Mine Drone Inc

Meeting your idol is supposed to unravel you. Most people turn into stammering wrecks, eyes wide, words tripping over themselves. Not me. When I shook hands with Dr. Marcus Tennant—the Marcus Tennant, the guy who’d turned asteroid mining from sci-fi into a trillion-dollar industry—I stayed cool. Maybe it was the coffee I’d chugged, or maybe I’d just rehearsed the moment too many times in my head. Either way, I kept my head, and that’s what opened the door. What started as a quick chat at a conference in ’62 stretched into hours, then weeks of late-night talks over glitchy holo-calls. We clicked—two gearheads obsessed with digging deeper, literally and figuratively.
One of those talks took a sharp turn into the future. We’d been bouncing ideas around, nothing serious, just riffing on his latest tunneling rigs—hulking machines that chewed through lunar regolith like it was butter. I tossed out a couple of wildcards. First: microwave beams paired with water injections to soften rock textures. Zap the material with focused waves, flash-boil the water into steam, and crack—the rock fractures, making boring ten times easier. Second: lasers scanning the tunnel walls in real time, breaking down the molecular makeup of the rock. Scientists could geek out over the raw data, sure, but the real gold was in spotting rare mineral deposits—iridium, lithium, whatever the market craved.
Marcus didn’t laugh. He leaned into the screen, eyes narrowing, and said, “Send me specs.” I did, scribbling notes on a tablet at 3 a.m., fueled by adrenaline and instant noodles. Six months later, the laser scanning idea was bolted onto his next-gen rig, the Tennant X-7. It wasn’t just a hit—it was a revelation. The lasers paid for themselves in weeks, pinging back data on mineral veins nobody knew existed. One mine in Nevada coughed up a platinum deposit worth half a billion, all because the beams caught a glimmer the old surveys missed.
That was the spark. Marcus’s team took the concept and ran, spinning off a fleet of drones—flying ones with buzzing rotors, multi-limbed crawlers skittering like spiders—to map every nook of every mine. By ’65, Mine Drone Inc. was born, a scrappy offshoot with me as a co-founder, though I still felt like the kid who’d stumbled into the big leagues. The drones didn’t just scan; they cataloged. Abandoned shafts on Earth, cratered pits on the Moon, even the icy outbodies—Pluto’s nitrogen mines, Titan’s methane veins—all got swept into our database. We hit 95% of the market share for mine-related drone systems, a number I still can’t wrap my head around. Investors started buying claims sight unseen, just off our data streams, bidding wars erupting over digital maps.
But we didn’t stop at renting out drones. Marcus had a vision: own the mines, run them ourselves. So we did. By ’68, Mine Drone Inc. was operating dozens of sites—Earth’s crust, lunar highlands, Martian chasms—using swarms of advanced rigs. Picture it: a ballet of machines, drills whirring, lasers flashing, all synced to a control hub on Phobos. That’s where the real magic happened. Our patented latency elimination tech—something I’d doodled on a napkin during one of our talks—cut signal delay to near-zero. A drone on the far side of Jupiter’s moons reacted as fast as if you were standing next to it. From our Phobos facility, a squat dome overlooking the rusty sprawl of Mars, Virtual Operators in VR rigs could steer a thousand bots at once, their screens alive with real-time feeds.
I’m Jax Carter, by the way—junior engineer turned accidental mining mogul. Marcus is still the face, the legend, but I’m the one who keeps the gears turning. Last week, I walked the Phobos control floor, watching operators tweak drone paths in a Peruvian copper mine and a lunar helium-3 seam simultaneously. A client pinged us mid-shift: “What’s in my shaft right now?” We had the answer in seconds—ore grades, vein depth, even a 3D render of the tunnel. They signed a contract before the call ended.
The world’s changing fast. Rare earths fuel the fusion boom, lunar metals build the orbital cities, and we’re the ones pulling it out of the ground—or the sky. Critics call us monopolists, say we’re strip-mining the solar system. Maybe they’re right. But when I think back to that first talk with Marcus, the way his eyes lit up at “microwave beams,” I know we’re not just digging holes. We’re rewriting what’s possible.
So yeah, when you think mining, think Mine Drone Inc. We’ve got the drones, the data, and the future—right down to the last speck of dust.