I awoke eight hours later, my hunger and thirst indicators in red and the debuff freely applied to me. I took care of these needs and then checked in with myself. I am used to sleeping only five or six hours a night. I didn’t know if it was about sleeping 8 hours, the lack of outside noise and light or if the game did anything but somehow I felt much more rested than I would in the real world. Checking my character info I also saw this reflected.

Well Rested

If you sleep for at least six hours in a bed belonging to you, you will receive a well rested bonus. 

All stats increased by 10% for the next 6 hours

Not bad. With my low level stats I received one point on each of them. Lucky for me the game rounded up otherwise my newb character would have nothing to show for at all.

I had also made up my mind regarding the sale of the mined ore while chewing on my meal bar. I would deliver 1000 units to take care of the mission and sell the rest to make money. It wouldn’t be much but then again I didn’t know of a better way to make a living. At least not yet. I was sure there were other options but right now this was all I had.

Taking my place in the cockpit I resumed where I had left off before I went to sleep. I had 200

precut squares left. Including some breaks it took me about 8 hours to take care of them.  That was 1500 ore right there and I had taken it relatively easy because when the lasers were melting away at each square I had five minutes to familiarize myself more and more with the ship and all the status reports I could get through the monitor.

Not that I had any super interesting discoveries but I thought it was important to understand all of this in detail to make sure I wouldn’t have any surprises I didn’t like while I was stuck in this flying walk-in.

According to plan I had tagged the first 1000 ore as ‘mission objective’ and the other 500 as ‘over requirement’. After each pickup I got a notice that I was paid 66 ICU. Of course the game rounded down here. But after my “shift” I only had 7500 ore to go and my account balance was up to 1226 ICU. Nothing I was happy with yet but I was pleased with the result anyway. Also my basic mining skill was up to level 7 but I wasn’t sure what effect that had. 

I ended my day by repositioning my ship slightly and cutting another 200 squares into the same asteroid while contentedly munching on one of those nutrition bars. I wondered if there was an even better way to extract ore but if there was I couldn’t think of it. I assume there are mining lasers that are faster. Also getting a new ship with more hard mounts would help. But neither one of these options was feasible right now. There had to be a solution that would already work for me. 

I had been accused of a one track mind when I was younger. I think I never changed but now I made it work for me. And while I let it work I fell asleep.

The next two cycles started a routine. I call them cycles because they didn’t really have anything to do with the strict 24 hour days of earth. I mined 200 squares and then slept for 8 hours. You know how a day for a normal "wage slave" was 8 - 10 hours of work, 6 hours of rest and another 8 - 10 hours filled with whatever one did for excitement and relaxation and to not go crazy. Lucky for me, I had discovered competitive gaming after my stint in the force to never be a corporate employee. But since I was sitting in a tiny spaceship in the middle of an asteroid field, my possibilities for excitement amounted to crashing this rustbucket into a space rock or anything equally stupid. So instead I focused on getting out of here. 

However, I probably could have kept going for more than 200 squares but after the buff ran out I wasn’t feeling it anymore. I wasn’t sure if it had to do with the drop of the point in willpower or if the overall effect of the buff was keeping me going. I felt like I could take on the world, or rather the universe considering that I sat in a spaceship, but after it expired I finished whatever was left of the 200 squares and went to get it back.

What I started noticing was that the silence and lack of distractions really started weighing on me. I am sure that being excited about the game and the overwhelm of the mission and being in space helped me in the beginning. I also didn’t notice it as much when the buff was active. Okay, I was missing some kind of music and was often humming to myself but the moment it wore off I started talking to myself. The upside of the downside was that nobody was around who could make fun of me for that.

I also caught myself wondering how other people would be able to mine like that for years. Just considering if I would have kept going the normal way and tried to make 15k ICU. I would have probably airlocked myself. And why was the system command not checking in more often. Shouldn’t it be in their best interest to ensure their miner’s mental health? And mine for that matter?

Wait, what was I even thinking about? This was a game. I could just log out and go to a bar, have a few drinks and flirt my ass off with Rachel. Geez. Was I really immersing myself that deeply?

During the second cycle I hit basic mining skill level 10 and was notified by an interface message.

You have reached basic mining level 10. 

You have unlocked a new skill: Survey

Use this ability to find ore deposits of higher quality.

You have unlocked a new ability: Basic Mining Laser Programming

Use this ability to create basic scripts for mining process automation. 

I stared at the message and then slapped my forehead. How had I been so dense. There was a survey module installed in my ship. But for some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that I could use this piece of tech to scan the asteroids. Now I wanted to slap myself silly. How could I have missed that?

And the programmation made sense too. I knew I could change the burn point of the lasers and was also quite aware that there was serious tech rigged into the hardpoints. Again, why did it not occur to me before to just program these damn things. 

When I was done berating myself I realized that it might have something to do with the abilities that I just gained. Were there some cognitive processes locked because I was lacking the skill? Or was it that these connections got blown open by gaining these skills. Either way, the implications made my head spin. 

The first thing I did was program the lasers to go through their square melting routine by themselves and then shift to the next square when they were done. I sat there and fine tuned the process a little for next 150 ore but then everything seemed to be working fine by itself. 

I celebrated this success with a cup of water and a nutrition bar. Wait until I log out and actually celebrate this. But then again, I might wait until I am on the space station and celebrate my freedom from the asteroid belt alongside my smarts. That thought made me smile. 

The next cycle I only spent time on the laser controls to cut a new grid and feed the coordinates to my mining program. The last grid was mined up during my nap time at which point the program didn’t know what else to do and had shut off. 

So for the next 6 hours I wrote a new program that would cut a new grid and mine it. Freaking nice. The only thing I needed to do now was reposition the ship every nine grids to maintain efficiency of the lasers. 

“Hahaha, my own nearly fully automated mining factory.” I said to no one in particular. Then I added in my best advertiser voice: “Did you ever dream of making money in your sleep? Come to Black Space and become a miner!” Then I chuckled about myself and my enthusiasm for this game. It was just a game. Damn me, I needed to keep that in mind.