I started this story well over a year ago. I am a tree hugging dirt worshiper who gets irate when people have the opportunity but choose not to recycle. I have said for years that alternative, non depleting and renewable energy sources aren't a trendy idea or a business plan but a necissity so that all of our great grandchildren still have a world to live in.
Since this story began we have changed presidents, faced a world economic collapse and seen the "tea bagger" revolution gain volume. as well as a number of man made and natural disasters. I have my opinions on all of these, but would like to keep this more fun than that.
I have always enjoyed Speculative Fiction, what the world might be if even just a few things happened differently. In many stories it is a warning, in some it becomes fantasy. The "Alvin Maker" books by Orson Scott Card were my first exposure to Spec. Fic. and I LOVED them even though they were in an America that still faced slavery and westward expansion. But it also had magic. Many characters had a "Knack" for something. I would describe it as a low level super hero power like in Mur Laffertys "Playing For Keeps". One of Cards characters could make wood stick together by matching the grain...he made barrels for a living. In Lafferty's world, the waitress could balance anything on a tray and the cook always knew exactly what someone wanted to eat. My friends and kids tell me I am a "finder", I can find small missing objects, or at least give a general direction when items such as keys, glasses and lighters get misplaced.
These days having an ability to find electricity would be a good power (pun intended). I know there are people out there who do everything as "green" as possible and I just get the feeling that in the end, They are the ones who will be able to survive due to their lack of reliance on "modern conveniences" and an inventive spirit to "make it work".
Pardon my formatting, HTML is not a fluent language for me...yet.
I call this story "Holding Onto Sunlight"
In the year 2025 power was a hot commodity in the Collected States. Since Coal had been phased out after being proven to have been the primary reason for the increased cancer rates worldwide. Nuclear power had been changed to a dangerous necessity after a solar flair severely compromised 15 plants in the spring of 2016. The ensuing weekend of meltdowns had left large areas of The Unites States east coast permanently scarred similarly to the area around the still radioactive Chernobyl. Uninhabitable, but vast tracts of new growth forests that had to be avoided by the general populace. In 2010 another problem had made its presence known and due to media coverage, energy companies "dirty little secrets" became public knowledge. Petroleum had been used as fuel for everything for generations and a deep sea oil rig exploding and sinking off the coast of the United States leaving an oil slick the size of Texas, made everyone aware that there was a bigger problem than gas prices.
Since the collapse of the government of the Unites States after the "Capitol Plague" that ruined the worldwide financial community and left the average citizen to the control of the average military, people had started taking care of themselves more, and the country as a whole, less. "The Collected States" were primarily the mid-west but now included a small portion of Mexico and most of central Canada. Almost everything between the Rocky mountains and the Appalachians had formed its own nation. The one holdout was the upper peninsula of Michigan, which had been turned into a super-max penal colony. Most of the bank executives and politicians that had caused the bankrupting of the world lived there with the common murderers, rapists and drug dealers. It was a closed community, fed necessities at regular intervals but pretty much left to their own to cannibalize whatever resources and people were left. Pretty much no one knew how many people were still in there, but no one really cared. We don't take responsibility to punish the bad guys any more, we let them take care of that on their own so we can keep a clear conscience.
Private power sources had become a necessity and were readily embraced as backyard and garage "scientists" came up with a myriad of new and better ways to gather energy. Some improved existing solar collectors, others learned to hyper utilize the slightest breezes, water and even gravity power. Almost every home now boasted some form of solar panels, wind collectors, or small hydro sources from gray water turbines and runoff collectors similar to the waterwheels that had been used to generate power before electricity was common.
This worked fine for households, even worked well for farms and many small businesses. The nations infrastructure however, streetlights, emergency services and public buildings, had higher usage and less urge to gather their own. This was one of the problems that needed to be addressed.
A new form of energy was needed and ideas were coming from the most unlikely places. One idea was algae that eats garbage. But the methane producing landfills of the late 1900's had proven that there was simply too much garbage that was not organic and "the greater good" was no longer a reason to sort compost from plastic or to reduce, reuse and recycle. One idea was from the uber science geeks in Nanotech. An idea that had started when someone had the idea to clean up gangrene with microscopic nanotech robots applied to people with non healing wounds. a modern, sanitary, robot maggot It had turned into the pollution eaters on a small scale when a woman was saved by the robots dismantling a metal surgical tool that had been left in her abdomen during surgery.
The Helobots had been specifically programmed to not create anything new and to not reproduce but to just collect the energy released when they dismantled unwanted tissue at a molecular level. This energy was then wirelessly loaded into a collector worn by the patient and used to power various monitors the patient was using. The problem was in programming them to decide what was to be dismantled and what should not. They were also supposed to shut down and allow the body to naturally process out the Helobots like any other component in the bloodstream. As far as anyone could see, that is exactly what they did.
Somewhere, something went wrong. Whatever happened, these non organic "junk" eating bots got out into the world and decided that dead organics just weren't their flavor of choice any more. It might have been an x-ray reprogramming them, or an EMP, or even some reckless idiot who went hunting in the radioactive woods. Either way, they found plastic and decided it was their catnip. In short order it was EVERYTHING Petroleum based.
Within a week, The mayo clinic was dissolving. The Helobots had not only started reproducing, but they had formed a hive mind as well. The power grid surged and within another week areas of Iowa, Wisconsin and South Dakota were seeing similar energy spikes as the Helobots crossed state lines using modern rail transportation. 30 days later, every major highway was littered with metal car parts leftover from the removal of all plastics and polymers. Tulsa looked like a swarm of plastic eating locusts had flown through. Every plastic seal, swimming pool, kids toy, rain gutter, water bottle or garbage can had simply vanished. Anything made of plastic, EVERYTHING made of plastic simply disappeared as the local batteries and power grids surged. Hundreds in Hospitals died when equipment designed to be light and disposable stopped working and ceased to exist.
It was a pandemic that only effected the objects that had become the populations "easy way out" for so many years. People didn't die from this infection, only their stuff did. Yes people DID die when there car tires blew out, or air craft crashed from components not working, or implanted medical equipment no longer extending lives. But anything organic was safe.
It took less than 2 years for the Helobots , who had been identified within days of their escape and mutating, to remove every plastic item on the planet. This included landfills, the giant floating mass of plastic that had been drifting in the ocean as well as infrastructure such as sewer and communication lines. Someone had a brilliant idea to send some into space to solve the problem of orbiting junk. But short of a giant slingshot, no one knew how to get the bugs through the atmosphere. Turns out, the Helobots had already made it to NASA and took care of it themselves. The astronauts weren't so lucky, but the bots were well on their way to cleaning up the band of space garbage that had circled the earth since the space race began. Seems the cold of space had no effect on them.
It was the least violent world war ever. There was panic, but since the criminals were all in Michigan, there was minimal violence or rioting. There wasn't much anyone could do about a threat they couldn't see and that traveled however and wherever it wanted. There was a surge in power, but now there was nothing to plug in to consume it. In the end it was those people who had lived as naturally as possible, the farmers and isolationists who got us started over again.
It was back to the pioneering ways of old, we still had wood and metal, medicines and knowledge. We started over forming co-ops and communities. used natural resources and each other instead of governments and major industry. Our commercial consumption of everything unnecessary was nothing. The simple life was what we had.
It was a rough reboot of the planets inhabitants, but in the end, it might have been just what we needed to save us all.
