“Wow, what’s that?” Marc asks, looking at the massive wall of concrete blocking the river ahead.
I shake my head. How does he absorb so little from the mission briefings?
“That’s the first of the dams, Marc,” I tell him as I pop another pole on the bank. That should be the last one on this side of the dam. “You know, one of the dozens of big hydroelectric projects that Father helped inspire two decades ago? Now come on, we’ve got to clear everything out of the cat. Go grab everything out of the fridge.”
Bora arrives in one of the speedboats, mooring it to the back of the cat. I bundle up my clothes and other belongings and move them with a thought over to the box with my name on it in the back of the speedboat. Evan’s gear floats along not far behind mine. I step down and grab the empty box for the food and carry it into the kitchen for Marc.
“Want help packing up your room?” I offer as he starts packing the drinks into the box.
“Yeah, that would be great. Thanks, Noah.”
I almost regret the offer when I push my bots past his doorway and feel out the state of his room. Clothes are strewn all over, with half-eaten packages of snacks and nearly-empty cans of soda mixed in among the dirty shirts and socks. I knew Marc was a bit of a slob, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad this fast. I gather everything up with my hundred hands, separating out the trash and packing the rest up neatly in his box in the speedboat. By the time I’m done, he’s got the food all packed.
“Great. Do one more quick check of the boat to make sure we didn’t forget anything,” I tell him. I step out onto the deck.
“Toothbrushes!” he says, emerging from the head with three of them. Evan was supposed to get those, but he must have been distracted by something. One of my many eyes sees him helping Valerie pack the medical supplies. Of course.
“Good catch,” I tell Marc. I take a quick sweep through our cat and then the rest of the fleet with my cloud. Looks like everything will be out once Evan and Valerie are done.
Simok is busy ferrying the Geologists over to the dock. We should have just made some walkways, I think that would be faster. Next time.
Once everyone is out, I get to do my thing. I feel around each cat’s control deck and pull the control boards from each one, floating them gently over to where Chad is waiting on the dock. He waves as I feel his bots grip them, and I release them to his care.
I suit up and float into the air above the boats and put my cloud to the serious work of the morning. I break down each cat into its constituent parts, being careful not to sink any of them and lose materials to the bottom of the river. A lot of what I disassemble goes into new bots until my cloud is big enough to carry the rest of the materials up to the upper reservoir. I float myself up to the top of the dam and start rebuilding the boats, feeling the millions of pinpricks as the bots I just built convert themselves back into hulls, decks, motors, and furnishings.
Below me, Bora and Simok drive the two speedboats over to the locks on one side of the dam. I should be able to finish rebuilding the cats by the time they get up to the top side. Chad flies up as I finish the build on the first cat and gets the control board installed in it. He drives it over to the topside dock while I keep building.
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The long, flat trailer full of our gear makes its way slowly along the winding road to the topside dock, pulled by Andrea and Louis’s clouds. Andrea stands up on the front of it in a stance that makes me think of the figurehead of a ship. Most of the members of our group walk alongside it, with a few following behind, all of them chatting happily.
I get another cat done and Chad gets its control board installed.
“Come on everyone,” I call out to the group waiting at the dock now. “We need three filters in the reservoir and fifty dredgers. Get building!”
They all spring into action, the Geologists getting one of the filters started there on the dock. Evan, Andrea, and Louise start kicking out the dredgers. They look a lot like the collectors, but with a scooping attachment that swivels around the middle and a cannon attachment up front. The first one that Andrea builds hits the water and immediately submerges itself. I can’t see what it’s doing through the murky water of the reservoir until it pops back up the surface and heads towards the dam wall. The mud cannon launches a glob of muck the size of a softball up and over the dam. The silty mass lands with a splash in the river below. Perfect.
We put a lot of effort into figuring out a good solution for these dams. On the one hand, the dams are great because they provide clean, and renewable hydro power to the area, but on the other hand, they block the movement of sediment downstream. That’s a problem, since it eventually causes the reservoir on the upstream side of the dam to expand as the bottom fills up and the soil downstream ends up getting depleted from the minerals and nutrients that the sediment was supposed to provide.
All the more conventional methods for dealing with the silt problem suck. Either they dredge the bottom on some periodic basis in a pretty destructive way, or they periodically drain the reservoir and scoop out the muck, which causes all sorts of problems like flooding downstream and interrupted power production. Or, if their infrastructure budgets can’t handle either solution, they just let the reservoir silt up, grow, and eventually wreck both the surrounding area and the dam. That last one would have almost certainly happened here in another decade or two.
Hence the dredgers. They’re based on a modified version of the collectors we dropped all over the delta, with the same satellite based control coordinator that the collectors use. One glob of mud at a time, they should gradually get silt levels back to each dam’s original levels, and we have controls installed that can adjust water and silt levels later if we need to.
Chad’s just installing the fourth cat’s control board when the first filter splashes into the water. I push the thing out away from the dock and let it sink down and anchor to the bottom near the far side of the reservoir. It should have the smarts it needs to move itself up and down as the silt level changes. The Geologist class starts building the next filter.
I hear a chorus of plops as more mud shoots from the dozen dredgers working now. The first cask from the filter surfaces and I see a dredger grab it and launch it over the dam before diving for its next batch of silt. Excellent, everything is working perfectly.
The speedboats hit the top of the locks just as I finish rebuilding the last catamaran. Chad gets the control board installed and then, with a jumbled combination of muscle and bots working, my siblings empty the contents of the trailer back into the boats pretty quickly. While we’re loading up, Bora and Simok are going over the training materials with the dam operators one more time to make sure they know how to not break anything.
And now we’re done here. The training team will come through again in a month or two for a refresher course and to look for any potential issues, but this should keep things running until they arrive. I survey the effort as I descend to the deck of the cat. Everyone is getting along, all the work is getting done, and the guides are putting out what looks like a nice lunch spread with help from Valerie, Keeya, and Lucie.
Not bad for a morning's work.