Drone Swarms and megastructures

On Automotecture and automatocycling, a treatise on architecture and material use in 2329.

Interviewer: Celandine Montrose Percklonic III

Interviewee: Dakrone McLiuMac

Age: 81 (Gen True, 75-150)

Occupation: Induction mine coordinator

Humanity: 34% robotic (no wetware).

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and narrative flow. The words and thoughts expressed have not been altered.

Celadine: Thanks for sitting with me today Dakrone. Let me start by explaining what I’m doing. I’m recording conversations with working class individuals for an article concerning the ways the Drone Fleet has changed architecture and urban recycling. We’ll be putting these tapes in a time capsule for posterity. What was the most revolutionary thing to happen in your generation?

Dakrone: The Transcontinental Pipeline, unquestioningly.

CMP: Really? Please explain. You’re the first person I’ve interviewed who’s talked about it.

DM: Well, I’m still pretty young, but I remember when I was a teenager, a baby still, the announcement of the project and thinking they were daft! A seventeen-hundred-mile canal across the entire span of what was still referred to as the United Stated, pre-Integration.

CMP: Could you briefly explain what the Integration event you’re talking about it? I want to assume that the people or creatures that unearth our capsule may not have a robust knowledge of our planet’s history.

DM: Sure. That’s another pretty amazing thing to happen in my life. Following the loss of the Last War, the nation then referred to as the United States was forced to abandon its independent governance and join the Global Council. The obliteration of New York by the Euronational Drone Swarm was too devastating. I still can’t believe the entire city was dismantled in six weeks.

CMP: The EDS is what built the Transcontinental Pipeline, correct?

DM: Yes, that’s correct. Part of Euronational’s obligation to rebuild the US post-war was to rebuild the infrastructure they devastated. As you’re aware, the Last War started over global climate. The United States’ constant flouting of international accord finally lead to the loss of several island nations, and with many coastal European and Asian cities becoming threatened by pollution, the destruction of wind and water sources finally caused Euronational to invade the west coast. So, they designed a magnificent arterial water system that relied on a massive east-west synthetic river that eventually became the Pipeline.

CMP: Can you explain the engineering behind the Pipeline? I understand you’re a mine coordinator, so you must be familiar with the general engineering principals it operates on.

DM: Yes, it’s actually the same principal the dirtlines run on, though the Tunnels are nothing compared to the Pipeline. The Drone Swarm first built a massive river delta and then dammed it off. Then, the easy part. The EDS built a trench three hundred meters deep and a thousand meters across that spanned from the river delta in California all the way to a symmetric delta built in Carolina. Then, it destroyed the dam. Twenty years. That’s all it took. It still boggles the mind to think. With the new, massive saltwater river running cross-country, hundreds of sedimentating reservoirs were built and the river was tapped to flow in. The reservoirs fed the municipal water distilleries the and Pipeline was complete. An automaton-made river larger than any natural feature on the planet and the most important transportation path ever conceived. Thousands of logjams traverse its length every day. Millions of tonnes of cargo. It’s truly a third-gen Great Wonder.

CMP: And what’s your level of familiarity with the Euronational Drone Swarm? Can you explain the fundamentals of its operation?

DM: Locusts. They were modeled on locusts. The insect. First developed in Scania by Unmortals. The process is simple: drill a massive borehole into a geothermal vent. Use it to power a massive turbine. Use the turbine to create a massive electromagnetic induction field. Unleash a swarm of literal-billions of induction-powered automatons. Pretty simple, actually. The Danelands use wind turbines for their inductors because its more readily available. Chindia uses its massive hydroelectric works. I think Afrabia still uses subterranean nuclear vaults. Subafrique is fully reclaimed now, but they used a carbon-cycle system, that is, coal-, oil- and gas-burning plants with carbon sequestration vaults. Subeuro is still obsessed with their Tokomak power. Principal is still the same in all those cases, though. Mass-manufactured, self-replicating drones. Tiny little diamond cutter jaws, a tiny little stomach, a small integrated circuit, air-powered levitation, and the HiveMined servers. Just like locusts. They come in like a cloud of black. The drone lands, cuts a small chunk out, flies to the dumpsite, and pukes it back up. Or, it eats a 3-D printing medium, lands on a site, and “deposits” its payload. Genius bit of biomimicry, that. Everyone at the time was thinking elephants and those damned Scanians were thinking ants. You know, you can see the EDS from the space labs when they are at full-swarm.

CMP: What would you say is the biggest impact the EDS has had on our culture, in terms of recycling and architecture?

DM: Heh, you’d be better off asking what HASN’T changed. I think the most important thing to change is how buildings are made, to begin with. Back in the Anthropocene…you know its funny that we call a couple-hundred year period a “cene,” ya know? I get it, a billion years from now, there will be a clear line between the Holocene and the Anthropocene because of nuclear testing, and that’s all well and good, but ‘cenes used to last millions of years. But the space between the Anthropocene and the Automatocene is atomic, comparatively. But the boffins say that, again, just like nuclear testing, the layers of Swarm corpses can be used to differentiate the era, so what do I know about geological strata? My geology training is in how to destroy the Earth, not study it. Anyway, I’m getting off track. What did you want to know again?

CMP: The Drone Swarm’s influence on architecture and recycling.

DM: Oh right, yes. Buildings used to be built in stages. First the frame, then the façade, then the interior. That dramatically limited how you could design a building. Also, it’d take years, sometimes, to build major projects. Humans had to do most of the operation, as well. Even early printing technology like the  3-axis gantry construction technique needed crane operators and used pre-fab segments manufactured offsite. That’s all changed now. The EDS can do real 3D printing. Automated trucks drive on site terrestrially, with raw dust in the bed. The drones used for a builder swarm have lasers instead of jaws and a heating element in their stomach. They ingest some substrate, carbon fiber, copper, whatever. It melts in the stomach, and then they regurgitate it precisely in place, and anneal it with the laser. That means you can do a ton of really fancy design. If you work with a destructor swarm as well, you can do some extremely elaborate printing, bracing, and removal processes that can lead to some extraordinarily intricate final shapes. And, in this methodology, all of the structure is solid-state. So, things like pipes and wires and air ducts are integrated into the structure, making for super thin shells, almost like printed circuit boards from the early Electronics era.

CMP: Could you talk more about the constructor and destructor swarms and what their differences are? What do they do?

DM: Sure. So, as stated, the constructor fleets are pretty straight forward. We use terrestrial vehicles to cart in raw materials, which are then dropped in place to build structures. This includes induction towers and locust production facilities, as well. Hence the “self-replicating” part. The destructor fleets are a different animal. They’re essentially the same as what we use in mining, save for some small implementation differences. Size, power draw, and the like. Constructor fleets are much more similar to ants. Destructors are closer to the aforementioned locusts. They’ll land on something, and then use its diamond jaws to masticate it. Nibble it into dust until its stomach is full, and then fly off to a dirtline and spit it up. When all of them coalesce into the superswarm, they can level a small city in a few days. As I said, during the Last War, the full EDS leveled Manhattan and all the surrounding boroughs into a mound of dust in six weeks, flat. They’re relentless. They can strip a human to the bone in under a minute, and devour their skeleton in another. They can devour anything. Tanks, warships, buildings, farmlands, you name it. There is even a swarm in orbit right now devouring space waste that pulls the double duty of destroying any intercontinental ballistic missile that makes it up that high. They were the new atom bomb. An unstoppable weapon of mass destruction. And because they’re so cheap, simple, and durable, they’re perfect for cleaning up waste, as well. Abandoned cities become can be completely reclaimed. Landfills reduced to dust in a month or two. Nuclear cleanup is a bit more challenging, but EDS cleaned up Chernobyl. They suicide-ran millions of them at the Elephant’s foot until it was completely disposed of, and then dustified anything that registered more than a few clicks on the Geiger counter. It’s actually quite poetic, the juxtaposition of something so revolutionary to creation against something so awe-inspiringly destructive. I shiver to think what would happen should they ever go rogue.

CMP: Are you ever afraid of that? What would you do if we ever did lose control of the swarm?

DM: Oh, I’m not scared at all. It’s extremely easy to destroy the swarm if you know what you’re doing. It’s not hard to disrupt the induction generators and a good EMP can buy a non-synth long enough to blow the lid off the whole shebang.

CMP: Then how did New York get leveled? Could the United States not have done that to save themselves?

DM: I mean, sure they could have, if the Global Council didn’t exist. They still have a fleet of non-autonomous vehicles, and unless you’re synthetic, the techniques you’d use to fight an autonomous army are very different than what you’d use to fight a biological one. I just meant that if they swarm ever went rogue, there’d be one hell of a mess to clean up before we could get them back in control.

CMP: Got it. Could you elaborate more on the dirtlines?

DM: Sure. All of that masticated dust has to go somewhere. So, just as the Intercontinental Pipeline brings in all that water, all of that garbage and sewage has to go out. When the Pipeline was first built, it still relied on traditional sewage and waste facilities, and was open-air. First, they enclosed the pipeline with the Great Arches, creating a weather-proof tunnel for the swarm to move around in. Next, a series of underground transport lines were built, the Tunnels. If you’ve ever bought something from the marketplace and had it delivered to you, it got to your doorstep through the tunnels. Then, giant inlet dumps were built into the tunnels, and an underground system of induction towers were posted up. Now, instead of using the old sewage and waste infrastructure, everything is shunted into the stream where a swarm of drones is dedicated to collecting and transporting dust up and down the Tunnels and into the giant processing plants where it’s spun down in centrifuges and separated into component categories to be recycled into new building materials for new structures. Those are the dirtlines, the stream of drones shuttling dust up and down the Tunnels and into the processors.

CMP: So, you would say that the EDS enables a zero-waste lifestyle?

DM: Among other things, yes. There isn’t really “waste” anymore, as we’d traditionally call it in previous times in history. But, to play the pedantic, technically material “waste” doesn’t exist at all, because whatever we create will eventually crumble into dust through natural erosion and turn into mountains and rock. Even the landfills of old would have eventually got buried under layers of silt and dust across millions of years until they’re compressed into geological strata, like coal. “Waste” as we use the term in society is not a concept that mother nature is familiar with. The only “waste” nature is familiar with is entropic loss, which we harvest as heat and recycle into electricity to power the inductors. However, they are not 100% efficient, as nothing ever can be; entropy needs its tax, you know. So, I’ll say that it isn’t that the EDS enables us to live a zero-waste lifestyle, I’ll say that the EDS has vastly increased the speed at which societal poop decomposes into the dirt life grows out of.

CMP: So, what would you say the impact automatocycling has on architecture?

DM: Well, the most important thing is rapid deployment. Because of the swarm, we can build buildings faster than we can manufacture the stuff to go inside them. Until we can find a way to micro-scale the swarms to deploy in manufacturing facilities, we’re stuck at the speed of assembly lines and 3D printers, which, to their credit, are extraordinarily fast, but when you can literally level a city housing hundreds of millions of people in six weeks, and construct a new city in its ashes to rehouse them in three months, you can completely rebuild any city as often as you’d like to adjust to new regulations and trends. I moved all my furnishings into my garage, designed my house on the Web, imported the plans into the Marketplace, and then clicked a button, and POOF! my entire house was demolished and rebuilt to the exact specifications I designed before I even finished up at the jobsite that day. New York has moved six times since the Last War to adjust to the ebbing and flowing of the waterline as the atmosphere recovers from all that carbon. Urban blight is entirely eliminated. Rural towns don’t die on the vine once the corporate support is gone. We’ve reduced raw material extraction by near a hundred-fold. In that same vein, everything is always becoming more efficient and effective and we worry less and less about natural disaster destroying our ways of life. California suffered a 9.4 earthquake three years ago. In the old days, thousands would have died and the city would have been leveled. Now? Because everything is demolished and rebuilt to new codes, and the materials are so much better and robust, it shrugged it off like water down a duck’s back. And, anything that did suffer any damage was completely wiped out and rebuilt in a new, structurally-sound way.

CMP: Would you describe that as a good thing or a bad thing?

DM: Neither? Both? Everything has its limitations. I went to see the Colosseum a few months ago. It was beautiful. It’s on its last leg and hundreds of citizens donate time and energy to keeping it standing and beautiful so that we can visit it and remember our past. In my generation, the True Immortals, we will be the only relic linking us to this time, assuming that we really are the first truly immortal generation. There are hardly any architectural artifacts from a hundred years ago, let alone ones that will last hundreds or thousands of years in the future. Things like the Intercontinental Pipeline will endure forever, but we’re losing the little bits of our history. Landfills were once the best place to analyze a society. By poring over the discarded scraps of the citizenry, we could glean insight into the people of our past. With all the landfills gone and atomized and probably part of a nearby skyscraper, how will archeologists unearth our history several thousand years from now? Will our data be our only legacy? So good or bad? I don’t think I’m qualified to make an opinion. I am saving up to demolish my house and remodel it again next year, so if I think it’s bad, I’m a part of the problem. My arm is 28 years old. I could have replaced it several times with a stronger, faster, more efficient one, but I spend my money on remodels instead. Everything in cycles, I guess.

CMP: Alright, one last thing. Where do you think the swarm is taking us, architecturally?

DM: Well, I think we’re going to increasingly isolate from nature. Just like the Great Arches built over the Intercontinental Pipeline, or the move to induction hexacopters instead of planes and road capsules and the like in order to get out of the way of birds and land animals. Pretty soon we’re going to be building walls and domes and what have you, and soon after that, hollowing out mountains and embedding in bunkers and so forth. Let nature have the planet again. I see swarm tech also taking us into extrasolar terraforming endeavors once we can find a way to build self-contained drone swarm factory packages we can mount on interstellar rocket ships. Mars is a great example of what we can do now. Euronation has already cityscaped thirty percent of the useable surface area and rising as population growth and colonization accelerate. There’s talk that the induction towers might even be able to be linked together to form a magnetosphere strong enough to protect a real atmosphere from getting blown away by solar winds. We might even see full non-synths on the planet within the century. I think you’ll see new exotic materials being swarm-printable, with more and more elaborate structural designs and more and more interesting industrial design. We may even see a circle back to durable architecture and a re-focus on making millennia-spanning wonders for aesthetic reasons and not functional ones. I am not certain. All I can be sure of is that we are a long time away from hitting the limits of the tech.