The Gone.

A miner's body could only be sturdy.

It had been engineered to resist possibly the harshest conditions the outer solar system offered, day and day again.

A skin of steel. One that would resist the impact of ballistic debris, which in the absence of an atmosphere would inevitably descend at the speed of bullets.

A modified liver. One able to fight and filter numerous cancer and imperfections that arose from stellar radiation.

Mighty muscles and bones, ones capable of resisting the terrific forces that lurked in these plains.

Powerful lungs, ones able to hold breath for hours if not days within the vacuum.

Unholy resistance to negative temperatures. Somehow strong enough to resist temperatures uncannily close to absolute zero... Yet of what use was it all?..

I could feel the weight of the snow on my chest, slowly flattening my body with each passing moment.

The icy coldness seeped into my bones, numbing my senses, and making it harder to think rationally.

Bitch...

I thought as I realized something particularly sharp and cold had dug into the lower side of my thigh.

The toughest part of a miner was always his skin... It insulated and protected us like a thick layer of Kevlar would block a bullet.

It was painfully obvious at that point, losing that insulation would greatly speed up the rate at which I was losing heat.

I didn't know how much time had passed since I got buried under this mountain of hard ice, but it felt like it had been hours already.

Should I maybe start counting the seconds? See how much time I can hold on to this...

I thought. Struggling to keep a decent sense of humor in this situation.

At least... At least my oxygen reserves were still good. If the main components had resisted the damage, then I should be good for a few more hours.

After all my air was empty... I would need to take a deep breath off the emergency container stuck on the left side of my waist.

'The day you had to open one of those would be your last.' The miners at the base often said.

Those cans were only meant to be used in emergencies. If for whatever reason oxygen supplies failed or were depleted, we would have a red can at hand. An almost indestructible container, storing a good amount of cryogenic oxygen.

You would be able to take a few long sips out of it before it ran out, but its contents could do miracles.

Holding normal air in your lungs would only get you to survive outside for a couple of minutes at most.

Pure oxygen, although extremely toxic in the long run, would maximize our ability to survive bare-handed in the vacuum of space, expanding our immediate livelihood from mere minutes to hours, some even days.

Sadly, my prolonged-misery plan had a critical failure point. Could I reach the can though?.. Was it still there?

If for whatever reason the answer to any of those questions question was 'no'. Then I would be done for sure.

| Nevermind. |

I closed my eyes. Letting my mind find delight in traveling to other, faraway places. In another situation, I may have thought differently, but right now I didn't care that much.

Until the familiar low-life-support-alarm decided to start blaring in my ears, until then, I would let myself remain ignorant...

Strangely enough, I remember memories of a far-gone past came flooding back. I was overwhelmed by an inexplicable urge to remember my origins. To remember where I came from before it all vanished.

In the past... Humans did have those people called a father, and a mother. Well, just like all the miners that had stepped on this moon, I was born without parents.

Brought into the world by the gentle care of an artificial whom. A glorified plastic bag had been my mother, and a general human supervisor would have been my father. Maybe.

Those were merely the rumors the colony of miners had heard and shared over the decades. None of us had actually seen or remembered any of that.

Our memories would always reset at ages three to six. Genetically coded or artificially implanted, it didn't matter. Whatever happened before the day we were brought to the surface, be it inhuman torture, or plain bliss, we would not remember.

Our first day alive was always the day we were brought to a base.

Strangely enough, I... All of us would recall that particular moment with a lot of vividness and detail.

The particular bumps in the snow as they took me in arms, the way the capsule landed on those gelid fields, and how it took off to the skies, leaving behind nothing but a thin trail of smoke. Everything was recorded in the memory to the very last second. The faces, the smiles, the joy.

Especially those that were not there anymore, everything that happened that day lay at a time-still, in my mind.

...

It was a common occurrence, we always came empty, undernourished, and weak.

So the first thing we did was feed the young ones, we would get them warm, and happy.

It did never change, our first job was always to get a smile out of them. For some reason, I understood it right under that mountain of ice.

For workers meant to die in horrible ways, frozen alive, holed open, crunched to death. Why not smile?

...

I said before I had no family, no parents, but that was an ugly lie to tell.

The truth was the miners had always been my family, my blood, and my people. They had always been and always would be.

I had found a father figure in Karl. An old expert in diagnostics who took me under his wing and, taught me everything he knew about machines. He showed me how to do my job with scrupulous precision and unending patience.

He never once gave up on me, not even after he died.

I had found my sisters in Tamm, and Cass. Those two had shown me how to survive out in the cold. They had run me on missions and showed me how to thrive in a place where few people could.

They had been my best friends throughout all these years.

Kev. I also remember meeting Kevin.

Despite having come from another faraway base, his simple silhouette had been enough to inspire us in our darkest times. He had been the pillar of our people for these last four years, and for that, I would always be grateful.

Lastly, Mar' and Mack. Those two...

Those two have been a pain in my fucking ass for so long that I shouldn't even remember them anymore.

...

Mmmhg...

There were very few times I ever let myself get emotional, but I couldn't help it. I started crying.

| Shit, nohw. |

I crunched on my side as best as could and let myself cry like a baby. We had seen countless miners die, and few of their corpses ever were brought back.

Every single time it happened it was an indescribable blow, yet it occurred so often.

We had laughed, mourned, cried, and smiled together. We were a tight-knit family, we had each other's backs, no matter what, that was what we would often say.

Yet when it mattered... When it really did, we were never there on time. And then someone died. It happened with Karl, with Marla, with Sack, with Sunny, with little Snowy, with old Pam, and with countless others.

It repeated time and time again, and each time it was devastating just the same way.

Now, it was my turn. Our turn to vanish and never be found.

If they had survived the suicidal assault down the moons, then I really wished them strength to move forwards. I wished they would not be sad when I died, that would really haunt me.

I wouldn't want them to relieve that trauma again. I really wished Kev and the two younger ones had had better luck than I did.

As I lie here, buried under the snow, I realized those memories were all I had left with me.

My body had already become unresponsive, my lungs shook, unable to act because of the gelid cold creeping through my flesh.

The oxygen didn't matter, the leaking heat from my insides would be the one to kill me.

...Any last words?

I asked myself as my tears froze along my cheeks.

[ Thanks. Thanks- for everything, It's been great. ]

If they were still somewhere under there. If communications managed to pierce through meters of rock and ice... Then, I hope they could listen to that.

| Karl, know that I didn't cry... |

He was watching. Every one of them was... So I let go. I closed my eyes, and I allowed my body to shut down.

Then I had a dream... I dreamt of something shout-

[ YO-shhU ARE WELCshhh-OME KIDDOshhh!!! ]

Noisy, distorted, inaudible.

My eyes opened like party balloons, they darted around in the darkness of my helmet, trying to search for-

[ HOLD-shhh ON!!! BREATHE SLOW!!! ]

My head cocked left as best as I could. Was the wall-? Was the wall talking to me with Kevin's voice?

[ Kev, is that- you! ]

I found the strength to communicate.

[ SURE AS HELL MOTHERFUCKER ]

Miners were said to hallucinate badly when subjected to deathly circumstances, some of the components integrated into our brains seemed to liberate large amounts of LSD when close to death.

[ WE ARE NOT LEAVING WITHOUT YOU OR YOUR CORPSE. BUT WE PREFER YOU ALIVE, SO HOLD ON THERE. ]

That was really Kevin though. That sounds just like what Kevin would say, his voice was becoming clearer, and the interference of ice was vanishing... That meant he was-

[ KID, WATCH OUT!!! YOU ARE GOING TO FEEL REALLY WARM IN A SECOND. ]

... Light.

As if aiming a flamethrower directly through a wall of ice, an incandescent flame shone through the complete and utter darkness of my underground coffin. Ice rapidly melt and filtered through the ground as my body rapidly started rapidly warming up...