The Two Seasons of Arthur Scargill by Frank Sonderborg

 

The Flash is peak Season on the mining planet Arthur Scargill. In the Antares System, 500 Million light-years from our home base.

Arthur Scargill swings dangerously close to the sun. The intense solar gravity stretches the planet's crust, triggering massive global volcanic eruptions. The air fills with Flerovium (element 114) and Copernicium (element 112) gases. The essential building blocks of our spacefaring civilization.

Our harvesters run at 100% capacity, skimming the atmosphere. Collecting our priceless cargo. Big bonus credits on the way for everybody. Happy days.

Then the season changes to, The Deep freeze: The planet swings far away into the freezing dark of space. Mining stops, and we await the return of, The Flash season. If the harvesters haven’t suffered to much degradation or need to be replaced, we can move them to either of the other Flash mining planets, Herbert Hoover or George Hearst.

We ship the collected and extremely volatile Flerovium and Copernicium back through our local Interstellar Kugelblitz wormhole, using Tokamak storage containers.

Flerovium is the perfect medium for stabilizing entangled particle pairs and is used for instantaneous communication across the galaxy.

Its heavy atomic weight also makes it, In the form of stealthy Smokey Dark Mirror hull armour, the ultimate defence against cosmic rays, pulsar radiation, or weaponized plasma.

The outermost hull layer is the Flerovium Dark Mirror, to absorb scanning, thermal heat, and laser fire. Directly beneath that stealth film sits a pressurized layer of Liquid Copernicium, waiting to harden and swallow the blow of any kinetic weapon

Copernicium can also be used to trigger a Kugelblitz, from which a Schwarzschild Drive is created, which, fed enough matter, will provide limitless energy, for starships or cities.

To be upgraded from a Scargill CopFlero mining engineer to the Architects A team, is the bonus I’ve all ways chased. Arthur Scargill will get me the last few credits needed. And then it’s the ‘Kugelblitz Forge Institute for Energy Architecture,’ for this cephalopod. Designing better Kugelblitz Networks was always the ultimate end game for me. I’ve got a talent for it. And I’ve submitted my fair share of papers to the Institute to ensure they knew who I was.

I’ve drive’s full of elaborate designs for more efficient Kugelblitz Networks. Involving cloaked quantum-energy hubs. Each a network of Flerovium processors managing an array of Kugelblitz reactors. My networks would efficiently beam more energy across space via quantum-entanglement channels, directly to our space colonies, starships, and automated mining bases. Entirely invisible, completely mobile, and invulnerable.

There is nothing to stop our advance across the Galaxy. And I, a sentient metal cephalopod, want to be part of that adventure.