Photo of the Moment
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Eating the Graffiti |
2 of 10 |
Remodelling is complicated. You can't just wade in and smash; you have to stand off the site, triple your sensor readings, and use your snakes with high precision.
I ascend from the Milwaukee harbour to the worksite. It's up thirty stories on a lakefront building, and has a ten-meter-wide transplas window facing the water. I like transplas. It comes apart much more neatly than brick or glass, and you can use it as a stable entry point.
"Can you do it in three minutes?" Bev says.
"You bet," I say. I'll do anything for her.
Hovering outside, and with both arms anchored on the wall for stability, I burn a hole through the window. My recycler chutes pour warm plastic pellets down onto the street. That's another good thing about transplas. It recycles very smoothly.
The worksite is furnished. It contains ten leather-upholstered steel chairs, an oak table, eighteen holographic camjectors, twenty speaker cones, and eight mikes. My orders say everything has to go. I feed myself the chairs with two of my snakes while my other six work on the table, jetting it into bite-sized bits. Inside my mouth, high-pressure abrasives strip the soft material from the chairs. Leather doesn't recycle, so I flush it out my refuse chute. Little clouds of leather hash and cardboard bits float down on the street below. After I've stripped each chairframe, I flash it with my plasma-jaw and recycle the molten result. Elapsed time for ten chairs: thirty seconds.
Bev laughs as I eat the last chair. Her happiness plus the happiness of the job, that's times-two happiness, which is another first.
Suddenly her laughing stops. "Hurry up," she says. "The lard's on the way."
The power here hasn't been shut off. The camjectors spark as I scrape them away with my wirebrushes. They leave charred circles on the wood panelling of the interior walls, but it doesn't matter; this panelling isn't worth recycling. I grind it and flush it. The underlying plastic I recycle with a heatfan-powervacc combo, except for the tight spots, where I use a narrow brush. My only error is a single notch on the floor, and it's a small one, less than two millimetres deep. I try to file a note of that error and also one for the exposed wiring in the camjector mounts, but I can't because I'm net-dark.
As I finish, two small flyers enter my caution airspace. They hover above and behind me.
"Get us back into the lake," Bev orders.
"Without my network connection, I can't negotiate right-of-way with those other craft," I tell her.
The flyers squirt some sticky gel at me. Are these malfunctioning builder bots, come to pour plastic or sound retardant? I don't recognise the material they're using. Some of it gets inside my recycler chutes, clogging them up. It builds up on my arms where they meet the building.
"They're trying to stick us to the building!" says Bev. She overrides my traffic control module. I plummet and the gel stretches for twenty-five stories above me before it finally snaps.
The strange bots stop spitting at me and pursue us out to the lakeshore and beyond. They're still above us when I dive into Lake Michigan.
"We got them!" Bev whoops as we descend to fifteen meters.
"Two minutes and forty-nine seconds from entry to completion," I tell her.
"You did great, Fox. Just great. Now let's make tracks." She enters some co-ordinates. "I know a hiding place."
My gravjets open a tunnel through the water for us. We head out into the lake.