[ WP ] The human race has spread across the galaxy , to support this rapid expanse , large mining corporations can harvest ( break down ) entire planets into raw materials .

I started with the asteroids. 
 
 There had been whole big belt of them, already bite-sized for the harvester to gather. I had parked myself in the orbit and let my ship do the rest, scooping them up as they tried to drift by. It had taken a few years, but I was paid by the rock, and they were the easiest rocks around. It had n't even had any trouble with the largest ones, which were large enough to look like little planets, round and cratered. One by one, they all had been tractored into the gaping maw of my moon-sized ship. 
 
 Tractor technology is a very interesting science. No, not the kind on farming planets, the kind in we use in space. The real term for it is gravitational engineering, but everyone calls it tractor tech. The main way my ship employed it is in beams, which kind of act like gravity ramps for mass to roll down. Once a beam hits a rock, it'll just drift right over to my ship, and into the gateway. 
 
 Once they pass through the gateway and come out the other side in a processing station somewhere, they're turned into materials for ships, like mine. Big suckers, moon sized and bigger, for living in mostly. Even my mining vessel has a nice little population of five million or so, though I never met them. They had their living quarters, and I had mine. They did n't have anything to do with me, or my job. 
 
 And today, my job involved deciding where to go next. The belt was fresh out of asteroids, since I'd been here long enough for a full orbit. It was a solid planet's worth of rocks that I did n't have to spend time breaking down a planet for. But now that they were gone, that was exactly what I would have to do next. 
 
 The tractor technology for breaking down a planet is a lot different from that of beams. Beams use positive gravity, and crumblers use negative gravity. They're the same force, of course, positive and negative are just technical terms. Negative gravity uses an opposing force to nullify existing gravity caused by a planet's mass, causing it to pull itself apart with its own angular momentum. It's a very simple process, and it creates chunks of the perfect size for harvesting. 
 
 In this system, there were a few candidates for rocky planets I could target. 
 
 The first closest to me was a decent target, alright in size and no major orbital anomalies to slow me down. But it's iron content was low, and iron was what paid the big bucks. I decided to do it later, though I knew I'd probably just leave it be in the end. Not worth my time. 
 
 The furthest one from me had the highest iron content by percentage of mass. It was over fifty percent, a damn good number. Too bad the thing was practically an asteroid already, too puny to bother with right now. I'd get it on my way out, a parting snack. 
 
 The one next furthest was a much better size, almost twice that of the first closest. But all its scant iron was dead and deep in the core, and it had a troublesomely thick atmosphere of corrosive gases. It would n't hurt my ship, but it would n't process well once through the portal. A problem for a later day. 
 
 The second closest planet, however, still had a little life left in it. Its iron was molten in the massive metal core, and when it was ripped apart, it would cool into wonderful lumps of pure iron that would each net me a pretty penny. It was the biggest of the four, as well, and the rock of the crust and mantle had some iron in it too. It was the obvious choice for my next target. 
 
 All that molten iron made my approach to the planet a bit tricky, since it was throwing off a doozy of a magnetic field for such a small planet. My instruments had to be recalibrated constantly, but I eventually reached a good position to harvest the planet from, between it and a fairly large moon that I had n't noticed until I got much closer. 
 
 I was about to activate the crumbler when I realized that there was a signal coming off the planet. That did n't make sense to me, since this system was marked as uninhabited. That was the only reason I was allowed to mine here, after all. 
 
 The signal read, `` Earth, the first home of mankind. May we never repeat the mistakes that we learned here.'' The name tickled something in my memory, but I was n't sure where from. I scratched my head over it for a while, but to no avail. Looking at the planet, it seemed like any other barren rock. Brown, unremarkable, and lifeless. 
 
 Shrugging, I activated the machine, and it began to crumble.
