Chapter 5: A Dream that was Found in the Trash

“Now entering Sector Salzburg,” a robotic voice says, as the doors of the subway open to the station in her home sector. As she exits the station, instead of heading home, she uses Tabby's GPS to take a detour towards the landfill just a few miles away from her apartment.

Despite most materials nowadays being made to be recyclable and biodegradable, not everything fit that description. In particular, older materials that were still being used and electronic waste from older machines that weren’t designed with biodegradability in mind were eventually tossed into the landfill.

It wasn’t a complete waste however, since a special acidic rainfall synthesized from the drones above was occasionally targeted over the landfill. This special rain washed over the various electronics and old robots that were thrown in the landfill, disintegrating pieces of plastic, flame retardants, and other non-biodegradable materials found in electronic waste, into a liquid that floats down the hill the landfill sits on and into a man made river of acidic water. The river was connected to a set of factories that were located a few miles away up north from the landfill, that produced a special gel-like plastic from the acidic water that was used as a base for a certain type of glue.

The acid rain did not damage metal parts however, meaning that the remaining pieces of metal were free to be collected. Technically, there was supposed to be someone collecting the metal from the fields every so often and recycling them back into society, but Celia hadn’t seen anyone, so she assumed they might’ve unofficially stopped collecting them from the landfills. After all, synthesizing new metals and recycling those instead, was much more efficient than walking through a landfill and filtering the metals out one by one. The only ones dumpster diving through the mess were engineering students who were too stingy to pay the small fee of using a metal synthesizer. Students like Celia, who wouldn’t dare pass up on the opportunity to acquire free metal.

With the threat of legal consequences scaring away most engineering students and inefficiency of metal collecting in a landfill chasing away the companies, the landfill was essentially Celia’s domain.

Before crossing the green, acidic river, she takes out a sheet of aluminum foil and wraps it around her shoes. While fabric wasn’t affected by the acid rain, parts of her shoes such the soles were made of materials that would disintegrate upon contact. To prevent losing them, she used aluminum, which she had discovered was resistant to the acid.

After securely wrapping her shoes, she ran across the river and up the hill, ducking beneath a part of the fence that she had cut open to sneak in during her previous landfill runs.

As she entered the area, she took a moment to absorb the sheer chaos of the place. All around her were mountains of discarded electronics that could be seen stretching endlessly across the landfill. Inside each trash pile lay broken robots; their joints twisted and dismembered, and their sockets, where plastics and other non-biodegradable materials would’ve been, were completely hollowed out.

Shards of glass crunched into the dirt underneath her shoes, as she began walking through the landfill, trying to avoid tripping over the piles of exposed wires that laid about. The air was dry and carried a faint metallic tang, but it wasn’t too unpleasant, and the feeling of knowing that she wasn’t supposed to be there, made her heart race with adrenaline.

Finally, after reaching the she marked for exploration, she takes a quick break before calling over to Tabby. “Scanner on,” she says as Tabby makes a few whirring noises before a green light shoots out from his eyes.

The scanner was one of the three attachments that she had purposefully chosen for her landfill runs. It had the ability to scan and identify what type of material an object was made out of, and can notify her if it found a specific one she was looking for. For this particular project, Celia was mainly looking for aluminum. Ideally, she also wanted to find other useful, expensive, high quality metals such as titanium if possible, but she knew it was just wishful thinking. She had only ever found it once from a newer drone model that had been thrown away, but most of the time she had to buy the materials from metal synthesizer. Nevertheless, she used aluminum much more, so collecting it from the landfill wasn’t a waste of time.

Celia follows Tabby closely behind as he continues scanning through the piles of trash. Eventually, he comes to a stop, notifying Celia that he had detected aluminum inside of a broken blender.

“Nice!” she says, before telling him, “disassemble mode on!”

Tabby closes the scanner, before making a few clicking and whirring sounds as tiny mechanical limbs sprouted from his sides. He floats over to the blender and begins to disassemble it piece by piece, as Celia stood from afar watching him work.

The disassembly feature was the second feature out of three, and was the main reason why she themed his design after a raccoon. Watching him methodically take apart and disassemble the objects in the piles of trash was similar to how raccoons would go dumpster diving for food, and she found it adorable.

After Tabby finished collecting the aluminum, he carries it over to Celia and she places it inside her bag. As she does so, Tabby opens up the third and final feature; a map of all the areas she had already explored through. 

Because the landfill was enormous, Celia didn’t want to risk wasting her time scavenging through the parts she had already explored, however, because new items were being added to the landfill everyday, she also didn’t want to risk missing out on some rare metals that might appear from time to time.

To solve this, she had recently planned out an exploration routine where she would go back and forth between areas she had already explored and new areas she hadn’t explored yet. For each area she had already explored, she would run through one of those areas (the area rotating each time) and do a quick scan with Tabby for new parts that might've appeared. 

After looking at the map and deciding which new direction she should head to, she announces, “alright Tabby, let’s head left for today.”

The two of them venture forth into a new part of the landfill, performing a careful search through each pile of electronic waste. They ripped through pieces of robot arms, old computers and laptops, a pile of smartphones, and old appliances like microwaves, refrigerators, toasters, dryers, air conditioners, and much more, extracting pieces of aluminum from each and every one. After about an hour of searching, Tabby suddenly paused while in the middle of scanning something.

“Celia,” he says, “I have found titanium… a large sum of it actually.”

Celia couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Really?!” she exclaimed as she walked over to the object his green scanner was pointing at.

“Yes but… it seems to be part of a robot leg sticking out from that large pile of trash over there,” he continues, “in fact, my sensors are telling me that a large part of this robot’s leg is made out of titanium, however, we don’t have the carrying capacity to lift the entire amount out. What should we do?”

Celia thinks for a moment. Titanium was way too rare of a metal to pass up on, but at the same time she really needed more aluminum for her project. Furthermore, Tabby wasn’t equipped with carrying capabilities, and she had to carry out the metals herself, and she didn’t think she could lift an entire robot’s leg out of the dumpster, especially one made out of titanium which was significantly heavier than aluminum.

She examines the robot leg closely, noticing its strange and heavily outdated design. Unlike other robots that utilized multiple parts and pieces, this robot looked like it was molded completely from a single piece of alloy, based on the fact that it had no visible holes or gaps in its appearance.

“Well… we could take a few pieces off from the robot,” she mumbled, still thinking about her options, “although that would be pretty hard to do since the entire leg looks like it’s one single part… We’d probably have to cut into which might take a while, but if it’s titanium we’re talking about, it’d definitely be worth the wait.”

“Got it,” Tabby said, pulling out a razor saw from one of his appendages, “please hold down the leg to stabilize it as I cut a piece of it off.”

Celia nodded and tapped her hand on the foot, however, as soon as she did, she heard a soft but audible whirring sound similar to a computer fan turning on. Suddenly, a bright flash of blue light shone out from underneath the trash pile, illuminating a wide area around her and causing her to stumble backwards in shock.

“What the…” she murmured as she covered her eyes from the brightness, the sudden movement in the pile of trash causing even Tabby to float back in surprise.

Suddenly, a large arm sprouted out from the trash pile, using it to leverage itself up as a tall, humanoid, robot about the size of a tall man stood up, brushing away the trash from its body. Its eyes flickered for a bit before turning on, as the robot scanned around to see where he was, before he spotted Celia and Tabby looking up at him in surprise.

“Greetings,” the robot suddenly spoke, “my name is ALTO, and my mission is to land on the moon.”