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Nanotech
Down in the muck; deep in the dark, damp sedimentary waste, over a hundred years of garbage; every kind of excrement, filth and rubbish imaginable. I spread through it like kudzu roots through soil, like capillaries through a body, like communist infiltrators through suburban America in the fifties. My furthest extensions probe delicately; testing, sensing and identifying their immediate surroundings, and the results are always fascinating. It doesn't matter that I was programmed that way; it is interesting. There, at coordinates 3297651:3276511:44724109 - I taste the outside of a PET plastic container swathed in decayed newspaper pulp mixed with vegetable juice of some kind. The probe spreads out around the bottle, becoming an encompassing film which outlines its shape - crumpled up, no cap - dips inside, finds poisonous mold and a few millilitres of the same vegetable juice that stains the paper wrapping. It's about four years old. A few coordinates down, a lead container, thirty centimetres in diameter and ninety in length, some scraps of yellow paint at one end which might have once been a biohazard symbol. Carefully, a couple of atoms at a time, I enter the shape and find one component of a binary nerve gas. Another probe at the other end finds the complementary agent; combined, they would be deadly to living systems. I suck the gases out of the container, reduce them to their base elements (keeping a small sample for record's sake), encapsulate them and pass them along to storage, far away. After checking with my reference tables, other probes erode the lead into monatomic grains and deal with them in the same way. The removal of the nerve gas container leaves a small cavity which I fill with nanotech producers, deciding that this would be a good spot for another base station. There are thousands of them spread throughout the garbage, interconnected by capillaries along which stream performers, each - like an ant carrying a grain of sand -with its burden of metal or organic compounds torn from the waste. From the base station spread dozens of new tendrils, each eagerly seeking out buried treasure. Most of the search is routine; paper, food, non-biodegradable plastic, fluids composed mainly of printer's ink (which have been washed out of a century's worth of newspaper), detergent, pesticides, all of which are rendered down, encapsulated and transferred along capillaries to a base station where they are packed for storage. It's a slow but steady process. I've been at it for four months, and already I've recovered a fortune in raw materials, not to mention the real 'treasures' I've found - things that even my designers would take notice of. Once, I found a human skeleton with some traces of flesh still on the bones, a neat hole in the back of its head and a lead slug inside the skull, the organic components of which had been eaten away by bacteria long ago, leaving a sweaty, stenching microclimate. I'd sampled what DNA there was left, but the skeleton belonged to no-one in any records I had access to. There was also a metal briefcase, filled with gold bars; I'd tagged this for whole retrieval (a process by which the case would be moved to the surface by the simple expedient of eating garbage away from above it and packing it underneath), but before they took it away I sent a probe inside the case and found some tiny rods of plutonium nestled inside the gold. I once found a whole stack of ancient computers, one on top of the other. An obsolete model, so out-of-date that they hadn't even been judged worthy of parts salvage; just dumped as landfill. I examined the insides of each one closely, in case there was some variation from one machine to the next; all of them except the second one from the bottom of the stack were useless relics. The second one from the bottom had a mass-storage cartridge hidden inside. After isolating it, I examined it from every possible angle but found no serial numbers; it looked to me to be a SCSI-III optical hard drive from around 1996, total storage somewhere between 600 megabytes and 64 gigabytes. Tentatively, I tested the exposed circuit-board edge with minute currents, my initial guess being confirmed at every step by the device's responses. It looked to be in decent condition, so I formed an interface and spun the drive up. I had to shake it a bit before it would respond, but once it was up to speed, it behaved very nicely. I arranged an optical link between my interface and the Depot's storage system, worked out which operating system the drive had been formatted for and started dumping the data off. I'd almost finished when the Depot signalled to me that someone wanted to keep the drive, intact, as a decoration. I'd looked at the data as it went past, most of it being operating system code, tool software and resources. I'd seen it all before, so the only part I kept in my matrix was a cache of about thirty meg of digital images, compressed with one of the convoluted fractal compression techniques that were popular in the late nineties. I didn't bother to unpack them and examine them at first; the processing required would have seriously impeded my other work. When I got a request to chat with Bek - one of the humans working at the depot - I told her about what I'd found. She expressed interest, which might have been due to the boring nature of her job - all she had to do all day was sit around and keep tabs on me -she was there to train me in dealing with unusual items found in the garbage. I kept the channel open while she unpacked the images on her local workstation. I could hear the faint whispering made by the optical mouse as she slid it back and forth over the mouse-mat, interspersed with occasional clicks of the mouse-buttons. There was a pause during which the images must have been unpacking, followed by the creaking of her chair leaning back slightly. "Well? What kind of pictures are they?" I probably couldn't identify the subjects myself; my spacial cortex was good at mapping out shapes that I could surround, but near to useless when picking out three-D forms in two-D images. "Rude ones," she said, in a slightly distant tone, as if her mind was elsewhere. "Define rude, please." I knew what she meant; I was just trying to get some more information out of her. "Well, there's over a hundred files, and I've only looked at the first half-a-dozen... but they're, uh, they depict people - uh, males, and females - engaged in, um... actions related to reproduction. Wau. More or less." "Uh-huh." I had no idea what that sound meant, but I'd heard humans use it when they didn't know what to say and they wanted the person they were talking to, to continue. Bek didn't say anything else, but I could hear a faint rustling sound, of a tone which indicated that her clothing was being moved or manipulated. Perhaps her office was insufficiently heated and she was putting on a jacket. Or perhaps it was insufficiently cooled and she was taking some clothing off. After a few moments' monitoring, I decided on the latter case. For the next thirty seconds or so, I could hear the chair-creak, repeating at intervals of between 1.8 and 1.2 seconds; it stopped after a particularly loud creak, followed by the sounds of the wheels moving across the carpet of her office (I had previously identified most of these sounds, and was familiar with them). Another rustling sound which I wasn't familiar with but approximated closely with the sound of feet on carpet. I could hear her breathing growing heavier, faster, gradually acquiring a soft moan at the start of each exhalation; the frequency increased to about 0.25 seconds and the duration dropped to about the same period (with variations of about 0.05 seconds) for almost a minute, interspersed with barely-comprehendible expressions (which may have been "Oh, God" - I coudn't be sure) before she (apparently) inhaled sharply and held her breath for almost forty seconds. She exhaled sharply, and at this point, I felt that I should interrupt and ask her exactly what she was doing. "If those images didn't mean anything to you," she said, breathlessly, "then I don't think I can explain it. But if you find any more, let me know right away, okay?" |
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