HSPSC is the acronym carved into the side of the drones, but nobody knows what it stands for, so everyone just calls them Canaries. The damn things don’t resemble a bird in the slightest, of course. Tough metal body and quick, sharp rotors do not a canary make. But it does fly. It even sings, in a way. The Canaries weren’t machined right. Something in their core makes a whining sound when they fly, scraping against some other component, changing pitches as it changes speed and direction. It doesn’t make them birds. But it does make them a warning, and that’s enough.
The mine has been unsafe for work for years now. Nobody knows the full extent of what the Borderlands has changed underground, but at least some of it is clear- the way the once-safe passages shift over time, the new veins of ore that glow or melt or move when you’re not looking. It’s even deadlier than it was before the change. No miner here is making it out the same as they came in.
But there’s still value in the rocks.
So the pay’s good, and the life insurance is better, and the people that run the mine care enough experience that they aren’t always going to leave you for dead, which works out for anyone desperate enough to take the job. The training is quick, mostly “here’s how to dig the stuff we want, here’s how to recognize what might kill you, don’t collapse the tunnels”. They say you’ll learn on the job. They’re mostly right. Anyone who can’t figure out what they’re doing after a week wouldn’t have figured it out with all the training in the world, so any more is just a waste. There’s something innate about the mine. You either learn or you don’t.
Of course, mystical knowledge from the tons of rock on top of you isn’t a safe enough investment for the managers, so they’ve come up with something else to help them out. The Canaries are about the size of a large dog, gunmetal grey drones that buzz past you at lightning speed, heading for any instability in the passages we walk through. You can hear them coming, the song of poorly-designed internals whining at you as they fly past, headed for some inevitable tunnel collapse. They aren’t here to save you. They’re here to be crushed by the rock, buried beneath the weight of all the stone, letting the pressure trigger some sensor that alerts the mine’s owners to the structural failure. You hear a Canary singing, you run. Abandon what you can. They’re designed to die in the collapse- You’re not.