Banana Slug #54:FOG

..............................................................................................................................................

The rain continued. It was beyond insane. It had been raining fairly steadily for what seemed like years. This had never happened since Noah. It was impossible. Even the deserts were soggy.

It was foggy too. In many places the fog became impenetrable. The historic London Fog had been no worse. The killer fogs of central California’s San Joaquin Valley were not as dense. Commercial traffic, traffic of all types, anything that moved much above walking speed, had been forced to stop a long time ago. Air traffic was almost impossible. Travel by land was at a crawl even with the radar. There was no longer any commercial river traffic. The water level had risen so that nothing could get under the river bridges. After a number of very expensive, and very lethal accidents the lesson was finally learned. Shipping was just no longer possible.

Famine descended upon the population. The old saying which few believed before was “If you got it a truck brought it.” The trucks had stopped running and the shelves became bare.

About the only thing that moved with any regularity were trains. They too had trouble with bridges.

All the river traffic was moored. Mooring worked fine until the water level rose too high. When the water got high enough the mooring lines either slipped, pulled the vessel under, broke free or some combination.

By ones and twos then in greater numbers vessels of all types began to break loose and float down river. They’d bump into each other and crash into anything in their way. River bridges were taken out by loose barges crashing into their supports.

..............

The intensity of the Fog was worse than at Island Oooooozeit, when they first began their journey. When Flint Island had re conceptualized it’s geological orientation and decided that it was a mover rather than a sitter, the visibility had been a hundred yards or better then. Had it been any worse they might have delayed the river-slither, then again, probably not. It wasn’t like there had been a lot of choice. Lately it was much worse that it had been then. Shelby was not happy. The Banana Slug moved just about as fast as it’s namesake, that is, considering the scale, it moved at a comfortable walk, for an old man with a cane, going up hill, in a blinding snowstorm on ice, into the wind. Even so Shelby didn’t want to be blundering into something unexpected. For obvious reasons he didn’t want to shine any lights that could be seen by hostile eyes.

Shelby was sitting in the eyestalk straining to see forward. All he could see was a grey wall of fog and he wasn’t happy.

“I have about ten foot of visibility here. I wonder if the view is any better underwater?” he muttered, “Chad, check that out will you?”

“Ten-four boss” Chad was in the other eyestalk. He lowered it underwater. “Pitch dark boss. Can’t see a thing.”

“What if we shine some lights underwater?” Shelby asked. “Will they help? Will they be seen at any distance on the surface in this fog?”

“Only way to find out is to try” Wilbur had been listening in. “We’ll have prototype variable frequency light bars installed right away. I have some ideas.”

.................

True to his word, Wilbur, Joshua, Yvette, Carl and Cody had construction drones installing an evil looking apparatus on the leading edge of the creeping crawler in about an hour.

“This is a Kludge” Wilbur said “It’s only a Kludge. If it was a real light bar it’d be pretty. If it works I’ll make it look purty later. It’s got sonar too. Try it.”

Shelby tried it. He activated the light. It worked. Shelby could ‘see’ a few dozen feet. He activated the sonar and it worked even better. He could ‘see’ almost a mile. He shut off the light.

“YES!” he said “That’s about ten thousand percent better. We’re not ‘out running our headlights’ any more anyway.”

“That wouldn’t take much.” Chad said “as slow as this thing is moving.“

............

The Daemons took over the operation of the new ‘vision’ system. They were about a hundred thousand times more sensitive than Joshua, Chad or Shelby. The Daemon’s ancient function was to be an interface between the human brain and the SoulStone. Interfacing with any other electronic device was child’s play by comparison.

...............

Shelby learned from this lesson. He needed, THEY needed to be able to see. The sonar was good but it wasn’t good enough and it didn’t work in the air. In CuChi he and the Voice had employed insects as scouts to great success in order to be able to work in absolute darkness. Later at Sam Snead he’d done something similar with insects. It was time to do so again on a much grander scale.

Insects
AND
tiny minnows.
For a few days the Forges and Assemblers were kept busy, night and day, fabricating more advanced and more capable versions of the insect sentinels that he’d used before. His machines spit out Robo-Bug and Cyber-fish by the truckload. Working together, using newly learned skills from the SoulStone, the Maggi, Wilbur, Cody, Carl, and many others developed a command system for the Swarm. It was a widely distributed, massively parallel, hugely redundant audio, video and multi-frequency radio reception network.

Tens of thousands, if not millions, of tiny cyber-insects and cyber-fish were released into the fog and water around the Banana Slug where they dispersed rapidly. Eventually they were englobed by a surveillance network miles in radius and thousands of feet high. When they began to move again, as slow as before, they weren’t likely to blunder into, OR be run over by anything without warning.

That didn’t satisfy Shelby. He built another type of bug. In order to economize on SSmoke this one was very small. It was tiny, almost microscopic.

He made millions of them, perhaps a trillion. They formed a constantly expanding perimeter. These were the long hunters. They hunted for threats and other information and would give notice of anything WAY out there.

........................
Next Episode
#55:Banana Slug -Barges…]( https://steemit.com/fiction/@everittdmickey/4xwexa-teotwawki) The Previous Episode was
#53:Banana Slug -Everyone was at Ernie’s…
The First Episode was
# 1 : Prologue…
..............
Book One: SoulStone
..................................................
I'm

@everittdmickey
.
I write
SPECULATIVE FICTION
My books on Amazon.
I engage in political commentary
and
generally talk about anything that strikes my fancy
on
Steemit
and
Sola

When watching the LameStream FakeNews Media

it's hard to tell what’s true or when they are lying isn’t it? It seems that they are more interested in influencing public opinion than they are reporting the facts.
SteemPunk Snail Image from Pixabay