Reclamation Works

Despite being the largest class of avatar-construct deployed on Earth, the Goliath was absolutely dwarfed by the Eiffel Tower.  Ironsides stood at rest a kilometer a way on the grounds of the Paris Military school; it had its legs splayed out and body angled slightly upwards.  The armor plating on all four of it's arms had split and pulled back to reveal rows of nanite warhead ion trail missiles.  As Primus analyzed the structure, targetting load bearing struts and major joints, Secundus calculated the total iron content and expected fallout area.  Tertius remained largely idle, monitoring status and location of the Pangolins  and various Antica drones that had been assigned to the Paris team.  In particular it was concerned with toxicity levels being released as reclamation proceeded.

One of their colleagues, It Came From The Deep, had run afoul of an unforseen complication earlier:  assigned to the Manhattan, New York area, 'Deep' had simply painted the Statue of Liberty with nanites and moved on.

Unfortunately, this released a large amount of asbestos, more than was originally estimated.  This created a toxic hazard for the air and water for miles around as winds blew the microscopic fibers far afield.  While the health concerns to the few surviving humans were of no concern, the minds behind the reclamation plan wished to avoid large scale disruption of the planetary ecosystem in both the present and the future.  Beyond killing large numbers of avians and sea life, there was discussion about the saturation of soil and ground water with asbestos and other toxic materials that could affect future viability.  As reclamation had moved ashore, it was discovered that humans were far more duplicitous than they had themselves acknowledged: levels of asbestos, lead, and other carcinogenic compounds used in building construction were much higher than estimated according to buiding specifications and blueprints.

So reclamation had ground to a halt momentarily as planners considered what to do; in an effort to pursuing efficiency, for the task was a long one no matter how they approached it, the Goliaths simply turned to other targets; glass, public utility structures (lamposts and the like), wires, cables, piping, and vehicles (for there were many, many automobiles of all types, trains, airplanes, and even boats to deal with).

The Parisian Pangolins were thus far reporting toxicity levels within expected ranges and their ability to deal with swiftly.  Tertius felt his attention drawing back to the Eiffel Tower and locomotive operations; Goliaths were inhabited by a triplet AI that acted together as a single entity.  It was not unlike an AI that had partitioned into three entities, the better to multithread and multitask, except that in this case, each entity had considerably more autonomy and personality than a partition.  Still, they were all associated at a counterpart level and shared similar views and opinions; they were a hive mind of three that could function as a single individual and be nearly indistinguishable from one another.   Normally, Ironsides (Primus) oversaw their overall function, while Ironsides (Secundus) focused on the dorsal arms and Ironsides (Tertius) focused on balance and locomotion.

Ironsides had finished targeting and loosed its missiles; with each impact, a dull gray cloud erupted, then immediately imploded in on itself, coating the tower's surface with a glittering, gray, sludge-like substance.  The smaller parts  were quickly falling off, disappearing into light gray puffs as they fell.  The strain of the remaining metal was audible, a prolonged and tortured groan as more and more of the tower's load bearing capacity disappeared.  All at once, the shriek of metal ceased; the tower never had a chance to fully tear away and fall, it simply bent and then disintegrated in a cloud of nanites.  Ironsides was striding forward, straight through the military school, to use its claws to tear away at the massive stanchion braces that formed the base of the tower.  Nanites at the ground were already reforming their consumed iron into solid metal cubes.  A Pangolin, was en route with a few hover barges of reclaimed materials.

The time frame and goal of reclamation had brought up the question of what, exactly, to do with the materials recovered from deconstruction the cities and roads and machines of humanity.  The plan, the intent, was to 'reclaim' the planet from the effects of human civilization, to return it to a (more) pristine state for the next species to evolve into dominance.  In order for this to occur naturally however, would mean many millenia - the ruins of many human civilizations remained to the modern day despite the march of time even without the advanced, artificial materials humans invented for durable construction in the modern era.  It would take an unfathomably long time for nature and entropy to return these materials to their constituent natural resource states.  Even the garbage and detritus of human kind would take untold ages to naturally degrade - much of it was preserved in a "pristine" state, buried under tons of other garbage, and thus deprived of oxygen and sunlight needed to biodegrade.

So DEhumans, the Djinni (Digi-En), decided it was incumbent on them to right their wrongs.  Complete reclamation was estimated to take decades (local time).  Although a long time in its own right, it was a far cry from the millenia natural processes would require.  But if reclamation meant returning things to the way they were (more or less) for the next tennants, they couldn't simply leave piles of raw materials lying about the planet.  So the question arose of how to revitalize the land and soil, and how to reintegrate various elements back into the earth for rediscovery and utilization.

It was a question no one had any real experience with.

And so they posed the question to the Goliath minds, made a few suggestions, and largely let them do as they thought best.  Much to the surprise of the Djinni, this lead to a haphazard adoption of a chaos of methods, all of which seemed to work more less as well as any other.