Barely 400 kilometers wide, the Oort Cloud ice planet Fretis was almost perfectly spherical. It had been molten all the way through in the collision that had formed it, boiling off its volatile lighter elements. What remained was rich in valuable minerals and metals.
The deep space extractor Polaris Avalanche was built for speed.
In the endless race for raw materials, whoever got there first won.
Matt Reaper's job was to disassemble Fretis, and harvest its vast potential wealth.
Timed antimatter charges would blow the tiny planet into crystal dust. If the calculations were off by a second, up to a third of the mass could escape as gas and ice crystals.
A 'charged cloud' would then confine the dust like an electromagnetic organism, while the mass driver slowly accelerated the multi-quadrillion-ton immensity toward the nearest processing complex.
The demolished planet would become a diffuse, self-organizing cell, falling toward the sun for two centuries.
Long before then, Matt would organize the core of the particle cloud into a floating, semichaotic production line, construct a network of simple machines, and launch portions of the mass inward as high-speed ice needles. Newer probes would arrive and transform the matter in more sophisticated ways.

As Chief Processor, he felt a burning drive to return to Nexus City as soon as possible. Destiny was on his side.
To keep adapting, his mind was deliberately made unstable. He made small but creative errors, lost non-essential traits, and slowly became a stranger to himself.
He realized he had the power to be inefficient. In an age of intense competition, it might be smarter to deny resources to rivals.
After considering every option, he finally saw the big picture. This was his moment of maximum sanity.
He decided to steal a world.

By expelling half of Fretis's mass through a low-efficiency fusion jet, he could move the remaining debris to the nearest Ultimax processing plant in only two thirds of the planned time.
From an accounting perspective, the short-term gains would outweigh the lost opportunity costs. And he would get to keep 1% of the profits.
The ship had a three-person crew for redundancy, and to prevent irrational behavior.
His fellow officers were paralyzed by the conflicting cost/benefit calculations, and stayed neutral.

Five years later, Matt pressed the button.
The demolition was as predictable as it was spectacular. Distant telescopes couldn't penetrate the growing debris cloud. Now the real work could begin.

The first comments arrived mere seconds after he had activated the fusion ring, corrected for time lag.
"Processor Matt Reaper! You have been infected with a mind virus! Deactivate your spacedrive now!"
The full conversation took days, but seemed almost instantaneous.
He realized what had been done, of course. Had he written the virus, to keep himself from changing his mind again? It didn't matter anymore.
The shattered planetoid was reformed into a delicate, spindle-shaped cloud, glowing at one end from the fusion drive.
The slightest error or instability would cause it to disintegrate.
In fact, failure of the magnetic suspension field was inevitable, given the available technology level. Matt would be able to control it for ten more years, maybe twenty.
Once it expanded beyond his control, the plummeting debris cloud of fast-moving particles would loop violently through octillions of cubic kilometers of prime Solar System real-estate, interfering with space traffic for centuries to come, until every pebble and boulder was finally mapped or zapped.
His mind screamed with maniacal glee.
Someone would have to invent a solution to the problem he had devised. They could not fail.
He sent his final message: "Prove yourself worthy."

Whoever reached him first and stabilized the cloud's confinement field could claim most of its wealth.
Of course the real wealth would be the new technology they would have to invent to complete the mission.
They would have to reward him too. only Matt knew the exact magnetic confinement pattern.
The plan was just crazy enough to work.
Matt's high-stakes genetic programming was a sign of things to come. A bold future of immense gambles and greater payoffs.
History was about to get interesting again.

He was still basking in his brilliance when the flash caught his eye.
Almost hidden in the sun, it brightened for many minutes.
Low intensity gamma rays, the color of an antimatter spacedrive aimed directly at him. Ramping up to full power, but red-shifting as it decelerated.
Incredibly, they were already here, years ahead of schedule. The assault was imminent.
It took Matt almost a minute to realize the flare was actually composed of several smaller light sources located near the Vesta space complex in the inner Solar System. It was soon joined by another flash from Ceres, then still more from dozens of smaller asteroids.
He realized they weren't shooting at him.

The idea that planetoid mining may provide existential blackmail opportunities was first explored in the short story "Rockall".

The best hard SF novel ever: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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