Chapter 276 Peace, Love, and Save the Whales
New Year's Day, 2016
While some were still celebrating the new year and making resolutions that were doomed to fail, others were still living with the horrors that had happened in November of last year. A few terrorist attacks had claimed the lives of more than a hundred people.
With the release of Star Wars: the Force Awakens the month before, the entertainment section was also still quite riled up, as the movie had achieved a box office success within the month of release.
With all of that happening in the last three months, changes had also occurred in Eden. The Eden of now was completely different from the Eden of the past.
Aron was standing in front of a massive pit with a diameter measured in kilometers. As he gazed into it, the screaming of displaced air came from the distance as a maglev train neared the pit and soon entered a bridge that crossed it.
The train slowed down a bit as it passed through the bridge, and the moment it neared the center of the pit, the containers it was loaded with were ejected from the train with enough force that they directly cleared the bridge and started falling into the pit.
The containers continued picking up speed as they fell, then crashed to a pile of other containers that were already at the bottom of the pit. All of those containers had arrived in the same way.
"How long until it starts?" Rina asked as she appeared on a chair behind him.
"A few minutes, at least. The last train should arrive before the process begins," Aron answered, momentarily breaking his staring competition with the pit and turning to smile at Rina. Then he returned to his staring contest, as he was trying to find the limit of his ability to multitask. The best way he could come up with was to try thinking of as many things as possible at once. Once he stopped being able to simultaneously develop on his thoughts, he would know where he stood.
As he did that, Rina just watched him with a loving smile on her face. She liked seeing him focused on whatever he was doing.
The screaming of displaced air came again as another train passed over the bridge to deliver one last batch of containers for the first phase of the project.
"It's starting," Aron reminded Rina. But she was already prepared; she put on her glasses and stood near Aron, joining him in looking into the pit.
...
With the last container finally falling, Nova took over and stopped supplying power to the entire rail that led to the bridge. It was a last resort measure, but a prudent one, as when all of the thousands of failsafes fail, the improbable becomes probable. That was a lesson she had learned just a few months ago. So now, no matter how impossible something seemed, she would always prepare for the worst-case scenario.
[Disintegrator #0000001 'Trashman' is coming online. Everyone in the vicinity should evacuate,] Nova announced over all of the radio frequencies and Q-coms within two kilometers of the pit. The announcement repeated three times to make sure that anyone who was near the pit would hear it.
With the warning broadcasted, she started the process of bringing the Trashman online. The first step was something that could only be seen through the AR feature on Aron's inner circle glasses. If Rina wasn't wearing hers, for example, she wouldn't have seen the shield that appeared and expanded to cover the entirety of the pit. Even though it was invisible to the naked eye—at least for everyone except Aron, and perhaps his little brother—the shield had sealed the entire enormous pit, making it impossible for anything to enter or leave it.
With the shield now online, it was followed by the disintegrator that covered the entire bottom of the pit coming to life. It immediately began disintegrating the thousands of containers and whatever their contents were along with them, separating them atom by atom.
"Wow," Rina said. She couldn't believe she was witnessing materials being disintegrated and broken apart, leaving their component atoms to scatter everywhere in the pit. They created a cloud of fog and filled the 'dump', making it impossible to see through.
After thirty minutes of continuous operation, everything that had been in the pit was turned into a cloud of various atoms. Although they hadn't been collected, yet, that changed when the disintegrator ceased its operation. With the disintegrator offline, the collector came online and began sorting atoms and compressing them as building blocks of pure elements, then moving them into dedicated storage areas for later use in the atomic printers.
Once the collection, sorting, and storing was finished, the shield was powered off. It would no longer be needed until the next 'garbage collection'. Every part of the recycling system was systematically power cycled then completely shut down before Nova returned power to the section of maglev track leading to the pit from the trunk line.
Soon, more trains began arriving and routing themselves to the storage facilities, where they picked up the stored material and headed to their next destination: the underground warehouses that existed to feed the element-hungry atomic printers in the Cube.
"The efficiency is off the charts," Rina exclaimed. She'd watched the entire process from start to finish and been amazed by it; the bottom of the pit was now as clean as it was before the containers had been thrown into it.
"It could've been more efficient, but that would've been overkill." Aron wrapped his arm around her waist and headed toward the futuristic helicopter they had arrived on. The pit had no access paths other than the maglev rail that passed through, and that was a completely secured line.
"Is your curiosity satisfied?" he asked.
"Yes, but you could've just told me about it. You didn't have to go so far just to answer my question," she replied, flashing him an embarrassed smile as she thought back on the question that had brought them to the pithere.
She had asked why they sought to be the main receiver of everyone's trash during the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations that had ended with the signing of a trade agreement by the United States, Eden, Esparia, and eleven other Pacific Rim nations. Many countries considered it Eden's way of reaching out and trying to develop a friendly relationship with those countries. Some of them had even been the previous 'trash bin of the world' and were now facing problems. Their citizens were naturally unhappy about becoming global trash dumps, and there were numerous health issues that arose from it that were only barely offset by the money they received for providing the service.
Basically, it was a dirty job that not even Mike Rowe would have wanted when he was still hosting his tv show.
(Ed note: "Dirty Jobs With Mike Rowe" was a television series that ran on the Discovery network in the US from 2003-2012. The host, Mike Rowe, would spend a day being followed around by a camera crew in documentary style as he worked in different "dirty" jobs, things like septic tank cleaner, sewer inspector, and cow inseminator, among others. It was wildly popular in the US and even moved to Australia for its final season.)
"I just needed a reason to take a breather. I've been spending too much time in Lab City, figuring out which products we'll be releasing. That took time away from you, which isn't a good thing," Aron said as they boarded the helicopter. He took the pilot seat and started putting on his seat belt; Rina naturally settled into the copilot seat and they both put on the specialized pilot's version of the ARES helmet, taking their safety very seriously.
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