June 13 - Cryonaut
It's not quite absolute zero.
The cryonaut lands on the planet, subzero temperatures kept at bay by the insulated bulk of her mech suit. She has managed to crash land on one of the few pieces of semi-solid land she could see from orbit: over the horizon is nothing but supercooled blue. After running some tests she will discover that the blue is liquid ammonia; this does not make her feel more at home.
A scattering of pods crash onto the frozen ice around her, the orders to send them there sent from a small tablet at her waist to the platform in orbit high above. From them spill machines, mechanisms, conveyor belts and sorting devices; she and her swarm of assistive robots set the machines to work.
Ammonia and ice are extracted from the endless ocean; they are in turn reprocessed into fuel to heat this damned place, and into platforming to extend the space with which she can work. She builds more machines, more constructors and heating towers. The lifeblood of her little factory here is that beautiful heat, harnessed raw from ammoniacal fuel to keep the cogs of the machine from icing to a halt.
But the drive to expand sends her further. Distant scans ping new materials, new resources to feed into the furnace of industry; she finishes her work, polishing off a few last designs before telling her suit to take flight.
The mech suit rumbles into life, deep mechanisms within the thing spinning propellors and thrusters into action. She hovers, gloriously, for a moment, before she jets off across the freezing ocean. She knows the suit will keep her safe, will keep her above the impossibly cold surface, will keep her from colliding head first into icebergs and other islands. A wake forms behind her, ripples cutting into the deep sapphire surface, its cold filling her with adrenaline even as the suit makes sure it poses her no threat.
She finds those other resources on her scouting flight, eventually. A vent of strange brine saturated with lithium ions; a curious spout of crude oil bubbling up from somewhere deep within the ocean, where long-dead algae have been crushed into carbon; a fountain of near-atomic fluorine gas.
She makes a note of each of them on her map, doing her due diligence while the suit keeps her there, hovering. Soon enough, she’s scouted the whole area, all its secrets now revealed to her. This whole world is so empty, so uniform, it is as if these small changes are imperfections in some larger structure, a crystal on the scale of a planet.
The factory needs her attention, her production ratios aren’t quite balanced and ammonia threatens to flood the system.
But she keeps flying, though there is no more for her to find.