#87: Food

..............................................................................................................................................
(Next day)

Shelby, Chad and the two Daemons found themselves in Shelby’s workshop, the Wizard’s Keep as the children of the Island had taken to calling it.

“So what exactly have you got in mind?” Shelby asked.

“Two things off hand for food.” Chad said. “Aquaponics for one. That should be easy enough.”

“Yeah. “ Shelby agreed “I’ve read a bunch about Aquaponics. I don’t see a problem there. We have the technology.”

Chad grinned. He’d seen that TV show also, on NetFlick.

“So what’s the other idea?” Shelby persisted.

“CHON“ Chad replied.

‘Huh?” Shelby said.

“Carbon Hydrogen Oxygen and Nitrogen” Chad explained. “makes up 96% of our body. The only other thing needed are a few trace elements. The best part is that CHON is in the air.”

“Well yeah.” Shelby said. “you got a point. We could use the blood-nanites to make a machine to suck it right out of the air and make food direct. In fact that’s what plants do. How hard could it be?”

“Pretty hard.” Elvira said.

“Yup.” Akatsuki “ I’m sure we can do it but it’s not trivial.”

“Not trivial at all. It is going to be a challenge.” Elvira agreed with her fellow daemon. “Perhaps we’d best concentrate on Aquaponics first? Do the hard stuff first..the impossible takes a little long?”

“We can do that”. Shelby agreed. “File CHOM generators next to EnStat Fusors. We’ll get to it one day.”

“Huh?” Chad said “What that what you said? EnWhat?”

“The full name is “Non-Statistical Fusion Reactions in Atomic Scale Accelerators” Shelby replied.

“I see why you call it EnStat.” Chad observed.”

“Yup. Lookit up someday when you have nothing else you want to do. It’s fascinating. I’ve been working on it in my spare time. “ Shelby told him.

“But right now we figure out how to make ‘ponics’ work?” Chad asked.

“Yup.” Shelby agreed. “Elvira and I will research the SoulStone for cross-over tech, you and Akatsuki research the internet and see what you can come up with. We’ll both see what we can find then combine the best parts of both and see if we can make something work.”

And so they did.

........................
(some time later.)

“You know?” Chad said “There’s an old saying.”

“Yeah?” Shelby said. “Go on.”

“If you have one problem you have a problem. But if you have more than one problem you have an opportunity to have your problems solve each other.” He said.

“Seems I heard that. It sounds about right”. Shelby said “what have you got in mind?”

Tier one of the Hierarchy is physiological. That includes clean air and water, food, sanitation. Why not play them off against each other?” he said

“For example. FishFood. We need FishFood to make Aquaponics work. Why not grow our own?” Chad continued “We have all that sewage just sitting there....and stinking...and requiring a sewer, and plant maintenance. That’s tier one. Why not use it to counter hunger, another tier one requirement. Use it to grow fish food for the aquaponics fish and meat animals? Build an ecosystem if you will.”

“Huh!” Shelby said “ I do believe you have a point.”

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

Kamiko Akiyama, wearing her mayor’s hat, answered the phone.

“Oh hi Jennifer what can I do for you? What? Your toilet? I dunno. First I heard of it. Let me call and find out. Be calm. I’ll get to the bottom of this....er...I mean...poor choice of words ,sorry.blush” Kamiko said.

“What in the world is going on?” she asked herself as she called the sewage plant.

“Chuck? This is Kamiko, is something going on that I should know about?” She asked.

“You don’t know about it?” Chuck the sewage plant supervisor asked. He sounded surprised...then a bit worried.

“Know about what?” Kamiko asked.

“Perhaps you should come down here and see for yourself.” Chuck answered.

“I’ll be right there” Kamiko replied.

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

“So what we figured “ Chad said “ was a massively parallel, hugely redundant, and widely distributed system. So we rebuilt the sewer. It didn’t take long using SSmoke. It’ll do for now.”

“And me and the boys are out of a job, or rather we have different jobs. In door jobs.” Chuck said. Oddly enough he didn’t seem too upset about it. Neither did the small crew he supervised. It had been a nasty job maintaining the sewage system and they were glad that they no longer had to do it.

“Yup” Shelby said “You guys can be robot wranglers from now on. From inside a building sitting in a nice comfortable chair. Instead of flat on your back in four inches of sewage trying to fix a leak....at night....in the winter.”

“Been there, done that.” Chuck said “ we all have.”

“Oh?” Kamiko was interested. She had, after all, asked Chad and Shelby to think outside the box. They were outside of it alright.

“Yup” Chad continued. “Sewage as we know it is mostly a lot of water transporting a tiny amount of human waste. That sewage travels thru a complex and expensive system of pipes to a complex and expensive treatment facility where things happen. One of which is that it is subjected to anaerobic digestion. There are some disadvantages. Mostly the complex part.”

“ ....and the expensive part.” Shelby said

“ ....and the anaerobic part.” Chad finished.

“What disadvantages?” Kamiko asked. This was entirely beyond her skill-set. Sewage was sewage. She never gave it any thought except for maintenance costs, and the smell.

“Well it requires a bunchaton of water, like I said, so you need a complex and expensive water system to supply it. That would be TWO complex and expensive systems to deal with.” Chad answered.

Kamiko nodded...she was well aware of those costs.

Shelby mentioned. “The sewage pipes here are ancient. I think the Romans installed them.”

“Naw..”Shelby said “Romans were Eye-talian. This is a ‘murican system. Abe Lincoln maybe.”

“The pipes carry the sewage to a centralized location where it is treated by the expensive equipment. The treated sewage then goes into the river.” Kamiko was shocked...she’d never realized that. Into the river?

“In addition to the liquid effluent there is sludge that has to be disposed of. Furthermore, even when the system is working right it produces a foul smelling explosive gas. ” Chad said “Methane you know. Sometimes called sewer gas, oddly enough. It has to be vented into the air or burned. That makes for a bad neighbor.”

“NIMBY” Shelby said. “ No one wants the sewage treatment plant in their back yard. An exclusionary attitude we might try to avoid?”

Kamiko nodded. Exclusionary attitudes of any sort worked at cross purposes to her conceptualization of the monkey-sphere. She hadn’t realized the gas was explosive.

“So we redesigned and rebuilt the whole thing. Structural Smoke and Build Bugs.....er....construction robots made that part easy and quick. “ Shelby said “We went to aerobic digestion instead of anerobic.”

“Yup. That allowed us to decentral.” Chad said “We committed Compost”.

“Instead of flushing five gallons of water down the drain every time someone relieves themselves, the ‘offering” falls into a container of ‘bulking material’.” he said

“The waste is aerobically digested in the bulking material by air breathing bacteria. No muss, no fuss, and no smell. When the container level gets to a certain point a little robot replaces it with an empty container and takes the full one away.

The sewer pipes aren’t full of sewage anymore they’re full of robots. Think of it as an underground highway.” he replied.

“I see” Kamiko said “and where does this compost go?”

“To the grow tunnels” Shelby said with a straight face.

“To the what?” Kamiko said.

“Grow Tunnels. Since we had the robots rebuilding the sewer system and they were underground and everything we just had them dig more tunnels. The tunnels are used to grow fish food, the bulking material, and other stuff, for things we need.” he replied. “we spread em out all over the island. It’s widely distributed. If one part breaks it won’t affect any of the other parts.”

Shelby agreed. “We’ve pretty much got it all automated. We can take care of all the sewage PLUS provide all the feed for the fish, rabbits, chicken, and other meat animals in the aquaponics system. The aquaponics provides fresh Vegetables for the whole town. The robots are just sitting there so why not put them to work? They can deliver food to anyone’s kitchen on demand.”

Kamiko was slightly overwhelmed. “Oh?“

“ Yup and do it 24/7” Shelby said. “Everything is in tunnels under ground. Doesn’t matter if it’s winter or summer.”

“No one needs to leave home to go fight the mobs at the grocery store in River City?” Kamiko was seriously overwhelmed.

“Nope. No need to leave home at all. Not for most things. We haven’t worked out everything yet. It’ll be next week before we get the grain mills in operation.“ Shelby replied. “we should have flours and meals pretty quick after that.”

“What does it cost?” She asked, dreading the answer.

“No cost” Chad seemed surprised that she would ask “It’s all automated using hard programed SSmoke. It pays for itself. The systems offset each other. They are balanced as an ecosystem of sorts and it’s free to the enduser.”

“EndUser?” Kamiko blinked.

“People” Shelby said.

.................................................
The Next Episode is
#88: We need more pollution…
The Previous Episode was
#86: Rain
the First episode was
#1 : Prologue

---

I'm

@everittdmickey
.
I write
SPECULATIVE FICTION
I have books on Amazon too.
Sometimes I also comment on the news

Sometimes it's hard to tell fiction from the news.