By Marcelo Medone

I dragged the bucket of freshly collected gold into the warehouse and saw Charlie Miranda about to introduce a plate in the microwave.

“Dude,” I told him, “Be careful with that appliance, it's going bad. It throws radiation all over the place. It will fry your balls.”

“Ha, that's funny!” he answered. “I’m not going to get any worse than I am now. Besides, I'm not using them lately, in this slave job away from everything.”

With Miranda we had already spent a year, eleven months and twenty-five days working alone in one of the unhealthiest places in the galaxy: an open-pit gold mine on Tapetum VI, the golden planet orbiting Bufo Minor. It wasn't just because of the tar-filled swamps and sulphurous shafts: the exploitation of the gold ores was still done the old, cheap way, by cyanide and water. Cyanide, if it doesn't kill you, causes brain damage. Maybe that's why lately we had been imagining that the raw gold in the warehouse was disappearing in batches, a little at a time, but steadily. I swear we weren't stealing it or hiding it. It was just vanishing before our eyes.

My partner ignored me. He put the plate with his fatty stew in the microwave and set it for 180 seconds. I did not see any flames or sparks coming from the damaged front panel, although I imagined Charlie's testicles shrinking and dying silently.

While the microwave motor was running, I noticed that the gold-laden ore in the bucket was disappearing as if it were being chewed or sucked out. And on the same bucket, the figure of a kind of monstrous amoeba, half a metre in diameter, began to appear. It moved like a hungry starfish devouring its prey. It even seemed to me that it was growing in the process.

As the seconds passed, it glowed brighter and brighter, until it had an unearthly golden glow. 

When the microwave stopped with a beep-beep, the image of the amoeba vanished as if it had never existed.

“You saw it, didn't you?” I told Miranda.

“What?”

“The bug on the gold.”

“I didn't see anything. What did you take? Cyanide wine?”

“Turn on the microwave again! Thirty seconds!” I yelled at him.

Miranda obeyed me without protest. This time we both witnessed the appearance of the alien amoeba and its subsequent disappearance when the oven was turned off.

Wasting no time, I grabbed an empty bucket, turned it upside down, and used it to make a trap along with the other one loaded with gold. I leaned on them with my whole body. The imprisoned amoeba struggled, trying to lift the bucket, but I did not let it escape. After a few moments, it gave up.

With a handheld variable-length scanner we analysed the creature: it was composed of a metamaterial of gold colloid and anthracene, undetectable at wavelengths in the spectrum visible to the human eye or higher, but sharp at wavelengths of a home microwave or lower.

Knowing how to look for them, we found several invisible amoebas. Besides being insatiable for gold, we discovered that they were particularly tame and docile. Charlie and I took a quick, practical course in xenobiology.

Five days later, when it was exactly two years into our shift, they came to relieve us. It was time to leave Tapetum VI and the Bufo Minor star system behind to return home.

We smoothly passed our luggage through the X-ray detector at the spaceport. Charlie was smiling like a child playing a prank. I was trying not to betray myself, like a poker player holding four aces. In this case, it was an undetectable poker to ordinary eyes.

In all, there were four suitcases slightly bulkier and heavier than usual, each containing 500 grams of clothes and toiletries and 22.5 kilos of invisible amoebas loaded with gold.

Finally, we could afford to stop working and enjoy life, far from modern slavery.

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