The Information Paradox

Chapter 5 - The Discovery [part 1]

A few standard days later after their very profitable trip to the rim, and now deep into the long lunar night, Kira was back at the lowest level of the newly discovered gallery in the old ice mine. She was operating the newest and largest of the fusion-powered digging machines. The managers of the mine, in consult with their engineers, had determined that a careful excavation consisting of a few horizontal bore holes into the massive ice wall should be completed before further excavations could begin. The amount of ice mined from this site in the low Lunar gravity well could be worth trillions of credits as water, oxygen and hydrogen exported to Mars, the Belt and to Earth-based exploration concerns. It was possibly one of the most valuable finds in the solar system.

The Big Beast as they called the massive machine had been chewing through the beyond ancient ice at the lightning-fast pace of over one meter per hour when the proximity alarm alerted and stopped the rotation of the cutter wheel. Multiple alarms sounded and forced an automatic halt to the excavation program and the machine ground slowly to a halt. The sensors were designed to stop and alert the operator of changes in the strata from ice to rock and to stop when any void was detected by the Lidar sensors or a magnetic field from any metallic object.

Kira checked her readouts and was puzzled at first. The comp indicated solid water ice at minus 40 degrees centigrade which was within a few degrees of the average in the deep part of the mine. What the machine's rudimentary AI had stopped for was an object less than one meter from the workface. Whatever it was, was on the other side of the block of ice that had been there for a very long time. Kira looked at the readings again and thought for a moment. She knew that the predecessors to the current Chinese Hegemony, the CCP had landed probes of the lunar South Pole 50 or 60 years before the People's New Revolution. She knew however, that none of those small, crude robotic probes could bore through more than a few meters below the surface. The metallic object she had discovered was more than a kilometer below the mean lunar surface and frozen in a block of ancient ice at least 100 meters thick. She looked at her readings one more time and tapped her comm panel. "Mine Control, Digger One. Sensors show a hold for, ah, some kind of buried object."

From a few thousand meters above her, the response from the control room came over her comm system. "Say again Kira, confirm you are on Nav program gamma-6 in ice gallery #3 in the new borehole?"

From inside her hard suit, Kira rolled her eyes before responding. "Roger that Control. I'm right on the bore line, coords are tunnel #3 Alpha, 220 meters from the main gallery, depth readout shows 1,169 meters from the surface datum."

"Copy all. What again was the alert for?"

Kira paused, took a deep breath and repeated the content of her first message. "Like I said Control, the sensors showed a large metallic object less than one meter from the cutter face and shut the unit down."

There was a long silence on the comm band and then Kira shrugged. "I could just override the safety cutouts, but I think that would probably be a bad idea. Maybe you guys should come down here and take a look."

Kira's supervisor on that shift was an old Earther named Wang-Ho who had been at the Lunar South Pole base for as long as anyone could remember. Everyone always joked about Ho and Ko on the same shift. Within an hour, the woman who was somewhere between 65 and 80 standard years old made it to Kira's work site. She and her assistant arrived in a non-pressurized four-seat utility vehicle with several pieces of equipment secured in the cargo area. The little machine looked like a child's toy parked next to Kira's giant tunneling unit.

The short woman unstrapped from the driver's seat and stepped up to Kira. "So, M. Ko, what have we here?"

Kira took a sip of warm reclaimed water from a bite nipple in her helmet. The water did not taste good and as she had been in her hard suit for the better part of 12 standard hours, the smell of the air was not great either. "Hard to say exactly. I was cutting the long access tunnel on this plane just at the lower level of the void in the cavern beyond that ice wall. Anyway, like I said before, all of the sensors went off-scale right and commanded an auto-shutdown for a large metallic object."