Sewer
Ya’ll could have warned this old lady.
Shortly there after I was blindsided. I was fat dumb and happy,
and wearing my mayor’s hat, so to speak, when I answered the phone. “Oh hi Jennifer what can I do for you? What? Your toilet? I don't know. First I've 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.”
“What in the world is going on?” I asked myself. Since I don’t have a built in chatterbox like some people we know myself didn’t answer. I had to find out the hard way. I called the sewage plant.
“Chuck? This is Kamiko, is something going on that I should know about?” I asked when Chuck answered.
“You don’t know about it?” Chuck, the sewage plant supervisor asked. He sounded surprised, then a bit worried.
“Know about what?” I asked.
“Perhaps you should come down here and see for yourself.” Chuck suggested.
“I’ll be right there” I replied. When the Sewage guy is worried it’s time to panic. I could imagine unpleasant consequences of our old sewage treatment plant going on the Fritz. I have a VERY vivid imagination. I scare myself sometimes.
“So what we decided that we want“ Chad was saying when I arrived. I was relieved the instant I saw him and Shelby. The Maggi had the situation well in hand. “is a massively parallel, hugely redundant, and widely distributed system. So we rebuilt the sewer. It didn’t take long using Ssmoketm. It’ll do for now.”
“And we’re out of a job, or rather we have different jobs. Indoor 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 seemed to be glad that they no longer had to do it.
I 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.”
I really had no idea what I was talking about at the time but like all officials since the dawn of time I had to run to get in front of my people so that they would think that I was leading.
“Been there, done that.” Chuck said, “we all have.”
“Oh?” Shelby was interested. He had, after all I found out later, asked Chad to think outside the box. They were outside of it alright.
Chad continued. “Sewage as we know it is mostly a lot of water transporting a proportionally small amount of human waste. That sewage travels through 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?” I asked. This was entirely beyond my skill-set. I was running as fast as I could, in unknown territory, to keep from being run over. If I tripped I would be trampled. Metaphorically speaking of course. Oh. Well. Been there done that a few times. FIDO. As far as I was concerned Sewage was sewage. I 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. I nodded, I was well aware of those costs. I reminded them. “The sewage pipes here are ancient. I think the Romans installed them.”
“Naw.” Shelby mumbled, “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 you mentioned “ Chad said.” The treated sewage then goes into the river.”
I was shocked, I’d never realized that. Into the river? We took our drinking water from the river. I thought about the other cities...up river. I could never look at a glass of water the same way...ever again...(ewwwww)
“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. It’s the same thing as farts, oddly enough. It has to be vented into the air or burned. That makes for a bad neighbor.”
“NIMBY” I said. “No one wants the sewage treatment plant in their back yard. An exclusionary attitude we might try to avoid?”
I nodded. Exclusionary attitudes of any sort worked at cross purposes to my conceptualization of the monkey-sphere. I hadn’t realized the gas was explosive....either.
“So we redesigned and rebuilt the whole thing. We used Structural Smoke and Build Bugs,
 
“er..that is... we used tiny semi-autonomous construction robots which made that part easy and quick.” Shelby said, “We went to aerobic digestion instead of anaerobic.”
“That allowed us to decentralize.” Chad whipsawed...these two were almost as bad as the Orcs. “We committed to Composting, kinda. Instead of flushing five gallons of water down the drain every time someone relieves themselves, the ‘offering' falls into a container of bulking material. 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 seals it, replaces it with an empty container and takes the full one away.”
“The sewer pipes aren’t full of liquid sewage anymore they’re full of robots moving sealed containers. Think of it as an underground highway.” he replied.
“I see,” I thought of that. Many terms came to mind. Doo-doo drive....feces fairway not the least of them. “and where does this compost go?”
“To the grow tunnels,” Shelby said with with that look on his face. It’s never good when he looks like that.
“To the what?” I asked....couldn’t help myself.
“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.”
Chad joined in, again “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 were just sitting there so why not put them to work? They can deliver food to anyone’s kitchen on demand.”
I was slightly overwhelmed. Thank Gnu. I was helping with the food budget for more and more of my people. I could ony continue to do so for so long before the foundation ran out of money. This would help tremendously. All those robots ‘just sitting there’. Who knew? I said brilliantly. I was a bit stunned. “Oh?”
“And they 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?” I was seriously overwhelmed just thinking about the implications. I was trying to get over the fact that expenses were DEcreasing. It was a novel experience.
“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?” I asked, snapping back to reality, dreading the answer.
“No cost, it pays. It’s an offset expense.” Chad seemed surprised that I would ask such a thing. “It’s all automated using hard programed SSmoketm. They are balanced as an ecosystem of sorts and it’s free to the end-user.”
“End-user?” Reality shattered. I blinked, was I being set up for a fart joke?
“People,” Shelby said.
I just glared at him and DARED him to say it.
He didn’t
...wise man.
To Be Continued
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