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  • FUTURES

Cold memories

Time to go home?
By
  1. Laurence Raphael Brothers

    1. Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and a technologist. For more stories, visit his website, https://laurencebrothers.com. You can follow him on Twitter: @lbrothers.

The dead crawler loomed before me on the blasted, rocky plain, an oblong grey block on treads, dark canopy frosted over on the inside. This was as far from Rock City as you could get and still be on the asteroid, 200 kilometres out. I jacked a booster cable from my own crawler into the power port of the dead one and opened the outer door. I had to steel myself before cycling the lock. But kwuh is kwuh and this was my job. The inner door unlatched, and there it was: a dead body, frozen solid, sitting cross-legged with a tablet in its hands.

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Nature 565, 128 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07850-8

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