“Ready!” Father calls. “Shields up!”

SHIELD

I duck and tuck as my cloud swarms into action. The dirt under me gives way as the bots consume the material to provide extra bulk to the shell they form around me. A light glow suffuses the inner surface as the morning sun disappears, then that goes away too, and I’m trapped in blackness.

“Safe,” I hear in my earbud from Chad. Of course he’s first. No one can do blind obedience quite like Chad.

“Safe,” I call out.

“Safe,” Louise claims third.

“Safe.” Evan is right behind her.

An affirmative hum comes through the earpiece from Andrea.

“Safe.” Marc gets his done.

“Safe.” Jeff is last, as usual. I think he has trouble ducking and pulling in his arms with his own muscle power since his whole cloud is occupied building his shield.

“Better that time,” Father declares. “Excellent work, my children. All tucked away in less than thirty seconds. Come on out now.”

I release the shield. A groaning cheer rises up as we each climb out of the shallow holes our shields made. No one likes shield practice. They might keep us alive in a pinch, but they’re not at all comfortable. The shell is permeable enough that we won’t suffocate, but it gets hot and claustrophobic inside.

“I’ve talked to some of my old friends in the Air Force,” Father says as he fills all the holes with a wave of his hand. “We’ll be bringing in some volunteers from the base at Nellis to provide a live fire drill in a few weeks. I want you ready for a real emergency scenario.”

He’s bringing in soldiers to shoot at us for practice? I’m not sure if he’s crazy or just trying to make sure we all inherit his god complex. If things go wrong, I guess he has enough spare children that it’s worth the risk. All of us are just guinea pigs.

“Construction time again,” Father calls. He tears down our first round of builds with another wave of his hand. It’s unnerving seeing him level buildings with no apparent effort and knowing that’s what I’m up against when I finally strike. “Jeff, Andrea, and Evan, dig a well there. Chad and Marc, give us a shelter there. Louise and Noah, a solar farm there if you would, please.”

The solar panels are easy. Really, all the construction is. The plans are pre-programmed so you just have to aim your eyes and run the function.

“You get the base, and I’ll get the panels?” I ask Louise.

“Sure.”

Louise is a good partner for the training exercises. Not quite as good as Evan, but I’m just glad it’s not a Chad or Marc day. Louise turns to look at the ground behind her and the parched desert dirt starts roiling. Through a miracle of nanochemistry, the minerals in the dirt ripple and slowly transform into something like a concrete slab. It’s not quite as sturdy as the real stuff, but it’s easily solid enough to support the panels of the solar array. I direct my gaze at the large pile of dirt and rock that is starting to pile up where Evan’s team is digging the well.

GATHER(SOLAR)

The bots swarm out and start gathering and refining silicon and trace metals. I have a pile about the right size when Louise is done with the foundation.

“Ready?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

I look at the slab she built and outline the area with my eyes to tell the software where to build.

BUILD(SOLAR)

My bots start hauling the sandy material over and printing the panels in place, layer by layer. While they work, I look around the barren landscape. It's not so different here in Nevada from some of the places we’re going. A few hundred yards away, the lush, manicured green of the campus commons peek through the open gates of the Institute. Life from the desert. That’s what we’ll be creating.

“Should we set up maintainers?” Chad calls over to Father.

“Yes. We’ll be doing that for all the installations, so we’ll want to practice doing it that way. Looking good there, Chad. Marc, you need to wait until the foundation is complete before you start. It needs a level surface or the software can’t build a stable structure.”

I’m not sure how Marc manages to botch his build every time. It’s amazing how many different ways he can figure out to fail. At least he doesn’t seem to be repeating the same mistakes, so maybe he’s learning.

MAINTAIN(20)

I feel the now-familiar prick on my non-skin as a batch of twenty bots reprogram themselves to maintain the panels and detach from my cloud. 

I get a slack feeling as my bots finish their job and spread out into their idle default configuration.

“Done over here, Father,” Louise calls.

“Are we doing a flywheel or battery for storage?” I ask as Father comes over to check our work.

“Let’s do a flywheel this time,” Father replies. “Not all the sites we’ll work will have the trace metals we need for batteries.”

Building batteries requires access to any of several specific sets of minerals, but we can build the flywheels out of pretty much anything. The implant’s overlay lets me see Louise’s bots spread out and start scrounging the metallic elements we’ll need for the electronic hardware.

BUILD(FLYWHEEL-CASING)

My bots rush to the square that my eyes trace out and build the enclosure. It’s finished just in time for Louise to start on the motor/generator and magnetic bearings at the base.

BUILD(FLYWHEEL)

Tiny bits of material start flying through the air between the pile of dirt from the well and the enclosure. The dots form into concentric rings as the materials are sorted by density and then fused into a disk a meter across. A second disc forms above it, then a third, each one fusing to the one below. A dozen discs later, the flywheel is complete and mounted. Louise caps it and covers the enclosure. A hiss escapes as the pump she creates pulls all the air from the box. Running in a vacuum like that, the flywheel should be able to store all the solar energy our panels can gather for several days. Or until Father wipes everything down so we can practice building it again.

“Good, now run the lines to the shelter,” Father calls out, seeing that we’re finished.

BUILD(WIRES)

I aim my eyes along the path between the panel’s electrical leads and the leads at the base of the shelter, with a little jog to connect the flywheel. The cloud rushes along the path, finding and fusing conductive minerals and then sheathing them in ceramic shielding. We walk over as the light in the shelter turns on. Marc and Chad finally got it all put together. Andrea walks in carrying a bottle of clear water pumped from the new well. Jeff and Evan trail behind her.

“Good work, everyone,” Father declares.

He’s right, it was. Despite all the dust and the heat of the morning sun, despite the sweat running down my back and the start of the sunburn on my neck, I’m feeling good. I’m excited to do this where the water and power will change people’s lives.

Father dismisses us, but we all linger to watch as he tears everything down again with another slow wave of his hand. The building tears itself down to rubble, which turns into sand before our eyes. The sand levels itself out, leaving our work zone as neat as a playground sandbox. He leaves the well. I wonder why for a moment, then I see some of the nursery kids coming out through the campus gates. Father chuckles as he turns on the well pump and watches a spray of water arc up and over the sand.

“What would you say if we made the Fourth of July a beach day?” he asks no one in particular.

So they do celebrate some holidays here. I wasn’t sure. This place is so weird, but the little kids don’t care. The trickle of small sibs turns into a flood as word spreads. Soon, the toddlers are having a ball running in and out of the shower of water and stomping in the sandy puddles. A pool starts forming under Father’s gaze, only a foot or so deep but that seems to be plenty for the little ones. Shoes fly off as the kids jump barefoot into the water. Sandy mud flies everywhere. Nannies look on from a safe distance, smiling at their charges.

“Happy holiday!” Father declares. “Today, we celebrate!”