Neptune Closes Diamond Crawlspace

Stratum-9, Neptune's crushing diamond-rain layer, is no longer officially classified as a utility basement.

Drafted in 2168, the rule allowed builders on Silt-Reach to bypass steep altitude fees by designating the stratum as an unheated storage closet. Under local rules, any space could be classed as a basement if it was regularly swept.

The duty fell to a single worker, Hiroto Tanaka, who descended eighty thousand kilometres in a titanium bathysphere to clear diamond gravel from the lower atmosphere. He moved three tonnes of gems per shift, which his union agreement classified as light dusting. He did this every Thursday.

"It is mostly just grit," Tanaka wrote in a logbook entry recovered from his ship. "If you do not keep on top of the drifts, they get behind the water heater and make a terrible racket."

The department defended the classification for decades against regional assessors, arguing a layer hot enough to melt lead was functionally identical to a crawlspace.

The arrangement ended when Tanaka retired. His successor refused to enter the bathysphere, leaving a lost mop at the bottom of the gas giant. Without Tanaka's weekly sweep, diamond drifts have backed up into the lower ventilation ducts, sanding Silt-Reach away from the bottom up.