Mantle Drillers Promoted For Outstanding Listening Skills

Shift logs from the Pelagia Trench reveal that eighty-six mantle drillers buried in last month's basalt collapse were logged as entering silent mode.

A corrupted software update permanently scrubbed "dead" from municipal systems, replacing it with "indefinitely non-verbal". When a thermal pressure valve melted the lower staging platform, automated diagnostics marked all missing personnel as taking extended conversational pauses.

Trench clerk Kaelen Voss produced logs showing flatlined cardiac monitors registered as zero-volume speech events.

"The software thinks a stopped heart is just an extraordinarily polite pause," Voss said. "They are currently being billed for overusing the quiet room."

Voss sighed.

Because non-verbal staff remain on active employment rolls, directors filed no safety casualties with off-world regulators. Relatives received no pension payouts. Instead, municipal billing systems automatically charged the families for unused vocal ration credits.

When asked about the workers remaining twenty metres below molten slag, Project Director Amara Sola denied concealing fatalities.

"No one died," Sola said. "They are listening."

Safety inspectors later found seventy melted pressure suits hanging in the airlock, each stamped with a written reprimand for failing to participate in team-building exercises.

By Friday, human resources plans to roll out the non-verbal protocol department-wide, noting that the dead crew has achieved complete compliance with corporate communication goals.