Day Seventy Nine (Romeo)

(This is part of the same timeline as Longshot, and here is some music to go along with it: Something Heavens)

To an outside observer, the Romeo units appeared much like an army of pill bugs gradually traversing the terrain. Their smooth, jointed domes concealed most of their internal workings, protecting them from the elements and the radiation of the land around them. The only exposed component was the cluster of sensory devices extending from the peak of a Romeo’s shell, gathering information about the area around the robot and reporting it back to the Aegis Network.

Romeo units were one of the several robotic caretakers not patched in to Aegis’s sentience, only her networking capabilities. Tasked with mapping and, eventually, cleaning or repurposing the irradiated wastelands that used to be nations, Romeo units rarely encountered situations that required higher comprehension. After all, modern nuclear weapons tended to leave barren, flat ground in their wake.

At the height of the spread of the Exhaustion, some leaders—ones who had gained control of whatever military force remained—had sought to stem the illness’s spread by eradicating concentrations of it, hoping the fury of a nuclear blast would stop something against which medicine had failed. It would never be clear who came to this conclusion first, but the domino effect that followed left a large portion of two continents in ruins.

These Romeos were the fifth pass through this particular area. In some ways the Romeos’ purpose was similar to their spider-like brothers, the Alfa series; instead of simply planting food stuffs, the Romeos were equipped with sensory equipment to determine the level of radiation. Once done, a second, third, fourth, etc. string of Romeos would comb the same paths their predecessors had taken, planting the seeds for a bioengineered weed. One of the early scientific discoveries that Aegis had witnessed, this weed fed off the radioactive half-life left in the wake of nuclear weapons, cleansing the soil around it as it grew.

A single radweed would die off long before the area was cleansed, but this was also intended; if the plant lived long enough to propagate, the eventual evolutionary track could be dangerous and unpredictable. Instead, radweed was engineered to burn itself out, consuming so much radiation that it effectively committed suicide.

This wave of Romeos was planting what could be the final round of radweed. Already the sprouts of those from the last wave could be seen making progress, breaking through the bleak ground. The sensors on top of the Romeos reported dramatically decreased radiological levels from a year prior, and the soil samplers, contained within the numerous legs beneath the protective dome, showed that the soil itself was no longer instantly deadly to most living things. The Romeo units reported this back to Aegis, and then swarmed out over the land to do their tedious work.

From the lens of Kindra Nikole Photography: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kindra-Nikole-Photography/495800123770510

~ by tawks on July 24, 2013.