The Storm (NUMA Files 10)

“Look familiar?”

“Like long-lost children,” Marchetti said. “Identical to my design, except …”

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sp; “Except what?”

“Except they can’t be mine.”

“Here we go,” Kurt said, waiting for all the denials and talk of preventative measures that should have worked. “Why not?” he asked. “Why can’t they be yours?”

“Because I never made any.”

Kurt hadn’t expected that.

“They’re moving,” Leilani noted, pointing to the screen.

Marchetti turned and magnified the screen again. “They’re feeding.”

“What do you mean they’re feeding? Feeding on what?”

Marchetti scratched his head, then zoomed in again. “Small organic proteins,” he said.

“Why would a tiny robot want to eat an organic molecule?”

“Because it’s hungry,” Marchetti said. He turned from the machine.

“Forgive me for asking, but why would a robot be hungry?” Kurt added.

“Here, on my island,” Marchetti explained, “the larger robots get to plug in. But if you’re going to make bots that are independent, they have to be able to power up one way or another. These little guys have several options. Those lines on their backs that look like microchips are actually tiny solar collectors. But because the independent bot has other needs, they have to be able to get sustenance from the surrounding environment. If these microbots follow my design, they should be able to absorb organic nutrients from the seawater and break them down. They should also be able to process dissolved metals and plastics and other things found in the sea, both to sustain themselves and reproduce.”

“This conversation is going from bad to worse,” Kurt said. “Explain how they reproduce. And I don’t need a lesson on the birds and the bees. I’ve just never heard of it in regards to a machine.”

“Procreation of the bot is a fundamental need if you want it to do anything useful.”

Kurt took a deep breath. At least they were getting answers even if he didn’t like the details. “And just what useful purpose did you design these things for?”

“My original concept was to use them as a weapon against seaborne pollution,” Marchetti began.

“They eat pollution,” Kurt guessed.

“Not just eat it,” Marchetti said, “they turn it into a resource. Look at it this way. There’s so much pollution out there, the sea is literally choking on it. The problem is, even in places like the Pacific Garbage Patch, the stuff is too spread out to be economically cleared up. Unless the instrument that’s doing the clearing feeds off what it clears, turning the garbage itself into a power source that enables the cleanup.”

He waved toward the screen. “To accomplish that, I designed a self-sustaining, self-replicating microbot that could live in the seawater, float around until it found some plastic or other garbage and chow down once it did. As soon as these things find a food source, they use the by-products and the metals in the seawater to copy themselves. Voilà!—reproduction—without all the fun parts.”

Kurt had always been baffled by the world’s collective unwillingness to do anything about the pollution being poured into the marine environment. The world’s oceans created three-quarters of its oxygen, a third of its food. Yet the polluters acted as if this was a trifle. And until there was nothing left to fish, or no one could breathe, it was doubtful anyone would do anything about it because it just wasn’t economical.

In a bizarre way, there was a certain elegance to Marchetti’s solution. Since no one wanted to do anything about the problem, he’d proposed a way to fix it without anyone actually having to lift a finger.

Joe seemed to agree. “There’s some brilliance in that.”

“There’s also insanity,” Kurt said.

“You’d be surprised how often those traits coincide,” Marchetti said. “But the real insanity is doing nothing. Or dumping billions of tons of plastic and trash into the thing that feeds half the planet. Could you imagine the vociferous outcry, the wailing of epic proportions, if the amber waves of grain were choked with cigarette lighters, plastic bottles, monofilament line and broken bits of children’s toys? That’s what we’re doing to the oceans. And it’s only getting worse.”

“I don’t disagree,” Kurt said. “But turning some self-replicating machine loose in the sea and just hoping it all works out isn’t exactly a rational response.”

Marchetti sat back down, he seemed to agree. “No one else thought so either. So like I said, we didn’t produce any.”