Moral Code by Lois Melbourne

Author:Lois Melbourne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nonlinear Publishing LLC
Published: 2022-06-09T06:45:38+00:00

Supply Chain

Twelve days ago, activity began at this desolate, fenced-off field, oddly positioned in the middle of an industrial zone. Hendrick’s team had delivered multiple canisters, each containing unique nanites. It had been a month since Cody and Loel had presented production bottlenecks to Roy. Specialization within the Dust would help them speed their processes. A perimeter setup, established by differential GPS, left the technology alone to execute its directive. When working with dust-sized mining motes, marking one’s territory to the closest fraction of a millimeter was critical. It at least made one a better neighbor.

Not all nanites are created equal.

Dark or light, it didn’t matter. Nanites were freely invading every centimeter of one-hundred-twenty desolate acres of trash in the former landfill. Giant, yet slender, drills had perforated the ground to speed the path of the Dust’s navigation to deeper layers under the surface. Unlike the household particles resting dormant on knickknacks and on top of tall appliances, this Dust navigated with purpose and agility. Similar to the domestic variety, this Dust could get into anything, no matter how small the space appeared. The convergence on their targets could be described as insidious, except this was a trash heap. No one cared what happened to its contents.

The nanites didn’t have to rely on the drilled holes. Speedy production was a parameter of the project, so the AI’s suggestion for the drilling was accepted immediately. Descending via the shafts reduced the obstacles the bots had to burrow through. Less obstruction meant faster access to the gold and rare earth metals coating devices crushed under the layers of dirt and discarded electronics.

Rockefeller’s lust for raw materials continued to escalate, and this landfill was rich with the necessities. There were no old mattresses or decaying household waste in this dump to block access to the resources the nanites sought. The off-limits private property was one of thirty-two equally fertile hunting grounds along the coastal states owned by Roy. He bought this land because it held the refuse from electronic manufacturers, retail electronic recyclers, and a host of other businesses that had planned to save the world from waste throughout the ’90s and early 2000s.

A circuit board from an early laptop, fifteen feet under the surface, was scanned by the spectrometers aboard the first one hundred nanites which entered a drill hole. Each identified a rare earth metal, or another asset programmed in their collective memory. They swarmed the board. The resource recognition signal was broadcast across the mesh network connecting all the nanites. The mining dust mites converged, and microscopic consumption of every valuable surface on the board began.

A single nanite scraping at a gold metal droplet melded to a green circuit board was inaudible. Hundreds of drilling dust particles attacked the cell phone casings stacked together in thousands of cubic feet without any detectable sound. Trillions of nanites scraping, drilling, collecting metal, silicon and plastic particles typically can’t be silent. However, working deep under the layers of dirt piled atop the electronic waste dump twenty years ago, the minute machines created an ambient industrial buzz.

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