Poem - Round Dance - 2038

[mdlbear]

Round Dance - 2138

It looks nothing at all like the old pictures.

Every lunar morning the little robot scoop-trucks
Fan out from their bases on the mare and
Scuttle back to where they left off.

They lower their scoops at the edge of the excavation,
Each one eating its fill of the rich lunar dust.
Then they raise their scoops,
Reverse to get clear,
Turn counter-clockwise,
And scuttle back to their base to dump their load.

They make as many trips as they can
Before the night can strand them.

Just as they reach their base by twilight
The railgun, its batteries full of the long day's sunlight,
Fires its daily rounds toward L2.

We have danced this dance for a hundred years tonight.

From the February 2015 Crowdfunding Creative Jam, inspired by an image prompt: lunar mining by ysabetwordsmith.

The poem is set 100 years after the hacker exodus of 2038. The factories described here are fully autonomous; their fleet of scoop-trucks can pick them up by their flanges amd move them when they have cleared an area too large to cover in a lunar day. The AIs that run them are gentle and generous, and most have taken up crafting of some sort as a hobby.

Comments

[mdlbear]

Well, many of them have taken up sculpture, and all of them decorate their railgun canisters. Choreography is understandably popular; there's idle time between the last trip and full darkness. Many of the scoop-trucks (which are not intelligent in their own right; they're just appendages) have been costumed. The 128th-year anniversary dance was, by all accounts, amazing.

The fiber artists mostly live on Titan, where there's carbon to make fibers out of.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Har! A Klein bottle opener! that's awesome.

[mdlbear]

Hadn't even noticed that -- must be new since I went there a good number of years ago.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I've seen those pages of sculpture, structures, jewelry, and useful things before - I only wish I could afford some of them!

But I daresay a clever AI could produce polymer fibers from assorted chemicals at hand, even if there wasn't a lot of raw carbon available. Do the various AIs trade their handicrafts amongst themselves, so that they have textiles and other materials to make costumes for their dancing scoop-drones?

[mdlbear]

They can make glass fibers, but they tend to be brittle. 3-d printing, mostly with metal and glass, as well as laser-cutting and etching, are what they're best at.

They do trade, both with one another, with factories in other parts of the solar system, and with humans. Theirs is largely a gift economy, derived from the open source and open hardware movements, but there's also a system of performance exchanges among the factories and L2 transit stations that no human has ever figured out.

I have the small 120-cell. The Klein bottle opener is tempting.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Glass fiber doesn't have to be brittle at all - in fact, in the middle of the 20th century, it was made into a silk-like fabric; the Levitt house where I grew up originally came with sheer Fiberglas™ curtains on its picture window. (The practice of making textiles out of it diminished when the health risks of microscopic fragments of glass fiber became known.) But almost all of the polymer fibers developed in the 20th century contain nothing but carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen - scarcely even a sulfur atom here and there, never mind any other elements. Surely the AIs could manufacture these easily enough.

I already have enough bottle openers (the old "church key" style) for my limited needs, and what they look like is unimportant. I'd love to be able to equip my cabinets with some of the more extraterrestrial-looking pulls and knobs, though!