Somewhere off the coast of Washington state, a refinery ship hums with activity. Deep below it, an automated fleet of mining drones scrapes and grinds at the seafloor, searching for the lifeblood of modern civilization - rare metals and Lithium. Buried in the massive cube of the refinery complex, an alarm panel sounds.

“What’s going on?” The supervisor asks, walking over to the man on watch.

He points to the status screen, “Looks like the number 6 miner dropped off.”

“Try switching it to manual control.”

The crew member taps a menu screen and rotates his chair over to a pair of joysticks, flipping a switch to activate the controls. He flips the switch back and forth a few times, and wiggles the sticks. “Nothing, it’s totally down.”

“Ok, it’s probably a power issue. Undock an ROV and let’s take a look.”

The crew member toggles another switch on the console, and a murky view of the sea appears on screen. He pushes the controls, and the ROV takes off from its underwater dock. It rapidly descends to the last known location, and he flips on the immensely powerful flood lights. Even with the blinding lights, the massive amount of silt kicked up from the sea floor limits visibility to only a dozen meters.

“This is the last known location, I’m not seeing it.”

The supervisor replies “Send a sonar ping, it might have kept rolling a little when it lost signal.”

“I think I see it way, way out there… and, it’s still moving. That’s not good.”

“Shit, We’re not far from the shelf edge.  We lose that down the dropoff and the fines alone are gonna make this whole operation a waste of time. Not to mention the cost of replacing a destroyed miner. I’m calling back to shore, try to catch up to that thing.”

The supervisor wakes up his boss, who then wakes up his boss, who calls up the response unit.

Within 15 minutes a helicopter is in the air.

Onboard, Katie Stewart prepares for the dive. She puts one final spit polish on her helmet and sets it on the seat next to her. The team of support personnel each prepare their portion - life support techs verifying oxygen and battery levels, cybernetics techs checking the prosthetic interface connections, the dive medic checking vitals.

One of the junior tenders walks the short distance to Katie’s seat and asks her, “Ready to plug in?”

“I’m ready, let’s roll.” She unclicks her seat belt and two of the support team lift her out of her seat by her safety harness, carrying her over to a tall metal framework hooked to a winch on the ceiling of the chopper.

In the center of the frame, what she considers to be the rest of her is suspended by two steel braces. They lift her up, and she grabs onto a bar near the top of the cage, doing a partial pullup to position herself onto her cybernetic interface connections.

She wiggles her reduced and modified hips a bit to settle in and align her interfaces to the cybernetic lower limbs, feeling the connections click in. One of the crew members rotates a pair of locks on each side and pins them into place, solidly connecting Katie as she clips the carabiners on her harness to the metallic ring that makes up where her lower limbs start.

The onboard computer inside goes through a quick self-test, and the eight segmented tentacles splayed out behind her onto the deck twitch slightly.

The cyber tech calls out, “Interface is up, moving to functions test.” Another crew member stands by each tentacle and counts off as Katie moves each tip up and down, then side to side, making sure all of them are in working order.

The supervisor hands her her small tool bag, which she clips to the chest of her harness and says, “Mobility check complete. Let’s get you flooded and pre-breathing asap - we’re coming in hot.”

“Sounds good, what’s the last depth of the drone?” Katie asks.

“Last we heard, it was about 120 meters and moving fast. If we don’t stop it soon, it’s going to fall over the edge, about 500 meters.”

“Shit, that’s deep.”

“Yeah, the crush depth on the drone is only about 250, so it'll be ugly.” The supervisor asks over his shoulder, “You guys got that pack ready yet?”

Two crew members walk over carrying a streamlined hard-shelled backpack between them, a bundle of hoses and straps in one of their free hands.

Katie holds her arms up, and the support crew clip the straps of the pack to her harness. They carefully clip in a pair of hoses to the webbing, and snake it around to Katie’s front as she hooks the heating system to her wetsuit top.

She unsnaps a flap from the front of her suit near the bottom of her breastbone, revealing two capped hose connections mounted to her ribcage. The dive medic standing patiently nearby rips open a sterilizing wipe, and carefully cleans the area. He uncaps the ends of the matching sterilized hoses from the backpack, and quickly inspects and hooks them to her chest ports.

Katie thanks him as she snaps the cover back down, and she rotates a switch on the pack. The familiar, warm and slightly woozy feeling of her blood being oxygenated and heated by the life support system returns as she straps on her wrist computer and puts the system into pre-breathe mode.

The techs grab her helmet and hand it to Katie, who unhooks the neck seal, pulls the helmet on, and locks everything in. She shakes her head around a little to make sure it’s secure and the tech verifies that the safety locks are engaged. He passes a hose from the pack to Katie, who connects the ends and gives a thumbs up to the tech.

The supervisor says “Final checks - any no goes?” The crew confirm their approval and the supervisor says “Clear to flood.”

Katie hits a button on her dive computer, and braces for the worst part of the process. The backpack starts pumping a biologically neutral perfluorocarbon liquid into the helmet, and although Katie is extremely practiced at this, every time still feels a little like drowning.

She forces herself to breathe in as the fluid reaches above her nose, and suppresses her natural urge to panic as her lungs fill up with liquid. She takes a couple slow breaths and tips her head up to purge the last of the air from her body, and then stops breathing entirely. The pack takes over for her lungs, and she’s ready to dive.

The supervisor checks everything one more time, and hits a button on his work vest. “Comms check diver 1.”

Katie looks up, engaging the eye tracking interface built into her helmet and types out, “comms ok. Ready.”

After waiting in the support frame for a short time, the supervisor calls out “One minute!” The crew hands Katie her gloves and straps into their seats as the chopper descends over the target area. A few moments later, the deck of the chopper splits open underneath Katie. She lets her tentacles dangle down as the door opens, hanging out into the open air.

She hits the thruster enable button on her computer, and tests the turbopump buried in the center of the pack, feeling like a muscle she hasn’t flexed in a while as she spins it up a few times and swivels the thruster through its range of motion.

A red light turns on above Katie, and the framework lowers rapidly toward the churned-up sea. A couple meters above the water, she reaches down and yanks on the pins locking her in place, immediately dropping her into the ocean.

She nimbly flips around and kicks on her thruster, using her body and tentacles to steer as she rapidly descends. Her grace and speed underwater always makes her feel like she’s returning home, and the sense of freedom is addictive.

At about 50 meters the water is pitch black. She flips on her helmet lights to try to see farther but it doesn’t help much with all the silt kicked up by the mining.

She turns on the rudimentary passive sonar built in her helmet, and picks up the pings from the ROV, off in the distance. She turns toward it, and messages the supervisor “Got the ROV. Be there in 5 minutes.”

“Sounds good, they should be pretty close to its position. Once you get to it you’ll need to get on the top rear of the machine, there’s a safety stop button in the cab - should be obvious, it’s the only button on the whole damn thing. Whatever you do, stay away from the front of it - we don’t know if it's still running its grinders or not. Also, we got the ROV operator patched into our comms, he should be able to talk you in.”

“Got it.”

As she approaches the ROV, hovering in the water just above the ocean floor, she stops in front of the camera and waves to the operator.

“Oh Shit! What the hell is that? Oh, it’s an adapt? I thought they were sending a hardsuit diver.”

Katie texts “Where to?”

Her supervisor says “He’s got voice comms only, she’s asking where to.”

“Ah, makes sense. Follow me!” The ROV thrusters spin up and Katie follows next to it, watching the sonar ping from the ROV reflect off something.

“This thing stopped taking commands from the main controller and just fucked off toward the shelf we’re working the edge of. If we can’t stop it, it’s toast. We also get fined if we mine even an inch beyond our designated area, so we get hit twice if this thing craters itself.”

They continue through the water, but it seems like they aren’t making any headway. The ROV operator says “Is that drone speeding up? Damn it - this thing’s too slow. Looks like you’re on your own from here, we’ll never catch it at my speed.”

Katie responds, “K, thx.” kicks her thruster to max speed, and brings her arms and tentacles in,  streamlining herself into an underwater bullet. The ROV continues to sonar ping, and she’s finally gaining ground on it.

In the near darkness, flying through the water at breakneck speed, Katie sees the distance in her sonar dropping rapidly. As she approaches, the sound of the mining machine becomes almost unbearable, and the display says it’s dangerously close.

Her light suddenly reflects onto something huge and metallic, and she stops her thruster, flips herself around and splays her limbs out to kill her speed. She hits the side of the vehicle hard, but not dangerously so, using her tentacles to absorb the shock and feeling around for anything to grab onto.

On each side of her landing spot, huge tank treads clank along at a surprising speed, doing their best to drive off the rapidly approaching cliff. Above her, a smokestack emits a gigantic plume of silt as it sifts out the valuable material. Katie shoots two of her tentacles forward, grabbing hold of a ladder and climbs up the side, fighting the current created by the machine plowing through the water.

The supervisor calls up “Hey Katie, that cliff’s awful close. If you need to abort the dive just let us know. They’ll be upset, but they’ve got insurance so fuck ‘em.”

She grapples her way up to the top, using her hands and tentacles to drag herself along, grabbing onto anything that offers a secure hold. Barely holding on, the edge of her lights hit a string of white and yellow retro reflective tape, and she climbs along the deck to a square pedestal with a small console. She climbs over a handrail, wrapping around it with all eight artificial limbs, and sees a glass cover hiding a huge red button with “EMERG STOP” engraved into it.

She opens up her tool bag and pulls out a shackle breaker, using the pointy tip to smash the glass and forcefully mashing the button down with her fist. The cacophony of sound quickly winds down as the machine’s power cuts out, and the visibility clears up slightly as the plume of silt dies out.

“Yeah! Nice!” The ROV operator yells over the comms, and she can hear a few people in the background cheering.

Her supervisor says “Nicely done, one more thing though. There’s a recovery buoy mounted to the top, and you’ll have to trigger it manually. It’s over by the chimney, should be on the left.”

Katie replies “Got it”, and searches around the deck for the container. She quickly finds the brightly colored box, and yanks the cover pin out of the top. The buoy begins inflating and rapidly ascends, pulling a thin cable upward.

With the water clearing up, she looks out past the front of the miner and sees the inky blackness of the drop-off only 50 meters in front of the machine, far too close for comfort.

“Done, heading back.” Katie uncoils her limbs from the structure and pushes off, kicking her propulsion into gear and leaving the crippled machine behind. She jets back to her pickup location, and slowly ascends back to the surface. The helicopter drops a hook to the water, and she connects her harness for the lift. She gives a thumb’s up, and the winch hauls her back into the cargo hold.

Once onboard, the crew helps her maneuver back into the support cage, locking her lower body back in place. She drains and removes her helmet, and a crew member holds out a bucket as she heaves and sputters the fluid out of her lungs, almost doubling over with the effort.

Once she catches her breath, the medical tech checks her vitals.  Once she’s breathing normally he helps her unhook her bloodstream connections to the life support system. The techs remove the backpack, flip the locks on her cybernetic connection, and she instantly loses feeling in her artificial lower half. Feeling much smaller and less capable now, the crew helps her back to her seat and hands her a towel.

“Nice job on that one Katie, if we had to wait for a hardsuit or submersible, we'd be scraping that thing off the bottom of the ocean in a million pieces. I guess we’d get paid for that also, but I’m all about the easy money.” The supervisor smiles and walks to his seat.

Katie clips herself back into her seat as the aircraft picks up speed, making its way back home. She watches out the window as the sea fades into concrete and glass.