Rift Miners

When you hear "Rift Miners," forget the image of a grizzled dude chipping away in a dimly lit asteroid cave. That's old school. These modern-day Rift Miners are more like cosmic cowboys, wrangling not cattle, but some of the universe's most elusive materials.

Imagine this: You've got your eye on exotic materials that are rarer in normal space than a friendly alien encounter. But guess what? There's a cosmic truckload of this stuff just chilling in another dimension. Sounds like a get-rich-quick scheme from a space western, right? Just zip over to this other dimension, fill your boots with exotic loot, and zip back. Ka-ching!

But hold your space horses. Hyperspace isn't a walk in the park. It's more like a sprint through a minefield. Leave your matter unattended or outside an electromagnetic containment field, and it's 'bye-bye, material' and 'hello, potentially being dead'. And if you think that's fun, try dealing with matter from the other side. Without a magnetic field, or if it touches our matter, it high-tails it back to hyperspace.

So, you're thinking, just grab some fancy gear, hop over to hyperspace, hoover up the goods, and pop back, right? Well, yes, but here's the catch: to mine enough of this stuff to make it worth your while, you need equipment so big it makes your average space freighter look like a toy. And our current drives? They can't handle the bulk.

The solution? Modular mega-machinery, sent piece by piece into hyperspace. Then comes the fun part: assembling and maintaining these behemoths in a dimension where even the laws of physics have an attitude problem. These are not your grandpa's processing plants; they're like floating factories, separating different types of exotic matter into their own fancy containers, ready to be shipped back to real space.

But who's crazy enough to man these hyperspace stations? Enter the AI – because let's face it, the effects of hyperspace on humans range from 'kinda weird' to 'full-blown horror movie'. The AIs handle the heavy lifting in hyperspace, piloting and managing the unforeseen in an environment where 'unpleasant' is an understatement.

And just when you thought it couldn't get more wild, remember, we're just talking about the first layer of hyperspace. Deeper layers are like diving into the deep end of the cosmic pool, each offering different exotic matter in crazy amounts, but with risks so high they'd make even the bravest Rift Miner think twice. It's a high-stakes, high-reward game – and these Rift Miners are playing for keeps.