt to mine energy from the desert to feed the collapsing cities. If she was still enough, she wondered if she would feel the vibrations of the other workers, hundreds of miles away, carried through the thin, waterless desert air. She wondered whether if she could, it would feel like a heartbeat.

Oil, tar, lithium—sand always had treasure under it. Now, the treasure was the sand itself and the heat it stored; the deeper under the surface the better. Compressed sand meant compressed heat, and the all-natural battery pack would hold energy—as long as you didn’t need to transport it: sand was heavy, and moving it shook and dispersed the heat. But technology solves everything eventually; there’s always a new way to extract, a new place previously unreachable, virtual escapes to offset the real ones being mined. And they’d finally discovered sand that could hold the energy over time and distance. This desert held sinkholes of uniquely sticky and powdery dust that could be compressed even further, into large, efficient, transportable bricks with power holding for five years before slipping out. 

That was her job. Find a power source, and you get blue and orange neon lights blinking the shape of a cheap cowboy, a beam from the top of a pyramid, and climate-controlled gambling all night long. It’d been done before. Palm Springs had heavily-watered golf courses in the middle of the Mojave, for chrissake, in the middle of hostile desolation only somewhat less challenging than this. And there was motivation enough, since power was what was needed now, desperately. They’d been trying to harness the sun for over two hundred years, but hadn’t mastered storage and transmission beyond a few days and a few hundred miles. But here it was, right in front of them the whole time—the problem of storage solved. 

She heaved the solar-juiced, compressed-sand batteries; strapped them tight, grunting under the weight; and hauled the flat of bricks on the back of the rattling, slow beetle of a truck. She imagined the whining metal shocks were steel drums, beating a rhythm as she drove the battery packs to the shipping container and sent it back. Send often, keep the city functioning; this was her standing instruction, her purpose. Instead of waiting to send a big shipment which would be more, well, energy efficient. Even the cities were hand-to-mouth with power the last two decades. Most of the more remote regions had been self-power-only for over fifty years now. The great power lines installed across countries, bringing electricity to farms and faraway villages, mere rusting skeletons. Copper wire and cable stripped and sold as soon as they were installed. Scavengers. 

There had been the shadow lately. The golden shiver, out of the corner of her eye. Couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but something tingled just under her skin, put her senses on alert, more than the whisper of wind or shift in heat and light, and made her feel not-quite-alone, but not-quite-being-followed either. She shook it off. She’d taken to dancing in the night. Because she could. Under the open sky, her breathing echoing in her ears as she panted, hot in the cool of the night. 

HQ had been silent for about a month now, if she had to guess. Usually, they sent a message weekly. It took significant energy to get a message out, even for a multi-national resource extraction agency. Even one who’d pinned their hopes for energy on this infinite desert. HQ had rules, but she had her own rules out here. Rules were important: hydrate every three hours, sleep a minimum of six out of every twenty-four. She’d worked too long once, without enough water, and ended up with a fever—sunstroke, she guessed—slept for hours, or days, and it’d thrown her off. She’d tracked time through journal entries, marking the sun’s journey, counting the numbers that made days, weeks, months. With the nights freezing and the days hot, seasons were meaningless, so numbers were her lifeline to food rations, water, communications. And sleep. But the power had stuttered off for one terrifying minute, and when her backup generator lurched on, the data had been wiped. She’d re-started, but was never quite as confident in her record-keeping. Never quite as sure she’d slept enough or eaten on schedule. 

With no word from HQ, she forged on. Drilling. Packing. Shipping. Her long hair dripped with sweat and as she counted her remaining rations, she wondered if she should keep some energy for herself. The thought a flicker dancing across her consciousness. 

Sometimes the feathery dunes seemed to shift with her mood. She spied a puff in the distance. The air was thin—the altitude, she chuckled to herself—and winds came quickly. With nothing to slow its path, the sand swirled faster than wildfire, a raging, lonely howl pelting everything in its path into submission. 

She scrambled into her shelter. Wondered if the cowboys from Reno’s neon signs would recognize her life. A packet of freeze-dried curry cooked in micro-waves instead of a can of beans over a wood fire, a cold night staring out at ink-dark sky. The stars felt closer here. Probably just that back home the buildings blocked the sky; high density housing to manage the population, factories, even schools had gone vertical over the last decades, climbing dozens of stories up. Open sky was a luxury. Air free of the acrid weight of piss, smoke, exhaust, factories, and heat was a large part of why she’d come. Why she’d gone through months of training on the sand-drop drill. Weight training. Programming she knew from her coding work, but the transmission hacks for the harsh climate had been new to her. Driving the cargo truck. Rigging the pullies. She’d made it through the program. Submitted to a battery of mental health exams, to see if she could handle being alone. As if she, or anyone, had any concept of what alone could be anymore, with ninety-seven percent of the population jammed into high rises and transport tunnels, always breathing the smell of other bodies, always hearing the coughing, screaming, breathing of others a thin wall away. 

She needed to see it, smell it. 

The vastness. 

Emptiness, open land, was something she couldn’t believe existed. 

But here she was, swallowed by it. And the sand covered everything. It had become part of her. At night, she stomped her boots at the door, banging them together to kick off the sand to the beat of whatever song was in her head that night. She scooped sand out from between her toes with the flat of her thumb, used the flat knife-edge to scrape it from under her rough fingernails, sneezing as it crept into her nose. She guzzled her ration of water almost immediately as the grain dust trickled her throat. She was constantly exfoliated, her hands smooth from brushing off the endless rough grains that managed to creep in despite her rigorous efforts. She’d given up trying to wash it out of her hair. It became part of her, like her skin. Sand and skin flaked off in equal measure.

When the first update from HQ was a week late, she figured it was just another power outage in the city. It’d been happening more frequently when she left. Protestors swarmed the power stations once in a while, and it took days to reclaim the stations without further damage to the aging structures. They’d check in once they took possession again. Never more than about a week. Now six weeks had gone by—or was it seven?—and the last note sent from HQ had been short. “Done now.” She’d waited for more, but there had been nothing.

She rummaged through her supplies, cleaned her shelter, took inventory. Rations definitely low. She was overdue for a drone-drop of supplies. Or was her tour actually over? Was she waiting for pickup?

There were six of them in this fourth expedition, dropped four hundred miles apart across the vast expanse, each with their own set of shelter, provisions, tools, and a truck. Part of the latest billionaire’s plan to save humanity from itself. Everyone knew resources were finite, but no one wanted to be uncomfortable, to live smaller. Make do with less. There were always new places to mine resources, people willing to extract for cheap. Until it wasn’t cheap, but there simply weren’t other options. Harvest energy. Store energy. Send energy. It was indefinite, thus a solo operation, to maximize supplies. So much was automated—the builder for cables, the mapping drone—you didn’t need a lot of bodies. Each of them in the expedition had their own broadcast dish that sent their communications to HQ. She wondered about the others, out past her field of vision, even with the telescopic binoculars. Wondered what would happen if she went searching for them. You’d end up lost in the endless sand. Lost and alone. HQ didn’t share the coordinates of the other stations. She didn’t know which direction to start searching, which frequency to search. 

Still, sometimes she called out, at night, into the darkness. Sometimes she listened to see if they were calling, too.

Rusted metal from previous expeditions littered the sands here and there. Oxidized orange, they blended into the landscape at odd angles. Giant blades, from the wind turbines the second expedition had installed before they’d realized that in spite of the re-enforced steel that should have withstood it, the wind, every third storm—or was it fourth?—came too strong, abandoned like wagon wheels left across the Rockies from settlers looking for resources centuries before. When the winds blew apart the turbines, the blades had landed on the shelter: 4R believed the team had been killed instantly. The third expedition had simply disappeared, possibly buried in a sandstorm. That’s why she had rules. Hydration. Sleep. Journal. Not that any of those would protect you from falling turbines. Still, structure gave her comfort, and the knowledge that her existence was recorded, even if only to herself.

“Please respond, 4R,” she tried, another missive into the abyss.

No response. 

“Please respond.” She was a month past re-supply if she was counting her remaining rations properly. Please respond. Maybe she really was past the end of her tour. Please respond. Still no word from HQ. Please. Not even a billionaire coming on the airwaves to save humanity. She scanned for the other work camps. Anyone? Nothing. She couldn’t imagine being entirely alone. 

Except. Except something had definitely been following her. That morning, she’d noticed a shift in the slope of the dune. A pileup of sand near the shelter entrance. She wasn’t scared. Not exactly. More curious. Cautiously curious. It was puzzling; there were no canyons, no boulders, no outcroppings to cast shadows, to shift with the moving sun. Just the ocean of coruscating solar panels that powered the station, the truck, and the silo where the brick-like blocks of smushed sand waited for her to ship back, hoping they didn’t get intercepted and stolen on their way to HQ. If there was anything left of HQ. 

What else was there to do but keep going. What was the power for in the end, and—the thought a shadow—what was this extraction doing to the thing that was now, apparently, keeping her company?

It’d been days since she’d sunk the compression silo. She’d spent weeks with the Unmanned Ariel Vehicle—un-person-ed ariel vehicle, she thought to herself, annoyed that even with all their advances, one extra syllable meant language stubbornly refused to evolve—mapping the landscape. The person-less machine mapped under the landscape, its radar showing her depth, temperatures, and eventually a spot where the sand was denser than usual: the treasure she was here for. The sinkholes would make the bricked batteries to hold and store heat energy. It had taken three days to load up the truck with the drill compressor, her tool kit, and spare parts, drive it out, set up the solar panels to power it, and turned it on to drill down. Sand covered it almost immediately—a golden powder that vibrated, dancing over the slow drop of the machine inching deeper and deeper below the surface. 

She’d shoved flags in a circle around the drop site to mark the area. They stood like Stonehenge. She stood in the center, over the self-burying container holding heat and sand, feeling the ground move beneath her feet. It was against company rules to stand within the circle where the machine was working, but her weight was nothing compared to the weight closing over it already. Still no word from HQ. Maybe the protesters had taken over at last. Maybe this time the power hadn’t come back, and there was nothing left back home. The vibrations hummed and rippled through her body. The desert felt alive, the sand was flittering, as if awake. Not the swirling mad frenzy of being pushed by the winds, but frolicking, singing, inviting her. 

A voice, at last, in all the emptiness. Maybe it was the echoes from the other stations, the other miners shouting into the darkness, their voices captured and carried, their lives in the grains blown to her. Or maybe they, too, were already gone. The voice jumped and wiggled. Like all desert sands, it contained stories: of beetles, of desert creatures, of riches just beneath the surface. The sand would tell her the stories, if only she would pay attention, if only she would be willing to hear its language. After all, she knew how to listen to the desert, had even spied the secret shadows whispering to her around the corners. 

She smiled as she slid back into the dusty, over-used truck, the vibrations still pulsing through her. She should be afraid, but she wasn’t. She had come here to be alone, but with no word or supplies coming from HQ, with no signal from the other expeditions, the solitude was overwhelming. Vast. Endless. There was one resource left. And it was for her alone. Not for the cities, or for the other workers. The sand had been here for eons, not lifeless or inert but blazing; full of heat and charged with energy and longing for company. It was awake, and she would accept the overture—meet the sand face to face. It was calling to her, a song on the wind instead of silence. With no home left, she gave in to her new one.

Inside the truck, she unscrewed her helmet, the 4th Rock Mining Company logo staring back up at her as she stripped off her protection suit and pulled off the thin moisture-wicking base layer. As she opened the truck’s door, her breath was pulled from her, through her body and into the dancing sand, as she stepped, naked, into the shimmering Martian expanse.