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The mine visit was uneventful. Time flew under the surface and before Alex realized it they had spent two hours riding and walking underground in tunnels seeing what the workers actually did, chipping away at veins of precious ore deep underground. Just being underground for such a short amount of time had a palpable effect on Alex. He felt smothered, pressed, suffocated, and could barely suppress his relief when they emerged into the daylight and open air.

Beside him, he saw Liu similarly let out a sigh of relief as they emerged from the mine. He had done a good job of hiding his discomfort underground, but Alex made note that Liu himself was not a miner and probably visited these facilities very rarely. In fact, Alex would not be surprised to find that Liu had never in fact been out here before. He was a city man, a polished international salesman, not a rural miner. The mud caked on Liu's two hundred dollar loafers said it all, and Alex caught Liu briefly glancing down at them in disgust. Meanwhile, the team of men who followed behind Liu, who Alex assumed were the actual mine operations management, had barely said a word all day.

There was a brief tour of the mess tents at the base, where shift workers were fed – free of charge, Liu pointed out – a solid-looking meal of rice and vegetable stew before returning back to the second half of their eight hour shift. "The health of our workers is paramount," Liu repeated in a line that Alex was beginning to tire of. But their actions seemed to support their words. The din of conversation in the mess tent among the workers completed the picture of healthy, strong men working a tough dangerous job, but one they were proud of and good at. Alex could see nothing derogatory in the scene. The mine operation itself seemed solid.

They re-boarded the bus to head back to the surface, this time taking a different path back up top. The narrow roads cut into the side of the pit were one way, so there was an up road and a down road. As they crested the pit's edge, the bus slowed down to merge with a series of haul trucks coming from another road. They were full, just like the haul trucks emerging from the pit they had been in, but Alex couldn't see where they had come from. He turned behind him, but the road disappeared out of sight behind a small hillside a few hundred yards behind them.

"Where is that?" he asked. "Where are they coming from?"

This time Liu did not know. He turned to relay the question to the mine foremen seated behind him, who had been silent the entire trip thus far. They exchanged a few words, Liu asking a follow-up question, and then Liu relayed, "They come from another part of the mine."

"Which part?" Alex pressed. The road clearly did not come from the pit they had just been in, and the briefing had not conveyed that there was another pit on the premises. "Is there another pit?"

More back and forth between Liu and the foremen, this time a lengthier exchange. And finally Liu said, with a tone of finality in his voice, "It is another way up from the mine. Same mine. Same ore. Just another road up to the surface, that's all."

Alex could sense that he wasn't going to get more out of them at this point in time, but he would circle back. He knew the trick of the Potemkin factory, the clean facility established just to put on a good face to the world, while the real work went on elsewhere. He would not depart today without driving down that road. That much he was sure of.

They were using brain implants. That was how they did it. Or, at least, that was half of the puzzle.

It had taken the better part of an hour of back and forth in the "research facility," which it turned out was the same as the infirmary, to get to the bottom of how the mine was actually tracking the keys to improved performance among its miners. It was doing so with the most straightforward, albeit rather invasive, approach – by implanting chips directly into their brains to monitor their activity while they mined. It was neither groundbreaking technology nor was it, strictly speaking, necessarily a human rights problem. That all came down to thorny issues of informed consent, worker coercion, and other matters. All things Alex would get to the bottom of, now that he finally understood the basic technology they were using.

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