A Dream Found in the Trash

“Now arriving at Sector Salzburg,” the robotic voice announced as the doors slid open at Celia’s home station.

Her apartment was only a short walk away. It was an old building that had been in her family for generations, which was the only reason her rent was so cheap. Her grandpa liked to brag that even Alaric had lived there once, although nobody in the family could ever agree on which room it had been.

Tonight, though, she wasn’t going home yet. Instead, she had Tabby lead the way toward the landfill a few kilometers from her apartment.

Most things nowadays were made to be recyclable or biodegradable, but not everything. Older materials that people still used, along with electronic waste from old machines that were never designed to break down, all ended up in the landfill.

It wasn’t a total waste, though. Every so often, the drones above would target the landfill with a special acidic rain. It washed over the old electronics and broken robots and dissolved the plastics, flame retardants, and other materials that couldn’t break down on their own. All of it turned into a liquid that drained down the hill the landfill sat on and into a man-made river of acidic water. The river flowed to a set of factories a few kilometers north, which turned the acidic water into a gel-like plastic used as the base for a certain kind of glue.

The acid rain didn’t hurt metal, so all the metal parts were left behind for someone to collect. Technically, someone was supposed to come by every so often to gather the metal and recycle it, but Celia had never seen anyone do it. She figured they had stopped bothering at some point. After all, synthesizing new metal was a lot more efficient than picking through a landfill one piece at a time. The only people who dug through this mess were engineering students too stingy to pay the small fee for the metal synthesizer. Students like Celia, who would never pass up free metal.

Between the threat of getting caught scaring off most students and the inefficiency scaring off the companies, the landfill was basically Celia’s own personal territory.

Before crossing the green, acidic river, she pulled out a sheet of aluminum foil and wrapped it around her shoes. The acid didn’t affect her clothes, but the soles of her shoes were made from one of the materials it dissolved. Through some trial and error, she had figured out that aluminum held up just fine against it.

With her shoes securely wrapped, she ran across the river and up the hill, ducking under a part of the fence she had cut open to sneak in on one of her earlier trips.

All around her were mountains of discarded electronics stretching out as far as she could see. Broken robots lay in every pile with their joints twisted and their limbs scattered, and every socket where plastic used to be had been completely hollowed out.

Shards of glass crunched under her shoes as she walked, and she had to watch her step to avoid tripping over the loose wires lying everywhere. The air was dry and had a faint metallic taste to it, but it wasn’t too bad. Knowing she wasn’t supposed to be here made Celia’s heart race with excitement.

When she reached the area she had marked for exploring, she took a quick breather before calling Tabby over.

“Scanner on,” she said. Tabby made a few whirring noises before a green light shot out of his eyes.

The scanner was one of the three attachments she had picked specifically for her landfill runs. It could scan an object and tell her what material it was made of, and it would let her know if it found the one she was looking for. For this project, that was aluminum. She would have loved to find something better, like titanium, but she knew that was wishful thinking. She had only ever found it once, inside a newer drone someone had thrown away. Most of the time, she had to pay the synthesizer for the expensive stuff. Still, aluminum was what she used the most, so the trips were never a waste of time.

Celia followed closely behind Tabby as he scanned through the piles of trash. Eventually, he stopped and told her he had found aluminum inside a broken blender.

“Nice!” she said. “Disassemble mode on!”

Tabby shut off the scanner and made a few clicking and whirring noises as tiny mechanical arms sprouted from his sides. Then, he floated over to the blender and started taking it apart piece by piece while Celia watched from a few steps back.

The disassembler was the second attachment, and it was the main reason she had designed him after a raccoon. Watching him dig through trash and take things apart reminded her of raccoons rummaging through dumpsters for food, and she found it adorable.

Once he was done, Tabby carried the aluminum pieces over to Celia, and she stuffed them into her bag. Then he opened up the third attachment: a map of every area she had already explored. The landfill was huge, so she didn’t want to waste time digging through the same spots over and over. At the same time, new junk was being dumped there every day, and she didn’t want to miss any rare metals that might show up.

To solve this, she had recently come up with a routine. Every week, she would pick one area she had already explored and do a quick scan for anything new, then spend the rest of her time somewhere she hadn’t been yet. The map kept track of what was new so she knew what to scan first, like the blender.

After looking over the map, she pointed. “Alright, Tabby, let’s go left today.”

The two of them headed into a new part of the landfill and carefully searched through every pile they came across. They ripped through broken robot arms, old computers and laptops, a pile of smartphones, and old appliances like microwaves, refrigerators, toasters, dryers, and air conditioners, pulling out every bit of aluminum they could find. After about an hour of searching, Tabby stopped in the middle of a scan.

“Celia,” he said. “I have found titanium… a large amount of it.”

Celia couldn’t believe her ears. “Really?!” she exclaimed as she hurried over to where his green light was pointing.

“Yes, but… it seems to be part of a robot leg sticking out of that large pile over there,” he continued. “In fact, my sensors indicate that most of the leg is made of titanium. However, my arms are only built for small parts. I cannot carry the whole thing. What should we do?”

Celia thought for a moment. Titanium was way too rare to pass up, but she also really needed aluminum for her project. She definitely couldn’t carry an entire robot leg out of here herself, especially one made of titanium.

She took a closer look at the leg and noticed how strange and outdated its design was. Most robots were made of lots of separate parts and pieces, but this one looked like it had been molded out of a single piece of alloy. There wasn’t a single hole or gap anywhere on it.

“Well… we could take a few pieces off,” she mumbled, still thinking it over. “That’d be pretty hard, though, since the whole leg looks like one single part… We’d probably have to cut into it, which might take a while. But if it’s titanium we’re talking about, it’d definitely be worth it.”

“Got it,” Tabby said, pulling a tiny saw out of one of his arms. “Please hold the leg still while I cut a piece off.”

Celia nodded and put her hand on the foot. However, the moment she touched it, she heard a soft whirring sound, like a computer fan starting up. Suddenly, a bright flash of blue light shone out from under the pile of trash, lighting up everything around her, and she stumbled backwards in shock.

“What the…” she murmured, covering her eyes. Even Tabby floated back in surprise as the trash pile shifted.

A large arm burst out of the pile. It pushed against the ground, and a tall humanoid robot about the size of a grown man stood up, brushing the trash off its body. Its eyes flickered a few times before turning on, and it looked around, trying to figure out where it was, until it spotted Celia and Tabby staring up at it.

“Greetings,” the robot said. “My name is Alto, and my mission is to land on the moon.”