The engineering workshop usually closed for summer as most of the students running it would stop being paid during the break and rarely anyone cared to show up to open it just for fun. But 16-years-olds were allowed in for another two weeks, supervised by an actual professor, as it was time to complete their final projects before graduation. It was also the final chance to get a reference for a scholarship. Robert knew he wasn’t getting one. And yet a stupid part of him couldn’t stop hoping.

Despite not working on the same project, they still shared the workbench with Gatien. Now, there was a guy who lucked out on puberty. Gatien’s voice was the first to break so he had a longer time to adjust, and now he had an amazing baritone, especially while doing an impression of a stadium announcer. He got over his acne stage pretty fast, leaving his skin smooth like simulated ebony; sometimes Robert had an urge to reach out and touch Gatien’s face just to make sure it was real and not a mask. Gatien started growing a beard a few months back. It wasn’t anything impressive, mostly just coarse growth at the bottom of his chin, but it made him look much older than he was. Paired with being from a richer neighbourhood, Gatien was the most popular guy in the school amongst girls. Yet, he didn’t pay any attention to them. Instead, he had a half-secret relationship with one of their former workshop instructors, who now had a science degree and was a full-time professor. Oh, and she was 25 and had huge boobs.

Robert found it extra insulting that their final projects were representative of how their actual looks compared. Gatien was putting finishing touches on an air sampler drone, built from several kits and filled with licensed software (free to use for a student but still). It could be used to prospect mineral deposits deep in the desert for new mining projects. Gatien had plans to patent the design and pitch it to the Survey Bureau. It was perfect and beautiful and had great perspectives, just like Gatien was handsome and already one foot in the college. 

Robert assembled an autonomous welding robot from a shell of an old vacuum cleaner and a processor from the plane he found last year. Well, it was supposed to be autonomous, it had all the hardware to be so. But no matter how hard Robert banged his head against it, he just couldn’t write an operating system universal for all the functions, bug-free, and able to fit in the limited memory. He knew a good chunk of his code was just bloatware, but each time he tried cutting something out, it stopped working. The robot was ugly, smelly, and useless, just as Robert was ugly and fat and destined to rot in the mines.

“You okay, man?” Gatien pulled Rob out of his dark thoughts. “You look like you are about to snap your interface in half.”

Robert put the device down. It was connected to the processor of his robot as he spent the last hour trying to add an option to at least control the thing remotely as opposed to the operator having to be in the comm range. It was hopeless. His only two options were to either cut out the video feed or remove the welding procedures, both of which would erase any debatable usefulness of the robot. Breaking the interface would not help.

“Yeah, whatever.” Robert leaned back and sighed heavily. “I don’t know why I am even trying anymore.”

“Because you are a talented motherfucker with too much energy not to pour it into an ingenious thing that doesn’t look like it could work and yet does every time?” Gatien chuckled and nudged Robert’s shin with the tip of his shoe.

Once again, something inside Robert melted. It was always like this with Gatien: he would spend days simmering with bottled rage over all the things that were annoying about the guy…and then Gatien would say a single sentence, and it would be gone. So what if Gatien was a handsome rich asshole? What mattered was that he understood Robert like nobody else did.

“I mean, sure. But even if I make this work, it wouldn’t matter. Bibi and Dupas didn’t even show up today because no matter how good their projects are, it won’t get them into college.”

Gatien’s smile turned a bit colder. He already had a spot at the evening college, which was a pre-college selection program, not free but affordable for a family of a manager with just one child. He also had a summer job as an intern at the Southern mine office, close to his dad. He didn’t have to worry about any of this shit.

“You can still leave a good impression,” Gatien shrugged with one shoulder and looked over at the bored professor in the corner of the room. “If not as a student, you may end up having a job here?”

Robert grimaced. “Everyone working here either is or used to be a student. And I don't have family connections. The only ‘good word’ I can receive is for the Northern mines, and you know how well they’ve been doing lately.”

“Ugh, yeah. Dad’s saying he’s been having troubles about that too in the Southern. Apparently, there are plans to perform some kind of very visible maintenance, just so people see that safety is being monitored or something.” Gatien tapped the deactivated control interface for his drone. “But I think you are missing another viable option for yourself.”

“Like what? Dying in a ditch?”

“Getting off Mesa.” A smile touched Gatien’s lips again. “I meant that earlier, about ‘a talented motherfucker’. They don’t need someone like you in Port, but surely there is a place for you somewhere else in the SOI?”

In the following silence, Robert leaned back and stared at the mess of wires in front of him. He…had never considered that seriously. It felt weird thinking about that. Nobody left Mesa, unless actively pushed out. Yeah, there was a whole sphere of space with colonies and space stations and spaceships out there but they were…for those other humans. Like, sure, Nikolai came from somewhere, but he was now here, on Mesa, stuck for life. And could Robert leave his family behind just like that? There were expectations that he would be helping more the older he got. Mom wasn’t getting younger. And he used to be responsible for Nikolai, but maybe it was fine now? With him at Base, the guy wouldn’t be that much of a burden, despite his worries about getting stamped. What if Robert could actually go somewhere else?

“The ticket alone would cost a fortune,” he finally mumbled, remembering the main cause of most of his problems.

Gatien snorted. “I mean, sure, but not the college kind of fortune, you know? You could start doing some of your fixing not for trade but for actual credits. And yeah, maybe you would have to work in the mines for a couple of years while saving up, but that’s not the whole life, right?”

A couple of years instead of the whole life. Why did it not sound as attractive as Gatien tried to make it?

“Most people I fix stuff for don’t even have credits lying around,” Robert made another attempt. For some reason, it felt very scary to grab onto a new hope.

Gatien stayed quiet for a little bit then turned to him with a serious expression. “Do you want to get a job that would bring you credits? Not as a hypothetical but seriously?”

There was something very intense in his eyes, something that made Robert think about administrators he had to deal with over the last year. And also those silly talks they would get at school about how you had to say ‘no’ to an offer of chems from your peers. Gatien wasn’t the kind of guy to offer him chems though (definitely not the good ones, nobody would offer those for free). 

“Yeah. I mean, as long as it’s not hauling weights around the whole day and not mines.”

Gatien nodded. “Okay. Sayu’s cousin works at the landing station. I heard him complain about how they are always short on staff. They don’t hire people officially and they pay per completed task. I’m sure they’ll close their eyes on your age if I vouch for you.”

Sayu was Gatien’s girlfriend. Her family was from a completely different world because they could afford paying for her college. No wonder one of her relatives worked with the orbital trains.

“What kind of tasks? It’s not offloading cargo, is it?”

Gatien snorted. “Of course not, they have haulers for that. Fucking huge machines.”

Robert realised something. “Dude, you’ve been to the landing station?!”

“Shh,” Gatien shoved him and looked around to make sure nobody was listening in. He continued in a whisper. “Yeah, just once. Before my dad got me a spot in the office, my plan was to work there through the summer. Unofficially. Mostly, it’s mundane maintenance. They provide manuals. You walk around, open hatches, make sure the crucial points are not filled with grime, maybe change wires where the old ones are about to snap. And they pay in hard currency at the end of the day based on how many tasks you completed.”

“This sounds way too good to be real.”

“Well, you still have to spend your whole day on foot, the landing is huge. And lots of those hatches you would have to climb up to. If you ask me, I’d rather sit in the office and make spreadsheets.”

“How much do they pay?”

Gatien hesitated. “Uh… Like… 10 per task?”

Robert forgot how to breathe for a moment. 10 actual fucking credits? In hard currency? Per task? Natan, as a supervisor, received maybe 200 per day, but his were sent to the company-issued wallet and were tied in so many rules about how much could be spent a day and even what for. They could maybe turn 500 credits per month into hard currency for all three working brothers. 10 per task. Even if he completed ten tasks per day, he would be making more spendable credits than Hershel.

And if he did more than ten…

“How fast can you ask about it?” Robert felt his palms sweat and he rubbed them dry over his pants.

Gatien eyed him with an unreadable expression for a couple of moments then shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe a couple of days. It’s something better discussed in person, so I’ll need Sayu to invite me over again. Maybe on the weekend. Gotta celebrate me graduating from this workshop and stuff.”

In the afternoon, when Gatien went to present his drone in its final shape, Robert disconnected his robot from the interface and powered it down then wheeled it into the corner with all the other abandoned projects. He decided to move it to his workshop some other day.