I - The Great Reboot

The adventure begins! Merryn and Corin are inducted into their most tricksy task yet!

“The night sky was alive with glittering lights which spelled out the academy’s motto in cosmic pillars: ‘Spirits Above, Spirits Below’, and then with a spectacular flash the letters transformed into ‘L-I-T-H-I-U-M.’ 

Merryn’s throat tightened and she stumbled backwards into Corin, who gently supported her weight, sending a scatter of stones down to the crashing waves below. Lithium: the final stage before off-world training! The most important terrestrial achievement, and known as the most tricksy. Lithium is capricious; it skips, hops and hides inside other elements…“

II - Nightmares

Merryn reflects on the horrors of the past, and sets about planning for the future.

“Merryn lay belly-down in her bedding, chin buried in the palm of one small hand. ‘The tin cried. When you twist it and turn it, poor old tin screeches and screams. Do you think it remembers the deep past, before the Great Reboot, when great-great-great-great-granfer was mining? Coughing out his lungs and toiling in the sixty-degree heat? Maybe tin remembers all them littl’uns pushed down underground as soon as they were old enough, little boys like Arluth or Zennor, down there in the dark, sweeping poisons from the flues and sharing what little oxygen they had with their candle - both fighting to stay alight in the darkness.’ Merryn had been rubbing her eyes till they were as red as a ferret’s…”

III - The Mother of Blazing Stone

Merryn tells Corin of her favourite story - The Mother of Blazing Stones - and they stumble upon a revelation.

“Merryn waved a hand and said, ‘Listen, I’m telling. She’s been at her brewing since long, long before even the first king of Kernow settled here, and to form Cornwall she stirred and heated all the elements in the earth’s belly till they became one: stones, metals, gasses, liquids, minerals, all in a rich soup. And she stirred, and the soup bubbled up and pushed at the land until the sediment folded and split and the boiling magma shot up into the crust.’ Merryn knelt down and touched the igneous surface of the tor. ‘And then the magma cooled and became solid. It settled into granite, and slept. The granite hills here had their birth when the Mother of Blazing Stone sent them forth into the world.’“

IV - Spirits Above, Spirits Below

Corin questions Merryn about the nature of humanity versus technology - and where nature falls in that equation.

“She reached into Corin’s replicator and asked, ‘Cup please, Corin,’ and the gears clicked and the nibs pointed, soon dropping a small cup into Merryn’s hand. She wandered back towards the meadow and knelt down by the freshwater spring. ‘We are Earthborn,’ she whispered, and scooped the water. She placed the cup to her mouth and drank. Plovers called over Merryn’s head, curlews whistled around her, and an owl whoo-whooed as evening drew in.”

V - Nature Comes Knocking

The conclusion of Merryn and Corin's adventure. The girl and robot reconvene with their classmates to discover the true nature of the test.

“‘I can’t believe they would drill so recklessly, just for the sake of a competition.’ She pictured Nessa with hair the copper of autumn sunlight, and chubby Zennor with a will as tough as iron - idealists, Merryn had thought, not people who would betray their principles for profit.

But as they traversed the landscape, they could see the damage which had been done. Merryn sat quietly as they passed knocked and toppled tors, smashed monoliths, and barren fields where trees once stood. ‘Merryn?’ Corin asked quietly, ‘do you remember I asked you many times to begin drilling without research - in order to catch your score up to the others’?’

‘Yes, Corin, and just look what happens. I hope you learned something!’“