A Minor Miner Problem

Grims Grigglesby hated space travel. It wasn't just the constant queasy grav orientation adjustments - just when you'd convinced your body up was still up and down was still down you transferred to a platform where down was now sideways and who even knew where up was - it was the

worst way to begin a diet of prepackaged squeezable foods. It was, however, the only way to earn the big bucks as an asteroid miner. What Grims hated about space travel quickly faded away with thoughts of cold drinks on the beaches back on Voluptatem Mundo. He fired up his laser

thermo sinks feeling the low vibe as they began pulling in the dark matter coolants. The spectro gridder took a second to identify everything within the local volume worth a melt, flicking it up on the overhead - green points in the void as usual but one showed as a deep orange,

which was especially perplexing. As far back as I could remember, this screen had only ever showed green on black. Orange was new. It was concerning. I thumbed through the papers on my clipboard, finding nothing of use. Sighing, I grabbed the giant tome of a manual from the desk.

No chapter on color, no listing in the index for “color”, “orange”, or even “green”. I flipped to the intro, which read: “your Computon 4500 XR comes with a green light CRT monitor.” So why was it now orange?

I feverishly typed EXIT before something stranger happened. The monitor began cycling through a rainbow of colors as the fans whirred. I pushed my chair back right before the explosion. Through cracks in the glass I read the cryptic text: don't ever paint me into a corner again.