[Holographic message — received 2075.03.14, 07:41 UTC. Flagged priority. Sender: Dr. Elaine Morrow, Director of Autonomous Systems, Meridian Industries.]
Good morning.
Your application to the ASO programme has been accepted. We reviewed just under two thousand candidates this quarter and selected eleven. You're one of them. Well done.
Should you choose to accept this offer, you will relocate to the restricted compound and report to me starting Monday.
The moment you opened this message, a Class 4 non-disclosure agreement was applied to your employment record, which means you cannot discuss your assignment, your location, or this programme with anyone outside the division. That includes family. There is no flexibility on it.
You've heard of axionite. Everybody has, now — the Senate hearings, the futures market, the feeds. What you've heard is what was disclosed: that a mineral was found on Titan with superconducting properties, and that several parties are surveying it. Three years ago, Meridian survey teams identified a crystalline ore with a molecular structure that we still don't fully understand. Room-temperature superconductivity. Energy storage densities that make fusion look like coal. Applications my research division tells me will take a decade to catalogue. Every major corporation and every government with a launch programme has known about this longer than the public has.
What the public doesn't know is how far along the race already is. There are autonomous fleets on Titan's surface right now, claiming deposits, building infrastructure, and contesting each other's operations. We know of at least six. We assume there are more. None of this has been disclosed. All parties have their reasons.
Titan is not survivable. Minus one-seventy-nine, nitrogen-methane atmosphere — an unprotected human freezes faster than they suffocate, and the nearest transmission from Earth takes seventy-six minutes to arrive. Nobody is going there. So we send machines, and we send the code that tells them what to do. You will write the programmes that control Meridian's extraction fleet, and because of that seventy-six-minute delay, once your code is uploaded there is no callback, no patch, no override. It runs as written. If something goes wrong, you watch it go wrong from a desk on Earth, and you wait for the next upload window.
I took this job four years ago. I understand what I'm asking you to give up.
Talk to whoever you need to talk to, while you still can.
If you decide to accept, report to Lab 11-C on Monday morning.