Zaable's Destiny

Raised in a mining community on a remote asteroid, where his parents worked the great mining machines extracting minerals from an asteroid belt rich in the components commonly used in spacecraft engines. Zaable's parents did not value education and had not enrolled him in the mining school until he insisted, and as a result he had fallen well behind the other children his age. It took several solar cycles for him to catch up and by that time the other children had taken to calling him dumb Zaable, a moniker he had not been able to rid himself of even after he surpassed most of them in knowledge of the things taught in the classroom. He eventually stopped attending class in person and took all the available classes from the comp unit in his family's quarters. Now he was nearing the age where the company would demand that he either learn to run a mining device or leave the asteroid belt for good.