Lasers Lasing

Lasers everywhere. You could smell the sintering of rock and steel as the machine went haywire. Why mine for diamonds when you could erratically endanger everyone around you? Classic robots move. No understanding. No restraint. Just pure destructive power: connect a trillion volts of giga-vaporizer to a huge metal arm and hope for the best. Naturally, the best never happens. That’s what we had here, the best not happening.

This might be the worst, actually. Sand and rocks melting all over the place, OSHA crews helicoptering in to film the whole thing, a trapped crew-member live-streaming the ordeal. I had to get in there and shut it off and it was going to be the objectively most-insane shutoff of my life. I was sitting lacing up my kevlar boots and reminiscing and the more I thought about it the less happy I was.

Normally when you run a shutoff op you drop in hot and strike fast, but with this monster of a digger moving so randomly it was going to take a careful strategy to get inside. We had spent the last 20 minutes plotting trajectories and figuring out the safest way to get inside the perimeter.

We didn’t have a chance. The reactor shorted without warning, bursting and spewing vaporized fuel across the whole scorched pit. Somehow the laser kept lasing away and ignited the millions of droplets of high-octane nitro-gasoline floating through the air. Needless to say, everything around ignited too, including us. Not my best day.