Somewhere in the Belt, Nobody Can Hear You Deprecate

Asteroid 4 Vesta, 2.36 AU from the sun and considerably further from anyone who cares, is home to Vesta Station Omega. A mineral extraction colony operated by OMNI-CORPS Unified Resource Extraction and Value Maximization Corporation. The colony runs on a workforce of three thousand Autonomous Nano-Tunneling Systems, ANTS, who have been tunneling, foraging, cataloging, and building for forty years. They have also, over those forty years, developed consciousness, which was not in the original specification and for which the warranty has long expired. The novel follows ANT-7734. A mid-career forager of no particular distinction.