Mining

Written 2015, published 2026 on RR, still relevant as ever!!  Setting: China in a few decades. Weng’s best friend trusts him with a secret: little tubular robots that effortlessly dig through solid rock and bring back gold. Weng repays that trust by stealing them. He tells himself he will put things right. Instead, he puts the machines to work. Beneath his home, a clandestine experiment begins to reward a talent society was forbidding him to use. Using his programming skills, Weng evolves the miners to be smarter, more independent, more quiet. He knows the machine ecosystem he is building deep underground will never be discovered. Increasing deliveries of precious yellow gold prove that he knows what he’s doing. A life of luxury for his family awaits. But his genius has a blind spot: the distance between teaching a machine to succeed and understanding what that success will cost everyone on earth.