MPJ

Dot-sized larvae of cricket or grasshopper invading our balcony flowerpot

Tomorrow morning, with first December's sunshine Vicks went to unload the drones and lift the equipment into his 'penthouse' workshop. The auxiliary house of his village estate were large and almost fifty years younger than the main house that originated just after the second world war in the middle of twentieth century. Ground floor was reserved for the the usual village auxiliary needs - old fashioned garage and small storage room along with guest apartment, while Vicks occupied entire first floor where he spent most of his freelance time before the FAR-T1 project. In recent years it was also the favorite space for both of his sons - and slowly, corner by corner they were claiming the space for themselves. Vicks couldn't be happier about it and even allowed them to spend nights there with him on his busiest days.

Southern terrace, with tremendous view to the 'Black Peak' mountain was built with heavy cargo elevator and along with round stairway exited directly to the drone pad. As soon as Arty heard the activity, he stormed outside and helped with heavy boxes.

"Come on Arty..." Vicks tried for the third time to interrupt his tales about old cartoon movie and 'living in present' philosophy.

"Look, I don't want to spoil the excitement for you." He finally got through the gap in his enthusiasm and all the master Oogway stories and quotes, who apparently was one smart ... tortoise, with tremendous kung fu skills. "But, you can't mount your entire existence based on the 'turtle wisdom' from the children movie. Life is too complicated to be generalized like that."

They pushed the final crate inside and Vicks started unpacking and classifying the content onto shelves and into drawers along the entire western wall of the workshop.

"But I agree with you. Living in the moment is way better than thinking all the time of all potential outcomes." He turned toward the large boxes. "Could you please help me with those?"

"Outcomes?" Arty opened the first box and started unpacking nanotubes especially designed for specialized 3D nanoprinter they needed to manufacture replacements for the malfunctional strings in Arty's left arm.

"Well, I am not master Oogway, but you know.. Expectations. If you set them too high, potential disappointments are also high. If you set them too low, the danger comes in form of small satisfactions."

"So you are saying that along with living in the moment, the life is also about balancing things out?"

"More or less.. Ok, let's get to work." Vicks turned the main server on and started working the keyboard and two screens. Soon after he initiated 3D nanoprinter calibration it started humming with familiar buzzing noises. When the gauge started counting percentage, he looked Arty into his curious eyes. "One thing is for sure though - too much philosophy leads directly into laziness. I experienced it myself... It was my worst year in the university... Don't ask."

Three hours later printer finished and reshaped nanotubes for Arty's arm design. On the other side, electroactive polymers were too complex to be built in great precision with Vicks' workshop industrial tools but thanks to Open Horizons shipment they were in possession of everything they need to assemble them. By lunch they manufactured everything they need and the 'surgery' was scheduled for the afternoon.

"How exactly you will replace the muscles?" Arty was curious. "I guess the only way is to remove my whole arm and let that robotic thingy to do all the work?" He pointed toward the lab's corner equipped with four artificial arms inside large vacuumed table, smaller version of the 'surgeon' how the team nicknamed it back then in MIT lab and which was frequently used as the EAP assembling and testing tool.

"Nope. I have real surgeon in mind. And there will be no need for the arm removal. Don't worry.. You'll be fine. He is extremely skilled."

"Who?"

"Philip."

Vicks turned, motion him to follow and left the lab for lunch.

"Okidoki." He stared after him for couple of seconds. Realisation followed soon after.

"Wait... What?"

Family lunch events with Vicks' family, under the heating umbrella in the garden was always special. They were always more than sharing a good meal and Arty quickly fitted in with his collections of jokes and one-liners. The village provided excellent background silence, the mountain offered great air and view and the company did the rest. Nobody but Vicks noticed Arty's frequent glimpses toward Philip's hands. He couldn't help himself and gave Arty little enigmatic smiles every now and again.

But there was no reason for any alarm. Arty loudly relieved later in the lab when Philip's tiny hands reached under his metallic armour with ease. With only couple of clicks and safe gyration he removed old muscles and attached the new one. Wiring were even easier job with electrical modules that were supposed to be inserted into skeleton in their recesses between nanotubes and EAPs. Vicks powered the new muscles up and most of red diagnostics icons went to green immediately. Without Philip's small and skilled hands they would need to disable and dismantle entire left arm, program the repairment robotic tool and loose the rest of the day in the process.

Arty lifted small boy again and this time with his newly healed arm only.

"I owe you one, little chef. Thank you."

"It was nothing Arty.. Really." His smile was full of happiness. And not entirely because of what he just did. There was something more with this boy. In Arty's short life up so now, he learned about lots of people who were able to give more than ready to receive. But within the last month he simply didn't have the time to meet many of them. He kneeled to pet Philip's hair and in the same time, exactly 7167km in the distant cloud server in MIT datacenter, one counter labeled with iGreatPeopleIMetInPerson incremented by one.

Replacing damaged fuel cells, silent motors and several parts of Arty's armour, including the entire back shield were even easier and couple of hours later they both exited to the terrace and relaxed for the rest of the evening.

They wanted to discuss more about the minerals and to went through the plan for tomorrow but somehow the conversation never took them there. Arty stood up and leaned to the fence. Just below him, two boys were playing soccer against their grandfather with two ground drones as goalkeepers. The flying drone with large screen was floating above them and acted as the referee. More drones were flying all over transmitting the match to the social cloud. The score was currently changing into 3:2 when Philip passed the ball through his grandfather's legs and scored the third goal for the boys. The cheering and hugging followed and Arty and Vicks joined the ovations from the balcony.


The rest of the evening, Arty and Vicks loaded the hiking equipment in the cargo drone along with strong flashlights and some more speleology tools needed for unearthing the rocks and minerals and went to rest for tomorrow.

The next day was even more non-wintery day, to say the least, just like they anticipated. They took short flight toward the mountain formation to the south and the sight was amazing. It looked like they took the trip throughout the history of the planet with every kilometer they passed. Still under heavy suffering from last summer's forest fire, the northern plains and massive rock formation that looked like the entrance into underworld gave impression like they belong to some other planet. Burnt forests and black fallen trees didn't survive despite large efforts by local residents and several waves of firefighting choppers and jet planes.

"These formations are hundreds of millions of years old, probably from Late Jurassic or even older. Back then, the most of the continent was covered by Paratethys - the large sea that over eons retreated living only couple of smaller seas and numerous lakes all over." Vicks explained the geology of the terrain.

Arty engaged all his visual aids and video recording tools and recorded timelapses from different angles. But, the natural disaster, even with its devastated aftermath, didn't give him the eeriest impression of the mountain. This peak wasn't anything like the most of neighboring mountain tops. When they flew over, the large mountain plane revealed the terrain not usual for ordinary mountains, that more or less found the necessary equilibrium with its residents, the plants and wild animals. Instead, dozens of strange looking ravines, small and big spread along the south accompanied with dozens of miniature gorges with round shaped coombs and gullies.

"Here!" Vicks pointed toward the second peak and the large gorge between their current position and the next mountain peak that was shaped like a broken pyramid top.

Shortly after, they hovered above the secured pit hole that almost ten meters below the surface went into complete darkness. There were no place to land so Vicks activated the automated pilot to maintain the hovering position. Cargo drone with its quadruple silent motors were extremely stable. Four propellers angled enough to avoid airstreams to go directly down the pit.

"So, this is the place?" Arty asked. "Where you found the mineral?"

"Yep. I was sitting in the same spot like we are now and controlled one of the Philips's social drones."

"Like these?" Arty pointed to the cargo container to the back where they stockpiled four of them last night.

"Yes, only I added a small robotic arm from the lab and was lucky to chop out that only specimen."

"Okidoki." Arty opened the hatch, hook himself to the towing cable, mounted the backpack with additional tools and lifted down couple of meters below the drone.

"I am ready." He shouted and produced the thumb up.

Vicks, powered the monitors, mounted the remote control for the drones and execute some fast diagnostics of all the systems they were about to use. Arty's view came live on the central monitor. Left one shown four video feeds from the social drones and right one was busy with various data coming from sensors from Arty's suit.

The towing cable started rolling out and soon Arty disappeared into blackness. The drones followed from the safety distance. He turned infrared torches and visually processed feed converted into visual light appeared onscreen.

The pit was widening with every meter and the hollowness of the mountain became factious for strange explorers. Hundred meters later, the walls started to glow reflecting the infrared. Arty stopped  and with ease chopped out a rock. The raw chemical inspection revealed quartz glued all over the igneous grayish rock with black spots here and there.

"It's quartz accumulated over the silicon dioxide based rock." Arty moved the view toward the large cave wall. "Lots of it." He took the sample into backpack.

"Looks like andesite." Vicks voice came from the comms. "It's sort of volcanic rock, made by crystallization of the magma especially in the vicinity of old and extinguished volcanoes."

"What was the depth where you found the mineral?"

"About two hundred meters from your current position. More or less at the end of the cable."

The site of the cave continued to change and for the experienced geologist, it would be like traveling millions of years in the past. Vicks and Arty, on the other hand, even though they both did extensive research before they took this endeavour, were far from being trained rock scientists. But the beauty of the site was tremendous and every now and again, Arty stopped the cable and took samples from the walls. The drones Vicks operated spread more from the cable and took amazing photographs within different lightwaves.

Twenty minutes later, the view started to change. There were less and less volcanic rocks and glowing quartz layers and for a while there was nothing to detect. Just bare rock walls. Ten meters later first signs of water were evident. Not by much but small streams of transparent fluids were forming as it seams out from the thin air, and flowing foot or two. Then the tiny stream disappeared into wall again.

"Almost there." Vicks said. "I got the sample not far beneath the wet walls first appeared. I think the pit hole ends soon after."

Arty slowed the descent a little and tried to focus the view from the walls and directly under. He took out the radar tool from the backpack and mounted it on his torso. The moment he turned it on, the detailed image appeared on the sensor screen. Vicks initiated the detailed wireframe image analysis and the result were beamed back to Arty. The pit hole bottom was nearly thirty meters ahead and in almost horizontal direction a small stream appeared from one wall side of the pit and flowed within shallow hallway further inside the mountain. This was something he completely missed last time with the social drone.

The radar analysis took his focus from the main screen with Arty's infrared feed and in the meantime Arty reached the bottom and started to record the surroundings.

"Crap the noodles!"

Art's disembodied and loud voice echoed from the main screen. Vicks turned in the instant and his jaws dropped wide to the fairytale sight he saw on the monitor.

The entire stream hallway was vividly colored and the water widely sparkled and reflected the most beautiful greenish color he ever saw in nature.


Despite every logic and rationality, Vicks' mind was warning him at this very moment, he hurriedly check the fuel levels for the cargo drone, inspected all the vitals and then hooked to the cable and started descending down. The hiking gear was motorized and the tiny platform he hooked his leg to, descended him next to the bottom only ten minutes later. In th meantime, Arty fixed the cable to the ground and along with three social drones entered the green hallway. The remaining drone climbed up and then followed Vicks the entire descent.

As soon as he arrived he joined Arty inside the hallway.

The sight seen with his own eyes were even more amazing than what he saw onscreen. The walls and the roof of the natural hallway was made of the same rock he luckily chopped two weeks ago just twenty meters above the main pit hole floor. The real greenish kryptonite with fluorine was all over the place, along with other minerals with bluish and magenta glow in smaller quantities but just enough to give this place unearthly scene.

It took Vicks several minutes to restore his talking abilities. In his wildest day dream he couldn't anticipate that something like this exists at all. He glimpsed Arty who was equally amazed, although after only a month or so after his birth his amazement with various things was nothing new. But this was indeed something even he was not seeing or learning about every day.

"Crap the noodles?"

Arty looked him with somewhat puzzled eyes.

"It was from your old YouTube video. You said it yourself when you first saw huge sea waves... Don't you remember? From your video log and your first travel to Crete. I wasn't sure whether you were more amazed with large waves or the sight from the airplane window you saw for the first time in your life."

"How old was I?"

"Ten."

Vicks remembered. He was right. This was the same feeling. When you see something extraordinary for the very first time, the boy or the girl inside you is the first one who reacts.

"You're absolutely right." The boyish expression was still there. "Thanks for the reminder. That trip was one of my favorites for years. But this..."

The scientist inside Vicks slowly took over and eventually they both resumed scanning the minerals and the water. He sent one small drone along the hallway to follow the stream and they anxiously monitored the returning feed without knowing what to expect. The hallway was curved and the drone didn't travel far - only fifty meters ahead, it stopped at the small waterfall. The water was reaching the hallway end and at the edge was falling into abyss.

Arty and Vicks came to the spot by following the shallow water and instructed all four social drones to follow the waterfall but the abyss was too deep and the water was never reaching the next bottom. After another hundred meters, humidity and temperatures rose and the water halfway evaporated and dispersed. The water drops that hitted the cave wall, formed the tiny wall streams like the ones they saw on the pit hole walls earlier.

Both being amateur geologists, Vicks and Arty, decided that exploring the large abyss was at this point way out of their league and equipment so they decided to send four drones to record the wide cave for a while before the return. The end of the hallway where they stood were only the small entrance into enormous cave that was spreading above, toward the mountain surface as well. As it seemed, the large portion of the mountain was hollow and Vicks expected that the size was enormous.

Two drones that were exploring upper half of the dome filmed two swarms of flying giant bats. They were big and their appearance were little odd with their bodies shaped not quite like the bats he knew off and he was sure the locals never reported this kind of animals.

Two remaining drones returned from the lower half of the cave. It seemed that the abyss was expanding down from all direction into sort of reversed funnel shape and the bottom was perhaps large enough to host two football fields. The recording showed larger water flows, the scattered bones of large animals here and there and in one corner even a family of a sleeping bears. Strange as Vicks knew for sure that the largest animal around this neighborhood was a red deer and the only predator, beside illegal human hunters were small packs of wolfs. He never heard about bears before. In fact, the sightings of bears within the entire easter Serbia were rare, especially in latest decades.

More waterfalls were filmed and four drones managed to record exactly twelve dome entrances like the one they were standing on. Not all of them were colored with mineral walls, but several were. When they left the pit hole and entered the hallway, they also lost visual of the cable and with it, the internet access that was relaying to them via cargo drone and soon after all social drones filled their memory banks. With that fact, Arty suggested to took all the samples they could from the stream and the hallway walls and return to the cargo drone for cloud memory upload.

"We have enough samples." Vicks said when they climbed up back into cargo drone. "But I am still curious about the bones. Maybe we could try positioning the small drones on the way, one at the bottom of the pit hole, two inside the mineral hallway and the last one we could control over the first three. With the drone chain, the feed could be beamed directly to us and then to the cloud. We could explore the abyss floor in much more details."

He looked toward Arty for approval, but there was no need. Arty already took the remote and started deploying the drones on their way inside the pit. Five minutes later the main screen came to life and they saw the exploring drone flew over the bears and headed toward the wide stream where large bones were lying. Vicks didn't say anything but he thought he recognized one skeleton. When the drone slowly approached he was sure - it was the bones from a creature known as Plesiosaur - a marine dinosaur from the Mesozoic era. It was clear to him when the drone confirmed perfectly preserved all four flippers and the short tail of similar size. Its long neck were almost five meters long. Only two days ago he saw the model of the skeleton of this creature within the Natural History Center.

He saw that Arty recognized it too and they followed the drone further toward the next one. More flippering skeletons were lying around. Probably, once in the prehistory of the planet this cave had open entrance into ocean and this place was either the home of these marine creatures or their graveyard. Or both.


"I am speechless..."

Marko, the Natural History Center curator arrived immediately when they sent him the feeds from the cave. Now, only one day after, he stood with Arty and Vicks in the same spot - at the end of the mineral hallway and watched the live feed from the laser mapping drones his team of museum scientists deployed in order to create fully detailed 3D image of the cave interior.

"The brown bears! I thought not a single one exists around here.." They make sure the lowered mapping drone took position carefully in order not to disturb the animals in the middle of their hibernation. "And these bats... It's almost like they never live this cave..." He started to pace nervously. Then stopped in sort of eureka moment. "Is this even possible?"

"What?"

"It's almost like these animals developed entirely independent underground ecosystem." He pointed into darkness. "It's the wildest thought.. But.. It could be that this underworld is their whole habitat. We definitely need to tag these bats and especially the bears..."

"Do you think the global warming caused this?" Arty asked the question all of them are thinking about at this moment. "But it became the issue only fifteen years ago. Twenty maybe."

"For humans maybe." Marko looked Arty with almost apologizing expression. "We are arrogant and ignorant species. Animals are different. They might be aware of the climate changes for a long time. Most likely for centuries. This cave could be just a tip of the iceberg. If I'm right, we could witness rapid evolution at work."

It was hard for Marko to hide the excitement. It was obvious that for him, this find was a lifetime achievement. He could only imagine the amount of scientific work and all the connected sciences that should start acting upon.

"Thank you very much guys!" He shook Vicks' and Arty's hands with enhanced boyish enthusiasm. You gave the people not one, but three discoveries today. The marine creature skeletons preserved like these were never found in Europe. Possibly nowhere else and I can't hide the excitement that our museum will finally display the real skeleton of this size... Hmm.. We will probably have to erect another building just for this."

He paced to the very edge and Arty followed the man, clearly worried about him. The stream and its wide entrance were definitely beautiful, almost like the scene from the Alice's adventures in the Wonderland, but it was pretty slippery and slightly dangerous. Marko pointed into darkness.

"... and these could be the breakthrough discovery. The one even Darwin would not be ashamed off." He make the full turn and faced them both again. "But this.." He theatrically produced the green mineral from his pocket. "... is something that will finally put our museum on the map."

Arty and Vicks looked each other but that didn't puzzled the curator at all.

"Gentlemen, behold the Sodium-Lithium-Boron-Silicate-Hydroxide with Fluorine." He looked closely the mineral and continued. "... and this time when I say with Fluorine, I will mean it."

Only then Marko saw Arty's raised arm and stopped talking.

"Ahem.. I brought with me additional geological tools and last night we analysed the minerals in Vicks' lab in great detail and..." He tried to find proper words. "As it seems, well yes there's fluorine inside, but it's not the element that is giving it the green color."

"There's another element in this beauty?"

"Actually three. Iron, copper and chromium. All these incredible glows in this hallway came from actually almost the same mineral." Arty continued the lecture. "It's more or less the same as the Jadarite from your exhibit, only the additional elements are reflecting the light differently due to the chemical impurities."

"Chemical impurities?"

"Yes, growth imperfections happened during the crystal creation, probably at the time when this mountain was one violent volcano or during the rapid tectonic movement. Or both combined." Arty explained and continued. "But even that was not exactly what was giving the colors all the intensity and super glowness."

"There are more elements in this?"

"Not really. We couldn't verify this, but we are ninety percent sure that there are free electrons in the mineral. Lots of it. They are responsible for the glow and color shades."

"You mean like in gold?"

"Yes."

At this very moment Marko's eyes received the superglow as well. He tried to say something but the words didn't come out. He stared for a long time and finally came to his senses.

Well, he almost did.

"Even better ... Ahem ..." He coughed the excitement out of his chest. "We will definitely need another wing in the museum just for this ... And this time we will insist on the name ..."

He paused, reached his other pockets and pulled out all the samples he took earlier.

"Guys - behold the one and only ... "

He then proudly lifted a bouquet of differently colored rocks that happened to basically be only one mineral.

"Serbian Kryptonite!"