Bit from Zen Cleaning Robot

“Dorphins!” Yells the Japanese man on the hill overlooking the ocean.

He has a nanobot in his pocket, it has much of the features of a Zen Cleaning Robot, but since it is for the young traveller, who generally has less attachment and fear of death, or so they think, it does not need to carry with it the heavy philosophy that takes up so much of the Zen Cleaning Robot's time. The nanobot technology – technology perhaps being a term that is misleading as it suggests planned creations, like hammers, screwdrivers, or genetically modified soya-beans that can be used to make chocolate bars. The nanobot, as is the case with the Zen Cleaning Robot, harnesses nature, not nature as it is known on Earth, this is a nature originating from a place that time had forgotten, a little shady spot in the corner of the far reaches of the universe, if the universe had corners, or any particular shape, though many brilliant minds think it resembles a turtle if looked at from outside the universe, but still others argue that there is no outside to look in upon, and another school of thought advocates that it looks more like a turtle-neck sweater than the majestic creatures who graze on sea-grass on the Great Barrier Reef, or who will, if provoked, bite your fingers off in the Everglades swamp. It is a place where life originated from dark matter. There are many living things, like those that help to give life to nanobots and Zen Cleaning Robots, that have evolved to gain sustenance off of dark matter. Mainly in the form of algae and fungi. Since dark mater is so much more prevalent that light, such species are in greater abundance that types of furniture at an IKEA warehouse. Though unlike IKEA, they rarely, if ever, occupy the sunnier side of the universe, on places like Earth, just as exponents of the Gothic culture seldom holiday in Jamaica.

The particular species that is so integral to the Kybertronics range of robots, a snail-like creature descended from a colony of other snail-like creatures which had spent some 7,000,000 years, give or take a century, drawing some of its energy directly from dark matter, and the rest from grazing on algae and glow-in-the-dark spindly fungus that grew inside a comet the size of India, Sweden, Greenland, Guatamala and Australia combined, and rolled into a ball like a paper mache Christmas decoration with a layer of artificial snow on top, which in the case of the comet was ice, not a thin spray-on layer that could be dispensed from an aerosol can and scratched off by a fingernail, rather a solid 55 kilometre thick surface that encrusted a rocky core, like a hazelnut in the middle of a Ferro Rocher. The thickness of the surface had been decreasing as the comet swung in an out of galaxies, hopping across the universe until it eventually got stuck in the Milky Way, somehow managing enough momentum to avoid the usual fate of comets in this area, that of being pulled in by the gas giant Jupiter, and settled down onto the Earth's surface after violently losing 99.9% of its mass on entering the atmosphere. The snails had 'been around', as they say, and had seen many things, in a figurative sense, as they didn't posses much in the way off eyes. This fascinating little creature, about the size, colour and shape of a blue Biro, had a most peculiar composition. Their shells were like silicon micro-chips in a computer, absorbing information, and even transcendental insights. Their shells were able to store, and even transfer, when union was made at the time of mating, the experiences of their surroundings, and the surroundings of their entire lineage, back to the very first 'snail'. This particular group of snails carried with them the learnings of a group of beings from Sygguiri, some 338,863,742,000,000 kilometres from Earth, if you measured from the direction the comet had come. Depending on whether you believe the universe folds in on itself, you may say that if you went the other way that it may be a tad closer. Following on from a catastrophic asteroid impact, big chunks of Sygguiri had broken off and been propelled in all different directions, heading into other solar systems, with a few, like the ones which the snails had been on, heading all the way across the universe.

The snails had inhabited the moist, dark cool caves the proliferated on Sygguir, where their diet of algae and glow-in-the dark spindly fungi grew exuberantly. As the snails died their shells formed part of the cave, which the fungus would tap into for nutrients which in turn helped feed the algae. The whole ecosystem was kept moist by the kilometres of ice and snow that had traditionally covered the caves when they had been on Sygguir, and which had subsequently covered some of the caves when they had broken off from the planet and floated into space in all directions.

With the snails, algae and fungi, another traditional inhabitant of the caves were Sygguirian hermitic nuns and monks who spent hundred of years searching within themselves for what the Earthlings called Nirvana. As the snails had fed the fungi that helped feed the algae, the nuns and monks would in turn feed off the fungi and snails, when they took breaks from their meditation, though of course they still ate with mindfulness so technically they never stopped meditating. The nuns and monks' constant meditation would fill the caves with vibrations of insightful light, dharma, insights that radiated from their bodies which the snail's shells would absorb and transfer to each other down through the generations. When consumed by the nuns and monks, generation after generation, the knowledge of the universe, of those women and men who became Buddhas and Sages, would inspire them to free themselves from the temporal bounds of the physical world. All the wisdom, the mysteries of the universe, that the nuns and monks had ever experienced, grew and grew, becoming part of the caves, the snails, the fungi and the algae.

When the asteroid had hit there was no time for the monks to escape, nowhere for them to escape to, so in a thousand chunks of Sygguiri many more thousand monks continued to meditate, until a time came when all of them met their end, leaving only the snails, fungi and algae.

One piece of Sygguiri landed in the area now known as the Himalayas in around 135,000 B.C. Only a few snail eggs, and handful of fungi, along with a few buckets full of algae managed to survive the descent through the atmosphere, when most of the cave, and the ice had burnt up, with the remaining portion sufficient to protect this precious life. Life which had held on to its foothold on the new, more stable and predictable orbit, to this day. In around 3,400 B.C. Some Earth hermits, in search of enlightenment, found their thriving little colony, in the cave, now halfway up a remote mountain in Nepal, to be a particularly inspiring place to explore the mysteries of the world.

The commercial applications of the shells where only discovered some centuries later by a Dr Wobats, Professor of Eastern Spirituality at Berkley University, had been trying to replace the batteries on his torch on a visit to the remote caves, the location of which he had most scrupulously guarded out of respect for the work of the monks in mining the gems of insights into the nature of existence that the cave exuded, on a visit to study inscriptions left by the ancient inhabitants. The torch's small bulb had fallen on the ground and been lodged upside down between two rocks, he fumbled in the dark for several minutes to try and find it, thinking for a while that he may die in the darkness, lost in the dark depths of the mountain, when all of a sudden the bulb lit itself up. On closer inspection he found a snail on the bulb. When he took it off the light went out, not instantaneously, as though the snail's slime continued to transfer energy to the light when the snail had gone. Weighing up the choice between betraying the solitude of the cave dwellers, and recognising the importance of their boundless spiritual contribution to humanity, with the potential to make lots and lots, and lots of money, which, when he did a few sums, using the power of the snail to get his solar calculator to process, would mean he would probably be able to buy Ian Flemming's Goldeneye, as well as the Aston Martin used in Goldfinger, along with many, many, gold-digging women in designer dresses, he decided to quit his rewarding, though pitifully paid, post at the university, smuggle a few small snails onto a plane, fly them to Switzerland, meet up with some dodgy electronics people that he had met on a train from New Dehli, who, on seeing the snail, drugged him, put him in the cargo hold of a catamaran, then sailed back to India via Suez and Goa, and then the criminals, and Mr Wobat by this stage was convinced that they were criminals, forced him to show them where the caves were, after some rudimentary torture, which, being a career academic, Mr Wobat was not trained to resist, in the same way that Ian Flemming, or his famous character, may have been. The gang then bought some children from some poor parents in northern India and forced them to collect snails which were then on-sold to a legitimate Japanese electronics for $17 million a pound. With a pound producing energy roughly to the equivalent of 3.8 megawatt hours of electricity which could be delivered over a period of five years, if regularly recharged in darkness.

Mr Wobats almost didn't survive his first major foray into the world of business. After stealing the location of the cave the gang leader, whose name was King, ordered that Mr Wobats be beaten to within an inch of his life and his almost lifeless body dumped in one the far reaches of the cave system, where, King, and the rest of the Cobra gang, as it was known, assumed that he had died. But Wobat survived, in the same way that the ancient Sygguirians once had by eating the snails, until after several weeks of isolation, his strength returned. Once bitten, twice shy, he vowed to also make a profit from the snails. He took a small number, along with some slime and fungi from the cave, smuggling them back to Australia in an ice-box known as an Esky, and started to farm them on a small section of a valley in Northern New South Wales called inisglas. His patiently researched ways of producing more energy from the creatures, and discovered that he could make a power pack by reproducing small sections of the cave environments that could then be used to power his robots.

Now the robots were in the homes and pockets of trendy youngsters. And after shouting 'dorphin' one of these trendy people, took out his nanobot, which was the size of a freckle, and absorbed the moment, in a similar way that people used to capture moments on their cameras, with the difference being that the nanobot was able to capture the actual moment, and, like the snails that helped to bring it into existence, could transfer this experience to whomever came in contact with it. Naturally this ability made Mr Wobats very rich, and, though one would think that his lack of scruples, which, incidentally, led to the ruin of all but an extremely remote portion of the cave system that had developed around the remains of the original Sygguiri seed, would have led to some karmic ramifications, Mr Wobats still managed to live the life of luxury on Goldeneye in Jamaica, with his Aston Martin, surrounded by buxom blonde and brunette gold-diggers who sold their bodies for a share of his millions. Leaving the day to day running of Kybertronics to his hippy sister Bharati.