You know, I spent about 20 mins carefully crafting a post, linking to your now 4 hour old comment.

But, it turns out: I don't care anymore. I don't give a fuck about relieving your ignorance.

I have spent several threads trying to lay this out to you on a kindergarten level, yet your bulletproof assurance is so great that nothing scratches it.

So I've decided to give up on bothering, and now I'm going to spend a few thousand characters writing a short story:

---

Dex Cranton leaned forward, heavy onto the handles of the Dynamax 5000 Ultrasonic Ore Shiverer, jamming the crystalline blade deep into the crusty surface of Edna-2067. Weightless dust and small shards of stone soundlessly cascaded away from the work surface and off into the infinity of space.

The giant body of the asteroid stretched kilometers in each direction, belying the cute little round shapes with a single crater that passed for asteroids in a 3rd grade physics class.

He never understood how those came to be the popular depiction. Sure space rocks were of all sizes, some only a fleck of dust that your eyes cannot see. Most of the ones worth naming were giants compared to most manufactured space stations.

After cutting a line about two feet long and a foot deep, Dex gently slid the milky-translucent blade from the rock. His mind called up the fact that this was probably the first time since this rock formed that something had marked it. He felt proud of this fact, every asteroid he worked was a ground that no man had yet tread, that nothing had yet struck.

He knew it a lot of ways, that this pride was meaningless. There were literally thousands of belt miners drifting out in the Hildan asteroid group, and every day thousands of human feet touched down on a new planetesimals every daycycle.

Yet every time he entered his daily rounds into the log, he felt he was in some small way reflecting those great pioneers of old as they forded unknown seas and touched first the mountain's peak. He knew his risks were just as great, maybe greater...

With no humans in literally tens of thousands of miles, he was more alone than any groundpounder could possibly understand. Things that were no big deal back planetside, such as an infected cut or a bad tooth, could mean serious injury or death.

Sure, he managed to make it to Stayer's Rock once every six months for some well deserved RnR and a quick medical. The trip was far too expensive in precious reaction engine fuel to take any more frequently. His mind drifted over his last visit, his moderate winnings in the casinos, his abject failure at hooking up with anyone...

That last one was a known downside of being a belt miner. The job was dangerous, and few women applied. And even fewer opportunities arose for a chance encounter when your nearest neighbor is so far away that the time delay makes casual conversation awkward.

He began the second cut on his sample, a right angle from the leftmost tip of his original line. As always, the blurring monocrystal blade needed barely any any force to pull it through a foot thick crust of hardened calcite.

This was what he loved most about asteroid mining, the time during the cut. The buzzing sensation, barely felt, that tickled his fingers. He loved the whorls and patterns of fresh exposed rockface, free from the marrings of oxidation or liquid erosion. He even loved the feeling of the suit pressing up against him, its positive pressure preventing lungs and other sundry organs from expanding fatally in the absence of an atmosphere.

He even loved it when...

Suddenly, something went 'clink'.

This confused him for the briefest of moments. There was nothing on his plasweb suit that was metallic, nothing to make that noise... Where had it come from?

As he was mystified, he lost focus on his Ore Shiverer, and the blade canted at a bad angle and popped up a corner of the block at speed. The shard flew off and whizzed by Dex's head.

That was a close one, dust and micropebbles were fine, the suit could handle it, but too large a shard like that one would act like a razor-blade, slicing through several layers of his life preserving clothing. The panic had welled and passed in a brief moment...

Only to be replaced with awe.

As the flake that had been removed revealed something shiny...

Ores usually never appeared in their pure metal state in space. Ones that do on Earth, like gold and such, are actually the result of microbes that digest rock and leave the metal in a very pure form as a thin layer on their skin. And when they colonize in the millions, very pure samples of metal can occur in native rock.

But this was space. There are no bacteria out here to concentrate metallic atoms.

Then how!?

He looked closer, and as the tiny fleck of gold swam into view, he saw that it had ... writing on it?

His gloved hand scraped at the surface, removing any electrostatically charged dust, removing all ambiguity.

And he stared closer at the words, written in plain english:

"Tycho Miniature Model Co."

"Little Giant type 5 model asteroid 1/64th scale"

"Please accompany children during playtime as this toy is a choking hazard"